Another Six Person Splunge with Bob as Guest

Another six person music project session with a slightly different grouping involving Jason, Sal, Nick, Steph, myself, plus Bob, the lead singer from one of my old bands, TAAZ. No Jared this time, but he's scheduled to be back for the next session in two weeks.

I've resurrected a fair portion of my old PA system, which means that the vocals could finally be heard over everything else and the overall sound quality improved immensely. Between having a decent PA system and Bob sitting in with us, the vocals were up to what I'd consider public performance standard most of the time. We have some work to do vocally, but not as much as I'd thought. Bob was a valuable set of ears as well as a voice (singing lead on "Peaceful Easy Feeling", "Wonderful Tonight", and a third song that escapes me at the moment), making several useful suggestions on vocal arrangements, not to mention functioning as sound man for most of the day. "Lola" and "Take It Easy" had vastly improved three part harmony, even with just the regulars singing. We even had one song ("Black Horse and a Cherry Tree") involving four voices at the same time. I'm a sucker for good harmony, and we had it this session.

We still seem to have some bothersome rhythmic coordination problems. Some songs would sound fantastic for a verse and a chorus, only to lose the feel somewhere in the next verse. Some of this is lack of familiarity with each other, since this was only the second session for about half the group, and some of it is one person or another not knowing the song well enough. These things can be fixed with practice and everybody seemed to realize that. I was very encouraged by a number of bright spots across the board from every participant, especially since a lot of those moments were players growing into a role within the group. It'll be interesting to see how Jared will fit in when he rejoins us for the next session, since we'll be adding one of his choices, "Dani California".

We're going to slow the pace next time, and put a more concerted effort into sorting out the parts of songs that we're having trouble with. I'm looking forward to what we might sound like on some of these songs with the bugs truly worked out of them.