Another wonderful jam with our friends at Nash Street Tavern. Ben had the H4n running, but the batteries died and so we only got the first two sets. There is another whole set that was arguably the best set. We all agree that we were playing really really well at this particular gig. Rainbow was also recording to CD, and we will get those and post them as soon as they become available.

Paul had a boatload of people over to his house for his 50th birthday party. Gato was in attendance in and in full force. It was a VERY busy day. Gato's biggest crowd probably. The unfortunate result is that we only got two songs recorded. We forgot to start the recorder before we began playing and then it also ran out of batteries and died. There are a lot of videos from this event up on YouTube that are honestly a better way to experience it. We DID manage to grab our version of Sing a Song of Songs with Dave Finucane on that SD card though, and it's definitely worth a listen.

I apologize in advance for the horrible quality of this recording. Kyle got us a gig at this assisted living facility for their fall festival. And we went out and jammed out for the families who were visiting their loved ones. The reception was mixed. On some songs, it seemed like they absolutely loved it. On other songs, they didn't seem to notice we were there. Part of what's going on with the recording is that there was a lot of wind that day, and the recorder is really far away from the band. So I had to run it through a low-pass filter to remove the wind noise and then boost the heck out of the audio to make it audible. That being said, I think we played very well on this gig. Unfortunately, Paul couldn't come. There are no videos of this show, even on YouTube.

Making sure the book was still intact in preparation for Paul's party. We also had Lisa sit in on this to prep the tunes Paul asked her to sing with Gato on his birthday. We added two new songs with Lisa instead of the usual Feelin Good.

Robert was unable to make it on this particular day, but we had all the mics setup so we ran some of our book just to get some more recordings that we thought would be solid. Some good stuff happened during this rehearsal. In particular, the solos on You Dont Know What Love is are very good, as is our take of Reese Richardsons Peace.

Ben forgot to bring his MIDI cord today so we had to use the onboard samples on the keyboard at Dana's house. That keyboard sounds fine for piano, but there isn't a good Rhodes sample, so Ben had to use Vibraphone samples for Come Together, which did not sound very good. That said, we got a couple of new tunes read into the book, and they sound very good.

We have rehearsals pretty infrequently now, but the tunes do not seem to suffer. The air conditioning went out in Paul's house during this one and it eventually ended up killing our desire to jam because it was just so dang hot. We ran through a couple of things in the book, just sort of randomly, more based on what we wanted to hear than anything else. Then we started doing more work on New Dang Song, which definitely needs a title as it becomes more legitimate.

A set list is coming together. We are getting through more tunes completely as a band. We spent today polishing things that we already know mostly. Lisa was not sick and had just eaten. We used Paul's Zoom H4n.

More running of tunes to try and get a good set of tracks for our demo. This time around, we used Danas laptop again, but he enabled his second audio input device and so we had enough channels to just run stereo out from Bens laptop for the keyboard sounds. We also had four toms on these recordings instead of just overheads or one tom. Ben also deployed a second microphone at an attempt at capturing the louder trombone sounds without peaking the input. To no avail. This is the first set of tracks to use noise gates as well. They are in use on the horns and on the toms. Lots of sparse activity there. The house's house is a house.

This rehearsal was very productive, but did not result in very much audio. We spent a bunch of time talking about what we wanted to play, and which keys things were in, we helped Paul get a book together. We also strung Fever and Summertime together into a medly, which I call Fevertime. Excellent playing all around when we actually made it through a song.