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I got together with Shahin and Brett to do some more practicing in preparation for Friday's show. We went over the set list a few times, and then we worked on tightening up some of the more problematic tunes.
One of the issues we noticed is that Brett is having problems hearing the looper unless it's so loud that it's going to affect the overall performance. After some tooling around, we found an amp that allowed him to use headphone to stay in time with the looped track without cutting out the main speaker. I decided that I was going to talk with Ryan (from JoS) and see if we could borrow a pair of speakers and his powered head to use instead; that we could run one speak as the main and the other as a monitor. Brett could then turn the monitor volume to whatever works for him while the main speaker runs at a more balanced volume.
The problem here is that we are using a looper as a poor man's sequencer. The more "proper" solution to this approach is to use a sequencer to create each individual part, and use a MIDI out to keep a drum machine locked to the time. That way, we would have significantly more flexibility for programming, we could parcel out the parts into individual tracks and then have a dedicated click track for Brett to help him stay in time.
Otherwise, we had a good time working on the parts. We also spent some effort on the individual solos. For this show, we don't quite have enough material to make it all the way through the night without repeating. We are already planning on stretching out the tunes (it's instrumental, so easy to do) as well as just doing some improv pieces, but we've decided that each of us are going to play an stand alone solo.
This will be my first one of these. I've been working on at least a part of it for the past few days. So far, I'm doing a tapped melody/chord type of thing, and then I'm going to go to a rhythmic thumping routine. How I'm going to get from the one to the other, I haven't quite worked out just yet. If I can manage it, I'm going to try and record the result (which I'll then post, natch).
Posted by Casper at May 15, 2004 10:19 PM