Falling Edge

The band continued fine tuning I, Awake this week, with Kevin adding more drum variations for the rest of the band’s perusal. We also made a slight change in one of the guitar and keyboard runs, choosing to end it early and replace it with drums.

We also continued rehearsing Social Engineering and even got into a little bit of Crippled by Fear, running through and jamming out some of the different sections with Steve for the first time. We’re looking forward to working on this one, as it’s the only song we haven’t actually played with Steve in the band (with the exception of Not That Far Away, which has no keyboard parts other than a solo).

Falling Edge

The band had another great rehearsal on Thursday. Things were a little slow to get started, as we discussed different options for a live keyboard setup for Steve. Once things got rolling we burned through I, Awake with only a few glitches along the way (no small feat for a 15 minute long song), and did a pretty fine job of Social Engineering as well, stopping to work on some of the more difficult timing sections.

For the gear heads who may be reading, Steve decided to bring his newly re-acquired Yamaha DX7 (with E! upgrade board) to practice, which worked out nicely. He’d been using a Korg keyboard controller to play through samples on a Mac or PC laptop at recent rehearsals, but was finding this a little cumbersome and at times unreliable. In most cases the sounds were top notch, but there was some difficulty with lag and unexplained glitching. He commented later in the night that he found it much easier to just control different patch changes from the DX7 itself.

Falling Edge

The band spent more time on I, Awake last night at rehearsal, and things are coming along quite well. Some tempo uncertainties were brought up and worked through, and it’s getting to the point where little new is being added to the arrangement. Kevin is still finalizing drum parts in different sections, but other than that this song is pretty much ready to record, which hopefully we’ll be able to begin doing in the coming weeks.

Falling Edge