All the Updatia What Fits

Let's see...

Rachel and patrixa danced with a tornado... and won. It was to the south and east of them, although at one point, they almost headed back into one of the areas that had the most destruction, just to try a different way home. They didn't even find out about it - outside of some traffic stopping rain they experienced - until a friend of patrixa called and asked if they were still in Kansas. Or, rather, Cow Hampshire. If they were in Kansas, it would be nearly as bad or worse than if they were in Oz, on account of starting out so far away, and not having the advantage of a wicked witch to land upon.

In other news, aequitaslevitas and I are putting down some new tracks for 5 on Reserve. This is sounding much better - and more coherent - than the prior effort. noone234 should be joining us tomorrow to do the alto sax thing. We'll have something up by the end of the weekend, not that I've gotten any comments on our earlier efforts. :: tap, tap :: Is this thing on?

5 on Reserve - rough tracks, live, take 2!

A new set of live tracks are out there on The Lefty Valdez Band MySpace page.

This take is a step backwards in that the guitar isn't there - it's just bass and keys. It's a step forward in 1) sound quality; 2) percussion that follows the tune; and 3) some of the time we we even play in time. There's errors in both the bass and keys parts. Even the drums come back, twice no less, long after the tune is over. Still, it's better than what was there.

It helped being able to isolate the parts enough so that we could record live. Although I have to say, my interplay wasn't with aequitaslevitas (and when it was my timing got a wee bit fast!), it was keeping an eye on that drummer and trying to get the feel for the part. Yeah, we wrote it, but I'm still working on getting the groove. It's just a tiny bit slower than we were playing - and I want to slow it down, as I feel it sounds better, so now it's just remembering that. It catches me the most in transitions back to the chorus... I get a bar or two in and realize I'm no longer in sync with the percussion and have to slow it down.

Tomorrow we should get, at the least, a more solid take with the bass, and we were talking about me getting that track down first, and then playing live with the three of us (aequitaslevitas on keys, noone234 on sax, and me on guitar).