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About this "practice":
Present: Abhay Singh,Pat Murphy,Johnny Skwirut
How it's gonna go
Fear, until it goes
Open Line
Posting this one got delayed since I caught COVID, apologies.
Johnny was able to negotiate some time away from being a new dad, and for some reason wanted to spend it playing drums in my basement. So, even though 3/1 was technically an "off" week in bcc: land, I enlisted Pat and Abhay and picked out some songs for us to play. We hadn't played together before, even though we've been friends for something like 10 years. and who knows when our next chance will be.
We had about 90 minutes together, and basically spent the whole time trying to get as many takes of these three songs in as we could. "How it's gonna go" and "Fear, until it goes" are probably the most structurally tricky songs I've tried to do in this setting so far (especially the latter). Everyone picked it up pretty quickly, and soon Johnny, Pat and Abhay were playing the chorus in a way I hadn't expected. I ended up having to change some of my rhythm to allow space for the bass fill Pat does on the last chord. We got reasonably tight takes of each of the songs, which you see above. I redid the vocals later because you can hear my voice straining too much on the live takes and I found it distracting.
When we were talking about the session last week, Abhay pointed out that part of the tightness was probably that Pat and Johnny have spent so much time playing together in Atomic Girl, so they know how to play with/off one another already. The other thought I had about it was that, going into a new song blind, or almost blind, someone is much more likely to reach for their defaults--how they hear songs and think of parts to songs. So we're seeing different musician's default settings. And maybe part of this project is exploiting those defaults, juxtaposing them against each other in different combinations and seeing if anything interesting comes from it. And trying to do it in a way where there's some sense of pressure (because it's all recorded and this intersection of people and songs may only happen once), but where the stakes aren't actually very high (because it's just for my little .tax haven).
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