In attendance: Rick McCarthy, Chris Paquette, Brad Hogg, Glenn Hughes, David Kuznick, and Terry Tungjunyatham.
All arriving tonight roughly within 10 minutes of each other. Tonight is Terry's first night back in the circle since roughly this time last year.
Beginning with a quiet moment at roughly 7:45, we begin with a bit of circulation to set levels, followed by some basic calisthenics with the 16-bar exercise. Glenn then calls Eye of the Needle. Played pretty well, with a touch of rushing in the leads. Glenn's suggestion for this piece (and as a general rule) is to really nail the transition points throughout the piece, so as to glue the parts together.
3rd Relation, next. Some rushing and open strings. We run the descending chord outro a few times, to firm that up. Calliope, after this. It sounds good, but there are some parts that are a little unclean. We work on this for a bit, and decide to come back to this, later tonight. Flying Home: a couple of problems throughout the circle, but nothing major--simply a matter of momentary loss of attention. There are some indiscrepancies in the bass part, which turn out to be due to excess tension in the left hand, as well as clear tuning problems, which are addressed.
"When ready, begin." Glenn attempts to pull the circle into Asturias, coming out of this improv, but it doesn't work, as either no one hears it amidst the rest of the circle, or no one is listening. An instructive moment.
After this, Brad asks to try an idea that he got [brazenly stole] from Tuning the Air: working on Thrak at a soft level. This gets slightly misinterpreted as "working on Thrak with no amplification", which is fine. We play through the song, and it is interesting to hear how we play when not relying on volume or force to bulldog our way through the piece. Additionally, it's also surprising how quiet some of the players play.
Glenn takes this a step further, and asks everyone to stand up and stand in a circle, facing each other, and has us play the piece again. We then work both the straight magic-chord 5s and the polyrhythms. And then, seeing as we're all standing up, and essentially unplugged, we choose to take a break.
During the break, Glenn takes the opportunity to have us all pose for a "Myspace Salute!" Apparently, in order to regain control of a myspace page, it's necessary to pose for a picture with a handwritten sign with one's personal or band name on it (depending on the nature of the page). Curious, but fun.
After the break, we jump in to Intergalactic. This is very much a "don't fall off the boat" piece, and we manage to prove it a couple times. There is a bit of rushing all around (and a bit more in one of the leads), and we take some time to tighten up some areas (the re-intro is particularly difficult, due to a very long pause).
Moving on to Growing Circle: played well. Terry suggests Bicycling to Afghanistan, as he knows the lead (though he needs a refresher). This falls apart roughly 2/3 of the way through, but will likely be ready and waiting for the gig, within the week--very good news. Moving on to Askesis: this is generally sounding pretty good, with only a couple of things that really need to be worked on (tension in the hands, and the spaces after the "tricky bit" and last verse into the outro, especially in the basses, who have a big jump up the neck).
Addressing Asturias, we recheck parts and a couple of fingerings, and then play it through. A few words about playing cleanly.
Brad asks to try a concept from the OCG II course. "When ready, begin." Not bad, from the scribe's point of view.
Rick points out that we need to run Where's the Nurse, and so we do. A couple of spots reviewed, with one more runthrough. Ending the meeting in silence at roughly 10 p.m.
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