Four Person Splunge - A Step Back

The last couple of sessions have been so encouraging, so it makes sense that sooner or later, there would be one that wasn't. Participants included Jason, Nick, Jared, and myself.

Sal let us know in advance that he wouldn't be making it for several good reasons, but we still had two other guitar players involved since Jared was returning, so no big deal. Then we got a call at the last minute that Steph had an emergency and wouldn't be making it. That took some of the wind out of our sails, because she's now singing about half the lead vocals, and when she's not singing lead, she's often singing a significant backing part or playing percussion.

And so we soldiered on with the guitar/guitar/bass/drums line-up we had, with me handling most of the lead vocals and Nick contributing where he could. On the plus side, we got a lot of work done on the foundations of some of the songs. We must've spent a good two hours working on three songs at the beginning, making sure we had good tempo, an ending, and various other things we needed to coordinate exactly the way we wanted them. We then moved on and got through a surprising amount of the usual list, with me singing lead on several of the songs Steph has been doing (ones I used to do) and Jared taking most of Sal's lead guitar parts where he could. We even worked on an entirely new song for us, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Dani California", which sounded surprisingly good in light of the fact that we'd planned to have Steph sing lead on it, so I had to sing that as well as playing Flea's bass parts. Not easy. I'd say it wasn't as much fun as the last two or three sessions have been, but it was certainly productive.

On the negative side, we're still spending far too much time on basics, working out little rhythmic problems in the guitar parts that should be getting fixed in the course of individual practice rather than in a group setting. We'll continue to work these things out as they emerge, but the recurring nature of the problem concerns me. I realized that coordinating three guitar players and having at least one miss most of the sessions would cause problems at times, but I didn't think it would be this difficult this often.