JW - 8/11/2012

No Bill again this time, but the other four of us got together.  The focus was on continuing to bring together "The Boys are Back in Town" and the two Bryan Adams songs.  We played a few other odds and ends, but that was the main focus.

Keith and I did substitute lead vocal duty again.  I was smarter this time in one respect and had at least thought to print out the words for all three, since I was fairly sure Bill didn't have any of them on paper.  However, I wasn't so smart in that I didn't practice singing and playing at the same time for any of them, even though I knew Bill wasn't going to be there.  The result was very much what you would expect, very hit or miss, mostly miss because I'm simply not that familiar with singing any of them, and splitting my concentration tended to cause both the singing and the bass playing to suffer to varying degrees.

I thought about this a lot on the way home.  I considered going so far as to learn how to sing and play all of the JW song list in case it was ever necessary, but that's a lot of work for something I'll probably never need to do, and Keith's voice suits a lot of the material better than mine in any case, if it comes to that.  A more sensible approach is to learn to sing whatever we're likely to work on when I know Bill isn't going to be there, and that's far more viable.

"Boys" is coming together, if slowly, and it's a good addition to the list in that I can see it going over and it's a song not every band can pull off.

Looks as though we're not going to have as much new material for the next show as I'd hoped, but I think we'll have enough.  Andy observed that if we play the material from the original last two sets during the first two sets and vice versa, most of the audience will hear songs they didn't hear the first time.  Quite correct, I think.

I'm beginning to see why a band that has been together this long doesn't have more established material.  All concerned learn quickly enough; it's just that some of the songs get lost, in a way.  Dale wants to make sure we have four strong sets, down solid, but inevitably we seem to have bits of songs that go awry because one person or another forgets something.  So we keep practicing songs that we have down for the most part, going back to nail down bits and pieces individuals have forgotten, trying to reach that 100% confidence level.  I don't have any better suggestion than to keep playing them until they stick.  And so the sidelined songs stay on the sideline.  Still, we're going to need to shake things up more if we start playing out more often.  I think we can do that by working some of the sidelined material back into the practice regimen, and we should need to play the basic four sets less often at practice as we play those sets more in public.  I'll have to think about a method of approaching this and suggest it to Dale.

Andy will not be making it to the next practice, and the plan is to have another vocally oriented session.  Keith agreed with me that it would probably be more constructive to just focus on vocals for one or two songs each time, but a full vocal session is still a good idea.  I plan to take notes this time.  The first session sounded great, but then we didn't retain everything we'd worked out.

I won't be guesting with Splunge this weekend, as I'd thought I might.  JW got together to practice (meaning my wife was less willing to lose me for an additional music session), and Splunge drummer Jason wasn't able to make it this weekend anyway.  I'll do it at some point anyway; there's no rush.