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.

So this is the earlier configuration of the Tritones. Without Paul. Thus, it is called the Semitones. Paul was unable to attend on this particularl scheduled recording session. We also used Logic to capture the audio and not Presonus, which is the preference Dana has. Ben used his laptop to capture all the audio and then just walked off with it on his hard drive. The MIDI for the keyboard went directly in, instead of being rendered into audio by one laptop and captured by another. The MIDI gets out of sync sometimes with the audio, which Ben is working to fix, and prevent, in future sessions. Also we actually played three or four more songs on this session, but Ben forgot to hit record, so we do not have them in this collection.

Still working out the kinks of the recording process. Lots of trouble getting the trombone in a volume range that is both loud enough to here and also does not overdrive the equipment. Also these are just the roughest of mixes as a reminder. Anything that we decide is worth keeping musically, we can redo the mixing to make it sound much higher quality. Some cool stuff in this session. In particular, we have the arrangement with counterpoint for Heres that Rainy Day by Dr. Zimmerman. We also had the neat idea of taking You Dont Know as a rubato intro with just sax and piano.

We are kind of shopping around our song book to see which tunes come out in the recording the best. This is what we tried out this week. Some of these sound pretty good and might be kept! Meanwhile, Dana and I have streamlined the recording process -- particularly the transfer from his computer to mine. I am struggling with the dynamic nature of Trombone and trying to figure out which type of compression can keep it from peaking the channel without causing it to sound super low in the mix.

Paul was decidedly out of the country, and Robert had a faulty alarm clock, so we were just a trio on this recording. Which was good, in a way, because it allowed Dana and Ben to iron out some issues with the recording process. We are prepping to do some demos, so this is good practice. Fun jams all around.

Gato decided it was time to get together and write some more! This is the session where we started putting together the bits for what we are calling the New Dang Song at the moment, but that is decidedly a working title. We got all the pieces together in this rehearsal, but have not done the form of the song yet, and probably there are more lyrics coming.