In attendance, tonight: Alex Lahoski, Glenn Hughes, Brad Hogg, Chris Paquette, Rick McCarthy. Victor McSurely, Dev Ray, and Andy Cahill are otherwise committed for the evening, for one reason or another.
Tonight, everyone arrives at roughly 7:35 p.m., independent of each other (with the exception of Alex and Chris, who came up from Connecticut together). Walking into the loft, we find the PA system still ready to go from the previous week, so set up is relatively quick, and technical issues are few.
A moment of silence to start, at 7:45. Moving straight to the Prelude circulation, we ask Alex to read the first chair, in Victor's absence. Work on this is primarily rhythmic, with the notes serving more as placeholders to be played while working on how we slot in. As a result, we never venture past bar 15 (which is a Cmaj/E, or I6 chord, for those keeping score), choosing instead to address rhythmic issues. Our approaches involve clapping in time, looping the same bar, and dropping notes in order to hone in on rhythmic responsibility. One particularly helpful exercise involves looping the first bar, and picking a muted string in semiquavers, playing one's note when appropriate. After about 25 minutes of all this, we return to the 15 bar loop. At first, it seems a little off, but pulls together quickly. Good fodder for next week, and Glenn mentions that it might be a good idea for each to know the piece, so that if we were to play it, we could assign parts at random and be able to play it.
With this, Glenn asks us, if this group were to perform tonight, what we would be capable of playing. The list currently includes Asturias, Growing Circle, Eye of the Needle, a Thrak without the fifth chord, Askesis (with one omission), Where is the Nurse? (a different omission), Calliope, and 3rd Relation. There are other pieces that are being hammered out, as well, and will probably be folded into the working repertoire within a few weeks.
To lead into non-circulation repertoire, we start off with Growing Circle. The first run-through is good, but the tempo drops in direct proportion to our dynamics, which are actually quite dramatic, but aren't necessarily being played--the soft sections seem to be soft in an arbitrary fashion, although we are playing them together. With a mind directly towards this, we play the piece again. The second time around, the feel is much better, and the tempo is much more consistent, though Chris comments that the end of the piece doesn't have quite the same energy as the beginning.
Moving on to Askesis, with Rick, Chris, Glenn, and Alex, with Brad contributing silence. At one point, a small intonation issue in the basses, but mostly good work. Glenn opts to show Brad a couple of parts of the bass--hopefully, this will be sufficiently augmented the following week. At this, we break for a few minutes.
On return, the circle tackles Nurse--Alex is still not sure about all of the piece, so Brad takes him out into the hallway to show him some primary parts of the bass line, while the leads work with the end of the piece. After about ten or fifteen minutes, the sense of being back in the loft leans into the hallway, and Brad and Alex head back in. Some more work with the piece, including switching Rick between lead and bass, and dynamics being mentioned. Alex has a better grasp of the piece, despite Brad's strongest efforts to help, and will probably have the line down by next week.
Next is 3rd Relation--a little bass-heavy, with Chris, Brad, and Glenn on bass, and Rick and Alex on lead. A couple of runs of this, and onward.
The last thing we run for the night is Intergalactic Boogie Express--Rick, Brad, and Alex on lead, with Chris and Glenn on bass. The first attempt crashes pretty quickly, and leads straight to rhythmic work on the opening. The offbeat triplets are pretty challenging, and it's absolutely necessary to have this locked in, so that when the basses come in, there is no question as to where they play their notes. A couple minutes of just this work really helps out, and allows us to move on in the piece. The tempo was definitely quite a bit faster after about ten minutes, but we manage to scrape a couple of complete passes; granted, there are some trainwrecks, but nothing that hard work and personal practice won't take care of.
Bringing us to roughly 10:35, we elect to call it an early evening, and end in a short moment of silence. As we're packing up to leave, Rick adjusts Chris's truss rod--next week will reveal just how much that helps Chris's playing.
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