JW - 6/17/2012

This session was essentially a dress rehearsal for the show next week, going through all four planned sets.  The result?  Not perfect by a long shot, but satisfactory.  Consensus seemed to be that, while we could do better, we would be okay if we play as well as this the day of the show.

One of the things we learned is that we have far more material than we need.  Good problem to have.  And we feel good enough about everything on the list that we were having a hard time deciding what to cut.  Again, good problem to have.

The vocals slipped from last session.  Not surprising in light of vocals not being the focus of this session, and we really didn't want to spend a lot of time on it just then.  I was having a very hard time hearing Keith's voice again, which makes it difficult to hear what I can do to blend well.  We'll sound good enough for the show, but I'd like to shore up this area afterward.

That first performance is a significant threshold, and we know we have more than enough material to play out now.  The next step, from my point of view, would be to get the vocal mix up to the quality level of everything else, and bump the amount of material up to six sets.  Why six?  So we can play our 20 or so best songs each performance and still be able to shake up the remaining list.  That should keep the audience (not to mention us) more interested than if we were beating the same 40 songs to death.  Those things are both easily accomplished with a little practice time.  The vocals are just a matter of reinforcing what we did in the vocal practice.  And we have quite a bit of material we sidelined to focus on the four sets we were going to need for our first show, so we wouldn't have to add much to reach six sets total.

The thing I really want to see is where we go from there.  How large of a list are we going to maintain?  What, if anything, will we choose to drop?  Will we add songs that are more current (or significantly different in some way) than what we're already playing?

We've got a good band here.  We won't know just how good until we get it in front of an audience, and that's about to happen.