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About this "practice":
Present: Abhay Singh, Brad Passarelli, Chris Sprindis
Walk to the window
Early Spring
Appliance
Logistical successes include: remembering to pause and listen back to make sure the levels were right. Logistical failures include: forgetting to re-hit record after making sure the levels were right. This was probably fine, since the practice wasn’t as free-flowing as usual. I was introducing a couple of songs that no one had done before, so our Chris was on essentially the same footing as Abhay and Brad. Instead of flowing through somewhat known song scaffolding, we were going through the repetition of learning a new song together. I wanted to get a sense of whether we could learn and record a passable version of 1-2 songs in a single practice.
“Early Spring,” the one I’m sharing here, worked pretty well because the song structure is super simple and the stops come off a clear vocal cue. The main risk to a take was that the solo would go sour. I tend to take the “million monkeys with a million typewriters” approach when I’m playing leads leads; this time I got lucky. Abhay did some cool piano arpeggios under the synth strings that adds and nice layer and texture.
The other song we tried had more parts and some dynamic shifts I wanted to hit, and gave us more trouble. It probably won’t make an appearance here for a few rounds yet.
“Walk to the window” was our warm up: short, easy for Chris to learn and familiar to Brad and Abhay. I really like this song and am happy to have a band version of it to share now. I did overdub the vocals because I was straining too much in the live version and it was bugging me. Everything else is what happened in the room at the time. We did “Appliance” to close out; you can kinda hear Chris learning it on the fly in the intro; the texture of the quicker bass runs while everything else is more open and slow appeals to me a lot. I also tried some different guitar settings and found a sinister guitar sound that lends itself to the sparser style.
More to come.
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