Spent
most of Saturday sleeping.
At
four, I check my email, and both Pork Beans and Bishop wanna get together,
Bishop tonight, Pok beans on Thursday. After a quick phone call to
Junzo, we're set to meet at 11pm at Yokohama. We meet, pick up some
gear (the studio has amps but no effects, and Bishop uses lots of
effects), and are there a little before midnight for out three hour
reservation.
The
room was smallish, but nice, with a full drum kit (no double bass
pedal though), a couple amps, piano, P.A.... everyone's set up fairly
quick.
Straight
away, I realize I'm gonna have a slightly tougher time than I thought;
I've got to play along with a sequencer's click track, because there's
a bunch of keyboard and sound effects -- and some are the main hooks
of the song. It's a little tricky at first, and we wun through Doku
and Masochist a couple times but it's a bumpy ride.
We
give the songs another go without the sequencer, and the songs start
to groove nicely. I know the arrangements (more or less!) and the
rhythms, but of course I haven't actually sat on a kit for 6 weeks
or so, and only learned Bishop's two songs by repetitive air-drumming.
So with tha in mind, it wewnt well!
However,
that click-track is gonna be a problem, I think; it's just a lot less
fun with it! And the language barrier wasn't hard to get around, but
I can see it getting tiring after a while for everybody -- either
that or we'll develop a shorthand way of communicating ideas. Probably
a bit of both.
So
I'm torn. Playing to a click track is good because it will make me
a better player, and I'll offer a more perfectly-timed performace.
But it's less fun in general. Also, I've always leaned toward a slightly
heavier style of music.
Then
the other half of me says that it was a lot of fun to be playing at
all, and Bishop's already established (they've got 6 gigs in the next
two months, and have been playing out for a couple years now). That
means I'll be playing live a lot sooner! And they're cool guys. So
while it might not be a perfect fit, it still could work out well.
Stay
tuned...
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