Jamie

With most of the bed tracks done for ITSOTW, I'm now working on the six million guitar overdubs. The other day, I laid down a solo for the tune "Help Isn't Coming," and, well, it's terrible. Or, as D put it, "Can you play something that sounds a little less like Journey?" We agreed that the best and most appropriate solo for the tune was one I just tossed off like a year ago in rehearsal. It's the canonical version, as it were, though I have never played it like that a second time.

So tonight I figured I'd just re-learn whatever the hell it was I played that night and get it ready so I can record it here in the next day or so. And, well. It took me two fucking hours to figure out what I was playing for bars five and six. It's this weirdly sequenced burst of stupid fast sixteenth notes and it comes out into quarter notes at an odd place, and the whole thing is wildly nonintuitive. The thing I improvised one day. At a speed that is significantly faster than the final version of the song. Nonintuitive. Can't play the fucker. Was I bodysnatched that day or what?

It's not uncommon for me to forget what I played (or even wrote) and for D to have to teach it back to me or dredge up an old recording and tell me to do, for example, whatever I was doing at the one minute and thirty second mark. We've been doing that shit for years. But, seriously, anything I improvised at the tempo we played this song at must have had its components firmly lodged in muscle memory, so where the hell did it go? Why is it alien music now?

I think I finally got the thing sussed out by slowing it down and working backwards from the quarter note bit. Of course I can't physically play it--it's probably going to take another few days of work with the metronome to get the thing up to speed, since I fall apart playing that passage about 20 bpm shy of where the song needs to be (which is another 18 or so bpm shy of the tempo we recorded it at back when).

This is good for me, or so I will tell myself.