GCNE Meeting, 01-03-2010

In attendance: Victor McSurely, Chris Paquette, Brad Hogg, Glenn Hughes, and Dev Ray. Alex Lahoski and Rick McCarthy are unable to attend, due to weather concerns.

Beginning the meeting at roughly 7:40, Victor starts things off with the metronome at about 48 bpm: "Four beats each, with first one note, then two, then three per beat, up to eight notes (or sixteenths). And, instead of starting over at one note, go back to seven, then six, and so on." With one false start, and Dev still pulling his guitar out of his case, we work with this for roughly 10 minutes or so. What is interesting is straining to hear the click, while fighting the urge to gradually speed up into the next set (i.e. beginning the 7 as a 6, and then speeding up to stuff in the last couple notes, just in time to play the 8), but then feeling the time stretch as we shift down to 7, to 6, to 5, and struggling to stretch out the spaces enough.

Moving on to the left hand, and the first primary. Pattern: 2-4-1-3. Three times up and down the neck.

Free circulation, with Victor stopping the first pass, and beginning it again.

Flying Home, with work on the introductory 2 bars and 4 bars of the D section. We count this as what it is: 6 bars of 7 beats. Counting it out loud proves to be very difficult for most in the room; we all know how the music "goes", and can drop into the right slot after dropping out, but the act of vocalization (and vocalizing a specific thought or "coordinate", to boot) provides a formidable challenge. Glenn is successful in regularly getting a sound to come out of his mouth. Victor points this out, and Glenn notes that continuity of the pulse is something that is fairly easy for him to hold on to, but that there is a big disconnect when trying to actually use language to mark where he is--talking and saying a specific word seems to be antithetical to what his hands are doing [my paraphrasing]. Victor agrees, and mentions that it gets easier, once one is able to do this on a couple different pieces of music. Also, for the time being, he chooses to not go into 7 bars of 6 beats (!). This said, once through Flying home in full, and then we break.

After the break, we work with Nurse, for the first time in about three weeks. There's a couple of roughish spots from not having been played, along with a couple of tricky timing bits, but the dynamics seem to jump out quite nicely.

During one run of Nurse, there is a moment where we all collectively pull back: first the leads, and then the basses trip up. Recovering quickly, the circle finishes the piece, and Victor declares that this is the first time in a long time that everyone is so courteous that, when making a mistake, we each acknowledge that "that might have been me!" This leads him to refer vaguely to an incident at his first Level III course--the pregnant silence then invites the story of the first performance of the League of Crafty Guitarists where RF was not present in the performance ("I always thought that it'd be Tony!").

IBE next. Victor and Brad on lead, and Dev, Glenn, and Chris on bass. A couple of spots where Brad drops for a moment, but nothing that personal practice won't address. Played twice.

Third Relation. Within a bar, instant rushing in the basses, which gets worse as we get into the first D section, after the intro. Victor stops it quickly, and attempts to run it again. Same problem, so we work with the metronome, and loop the midtro and first D section, while being asked to count 4 bars of 4 concurrently. This will take some personal practice. We run the piece once through, and the rushing does diminish noticeably.

To finish the night, we play Thrak twice--first with the Lark's section, and then straight in. It is fast, tight, and right on the edge of being over the top. In other words, very good.

Silence, with a few words of practicalities coming up (a presentational gig at Victor's school, for instance), and we end at roughly 10:30 p.m.