GCNE Small Meeting, 06-09-2010, Brad's Apartment

In attendance: Rick McCarthy, Chris Paquette, Brad Hogg

Rick arrives earlier, around 11 a.m. Some general chatting and banter for a while, until the need is seen to start warming up. A couple of variations on the "Hammerhead" exercise, mostly involving inverting and reversing the pattern and moving up and down the neck. From there, we revisit Driving Force to get our fingers and minds moving together, taking time to clarify a couple of chiming bits.

Chris eventually arrives, to the joy of circlemates and dog. Some tuning, adjusting, and silence, and a circulation to begin the meeting. Where's the Nurse gets the nod, and it's a pretty in-depth one. We start off with three runs of the piece: once to get ourselves going, again to run over bits that we missed, and then a third slow run (being inspired by the traditional Turkish music that Tony Geballe had played us when he first taught the circle how to play this). From here on, it's all about tiny things: whether to hammer on or pick a note, the picking pattern of a section, whether to legato-fy a single note in the lead part. Small things, but quite illuminating to look at.

At Rick's suggestion, we move back to Driving Force, running the intro and opening Amin/Dmin section. Playing to a click proves to be very difficult at a slow pace (official performance tempo is 130, but we are running parts sub-100 while we are learning the parts), but slightly less difficult at a slightly faster pace. Some bits and bobs about putting the sections together, followed by a necessary break.

Back in the circle, Invocation is reviewed, in the case that it comes up for the church service on Sunday. Following this, we work with a simple chromatic power-chord circulation, from Eb to Eb. The form is simple enough: 3 up, 1 down, repeat (this would read as Eb-E-F-E-F-Gb-F-Gb-G etc.), and the same pattern in reverse on the way down (3 down, 1 up, or Eb-D-Db-D-Db-C etc.). The bugaboo is the shift in the pattern at the top and return to the bottom of the scale*, which throws us for a loop and gives us more work than we had expected. Making it through a few runs, there is a final bit of circulation for Chris, who takes his leave shortly after demonstrating his proficiency at his day job. Rick remains for a short while longer to run over some parts he is teaching Brad, as well as to help workshop a couple of small ideas that Brad is working on, and then takes off himself.