JW - 2/9/2013

Excellent practice!  Virtually everything sounded good, which I attribute largely to changes in the sound mix.  Keith's guitar was quieter and I could hear everything!  It's amazing just how good we can be as a group when we can hear each other.

The three new songs should be ready for the next show.  And to top things off, Bill bought two wireless rigs (one for a headset, and the other for a microphone), so the stage show should be livelier next time with three of us being wireless.  Keith is now thinking about going wireless as well, which would be great.

On the downside, we played a few songs we haven't done for a while, and everybody had some rough moments here and there with them, just trying to remember things.  Clearly there's some review necessary, but we have another week of practice before we have to play most of those songs in public again.

There was some discussion of a possible new song for Helen, with Eurhymics and Pretenders songs coming up.  And for the rest of us, we were talking about doing some REM or U2, or even the '80's hit "Turning Japanese", which would be fun.

We were talking about our set lists for the upcoming shows during a break, and most of the band had songs that had been omitted from the list that they wanted to put back in for the next show.  Dale pointed out that those songs would have to replace something else, so he was looking for suggestions as to what to take out.  The reality is that everybody understandably wants to put our best foot forward whenever we play out, but at the same time, we need to have variety or people coming to see us will get bored, then stop coming.  Why have a 60+ song list if we're only going to use 2/3 of it?  I'm a big advocate of rotating songs, but most of the group resists doing anything so systematic.

JW - 2/3/2013

I'd been looking forward to this session after working with our general sound last week.  I was ultimately a little disappointed.  It helps to have Andy's guitar in the monitors, but we ultimately ended up so loud again that I couldn't hear Keith's voice at all and couldn't hear Bill's voice as much as I would've liked.

We went back over some old material and made sure to include the newest songs.  You can tell we hadn't hit some of the old songs for a while.  Fortunately, we'll be focusing on these again in the coming weeks, and I'm sure they'll be fine after we give them some attention.

Andy is doing a nice job of getting the sounds for "Let It Be".  Still don't know if that's really a bar song, but it sounds good.  Enjoying the vocals on "Surrender", but we're not consistent enough in how we're doing the group vocals at the end.  I think the crowd is going to love that one, though.  Re: "Movin' On", we hardly need another Bad Company song, but I think it's in there chiefly for political balance within the band, and I'm fine with that.

I know everybody is a little bored of the old stuff, but you've got to touch on it on occasion or you lose the tightness.  I've always favored a systematic return periodically to any song we play regularly, feeling that if there is enough of that old material, we can avoid boredom by having enough of it that it takes a long time to circle back to any one song, but "systematic" generally isn't the JW way.  Don't know why; it just isn't.