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Day Three Hundred Twenty Nine (Year Two)

B. and I got together around 12:30 today.  We had lunch and plotted out where to begin, music-wise for the day.  For the first time in about 7 years, she actually flat out asked me where we start if we want to be rock stars, and meant it as a serious (or at least semi-serious) question.

I told her the same thing that I've been trying to get across for those entire 7 years.  I told her that the songs are the most important part.  And that whether we were producing it ourselves (which currently appears to be the case) or having someone else do it in a big time studio on someone else's budget, if the music was tight and the songs were good, that was most of the battle.

Our biggest problem has always been that we didn't start with click tracks and build from tempo.  So that's where we started today.  Using a combination of the recordings we've already made and Magix Music Maker from B's computer, we constructed temporary backing tracks for 6 out of 7 songs, and figured out the tempos that the click tracks need to be at so that I can start building rhythm tracks as soon as I get home.  This is where we should have started all those years ago.  And whether J. rejoins the fray at some time in the future or not, we are at least pushing forward toward putting something out.

It felt good to sit in the same room and just swap ideas back and forth, too.  I thought for a while that we were going to wind up revisiting one of the early, early songs that we discarded, but instead we wound up picking up the pieces of a progression we had gotten late, late on my last night home last August.  We took that, re-tooled it a bit, and came out with another chord progression that we thought was incredibly cool.  And all because of one riff that I've never quite been able to let go of.

All told, a productive day.  Could've gotten more done, but for a 3-4 hour stretch, it was pretty darn good.

More tomorrow, including the pilgrimage to Exclusive Company.

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