Rick's House, 01-19-2014

Attending:  Rick, Dev, Chris, Scott, Brad

Dev and Brad arrive to Rick's first, with Dev offering consolation for the Pats' loss.  A little generic conversation regarding the AutoTune culture.  Scott arrives next, shortly followed by Chris.  A little more chatting, and then down to business.

In the circle, Dev takes on calisthenics.  The directive is to cycle through the permutations of the First primary while ascending and descending the neck, with one permutation per fret.  Cycling through is done via the Tony G method of pairs-hi-lo:

With 4 digits (1 2 3 4), one takes one pair of digits, and then takes the remaining two digits and adds them in hi-lo or lo-hi, depending on the permutation.  With this, all permutation of the first finger would be:

1 - 2 - 3 - 4
1 - 2 - 4 - 3
1 - 3 - 2 - 4
1 - 3 - 4 - 2
1 - 4 - 2 - 3
1 - 4 - 3 - 2

And so on.  With the metronome at 72, we take our first pass at it.  A break down somewhere in the middle, so we reset and come back down.  A second pass shows that we may have made a mistake, and a third pass confirms that we made a mistake but fixed it the second time round.  Several useful observations, most of which seem to center around 'getting back on the horse as fast as possible'.

Moving on to repertoire, a bit of discussion about what we had worked on the previous week, and the week before that.  Eye of the Needle, sans a primary lead.  A couple of very minor blips, but otherwise quite good.  Voices of Ancient Children.  One false start, and then one good start, with a half-intentional tempo push in the intro from Rick and Brad; both acknowledged that it was a bit too much, but that it had felt a hair slow, and so the tempo got notched up a bit.  Flying Home, which also got a goosing; this one benefits from constant oiling.

To the current three.  Where is the Nurse?  One runthrough.  Dev asks Brad and Scott to please play through the part, to which Scott replies that he still hasn't been able to learn the entire bass part.  Brad and Scott set to working on the bass soli intro, specifically bars 13-16 (the F section).  As they work on this, Dev takes Chris and Rick into another room for spot work in the leads.  Brad makes sure to point out to Scott, as much as for himself, that learning the counting for this piece is crucial, especially in this section.

After maybe 10 minutes of this, Dev checks in, and then the leads come back in.  A full runthrough of the piece again, with a very confident Scott to boot.  Good stuff.

A bit of a bathroom break, and we move on to Calliope.  Largely touching on the work from the previous week, with some tempo surprises from Rick built in as well.  The "Chinese" section gets some needed attention, and there is a reminder to relax during work on the intro.

Finally, some work on Asturias, which primarily focuses on the twinkle section:  what the three twinkles are, the basic structure, what needs to stay and what doesn't, and a note about allowing the spaces to breathe (my words).  One play through, with some clear adapting of instructions, but some nice music happening as well.

A final circulation turns to an improvisation which goes through several different areas in the space of 5 minutes.  We miss the ending by about 12 seconds, and Dev brings this up, but otherwise there are some good moments.

All are on the road by about 9:45ish.