Jamie

We got two of the last three sets of bed tracks down last Friday, and it was much less ugly than I expected. We haven't played these songs in a while on account of having wasted a shitload of time trying to get a vocalist up to speed, and we really just hammered six or so songs in that whole six month period, because a) she is the world's slowest song learner, and b) she never really put her back into it.

(Pro tip: When you've been working with somebody for a month and every instinct is screaming "CUT BAIT! THIS IS NOT GONNA WORK!", that instinct is probably correct. I let myself get talked out of moving on this time and ended up throwing months of good time after bad. Gonna try and not do that again.

Pro tip #2: No amount of talent will make up for an inability to consistently find the damn downbeat.)

Anyway, the upshot is that these songs were old and rusty, but for two of them, that turned out not to be a problem. We had such solid tracks from previous rehearsals that it was easy to come back up to speed, and we threw down some good stuff. The only sticking point on one of them was that we really wanted to rush the bridge of "Shadow," but we ironed that out pretty quickly.

The third song, "Inner Circle," was kind of a mess, and mostly that's because we had left too much stuff hanging and uncertain in the arrangement to begin with. There are two sections where the bass goes into a triplet figure while the drums keep a steady beat, and the effect feels like a 6/8 time signature superimposed over a 4/4. The drummer (who I will call Jeff, since that is his name) was pretty uncomfortable with how the triplet figure rubbed against the main groove, so we ended up spending a bunch of time thrashing that out.

We got something that we like, but by then it was late and we were all pretty burned out. Plus we needed some time to live with the new arrangement and decide whether it's a keeper. I think it is, so the plan is to nail that sucker tomorrow.

After that, six million guitar dubs and scheduling vocalists! And it's about time.

(Pro tip #3: Every damn thing takes way longer than I think it will, no matter how often I try to recalibrate.)