Well, we've been at the rehearsal space for 3 days now, and it's is going really really fast. There is an awful lot of energy and excitement surrounding the new jams. We've been wood shedding and refining "She Won't Last", "Unholy Ghost", and "The Loophole". We've got a new one called "Ashes" up to speed now, and two more fully realized songs that need lyrics. We work today, then Chris is out of town for a few days for his sister's wedding. Dave and I will use some of the time jamming some acoustic ideas. We've got a couple of sweet Yamaha acoustics down at the studio, and we're going to get some non-rocking stuff started. I am really excited about that because since Skycycle broke up, that's where I have put my musical energy - the melancholy acoustic stuff. Dave is singing more and more in the band, and I think our voices blend well. I think if this band can have the hard rocking shit (which it definitely does), and the more song-based jams, and also a gentle acoustic aspect, I think we'll have it all.

I have been working on recording rehearsals, and documenting what we do. My whole musical life, I have relied on tape recording rehearsals with a crappy little hand held recorder, that made up for in portability  and ease of use what it lacked in sound quality. And boy did it lack sound quality. I find that the only way I really can get the songwriting machine working is to live with the jams in daily life away from rehearsal. Usually in rehearsal if you play or sing a part, and no tape is running, you think you will remember it right the next day, but that's just lazy and usually wrong. The next day comes, and you try to re-create it, and it always ends up different. With this band, I wanted to get something more thought out happening.

Here is the new process: I bring a tablet PC I bought last year (a PC with no keyboard, you write on the screen with a stylus) that I was going to sell- to rehearsal. No need really for a tablet PC, it was the only thing I had lying around to use. I hook up a stereo mic to it (got adapters so that it goes down to a quater inch jack for the tablet). I use SoundForge 6 (a simple waveform editor and recorder) to record simple .aif files of us jamming. Not super pro quality, but one million times better than a cassete recorder. I take the tablet home every night and copy the .aif files over to the G5. The PC works with the Mac great on my wireless network, incidentally, the tablet just pops up on my desktop and I pull the files over (would have thought It would be much harder). The copy usually takes about a half hour, for a gig and a half of files. That's way too much space, so I open the files in Peak 4 on the Mac (pretty much the Mac equivilent of Soundforge on the PC) and cut them up. Make them mono to save space (the way I'm recording, it sounds like mono anyway), and save them as mp3's. Then for my own personal use, I drop the files into iTunes. I make all the "album" names "rehearsal" and set up a smart playlist, so that anything with the album name "rehearsal" will show up in it. So far, so good. Next on the list is to set up a place online for the guys to get to them and download.  Looks like it will take a bit of time every day before rehearsal, but overall, it's light-years ahead of what I have been doing, and at the rate that this new band creates new music, it's absolutely necessary. Also I am enjoying it, just waking up, getting my tea (trying to drink green tea these days instead of coffee) and listening to the day before while getting new ideas for today.