We jammed the other night. I would say "practice", except that we didn't really practice much of anything. We just showed up, plugged in, and played for two hours. We fumbled through a few covers we've played thousands of times before, scratched our heads at old originals we hadn't dusted off in years, and bulldozed through some unfamiliar new material. Not bad after yet another apathetic band hiatus. We've got a show coming up at the end of April-another installment of the Renegade's annual Loud Music Symposium. Yes, we haven't played a show since last year's LMS, but we're glad to fire up the 'ol engines of indifference and blow out the cobwebs. One might find oneself asking: What kind of band plays less than one show a year?! One might find the answer: the same kind of band that plays together for fifteen years but has recorded only two albums. But that's another discourse entirely. Don't get me started.

Warning: extremely geeky music tech-nerd post prodeedeth:

The momentum from our jam session carried over to the next evening where I found myself reading all the samples for one of our new compositions. Being an instrumental three-piece, we are each tasked with MIDI-duty-triggering synths and samples with whichever spare appendage happens not to be occupied at any given moment. For years this meant undertaking an excruciating and laborious process of re-recording a syntheiser chord progression here, or a textural guitar layer here, or the odd drum machine pattern there, sampling them, chopping them up and assigning them to specific keys, all the while trying to make everything as small as possible so as not to exceed the sample-memory capacity of my poor hardware-based samplers (a whopping 32MB). I've since abandoned those dogs in favor of an entirely software-based system… Reason. What used to take a good eight hours of compu-tomfoolery with the old apparatus, took less than ninety minutes with the current rig. I sampled all my keyboard parts right out of Digital Performer, chopped them up into sensible, trigger-able slices, simultaneously exported all the soundbites to .aiffs, imported into Reason's NN-XT, assigned the keys, and blammo. Instant performance map-ready to rock.

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