Well despite the unhappy absence of the third leg of the stool that is our band, Steve and I managed to press on by ourselves last night. We're really getting the workflow dialed in, and we were able to make big progress on several songs.
There were many highlights of the night, but I think my favorite was probably recording Steve playing the staple-gun, and then a pair of bricks. We spent no less than 10 minutes selecting the appropriate bit of scrap wood into which Steve would fire the staples. For the record: plywood is too hard. The winner was a piece of hemlock. I got all nervous about bringing the bricks into the studio because I didn't want to get powdered brick on the mic capsules, but we managed to pull it off without any permanent damage. :) Steve played the bricks both as a shaker (sliding them together) and as a pair of very heavy claves. The sound of a brick hitting a brick is just cool.
In other notes: we started on a song that isn't all funk and doom. I'm not going to call it a ballad (seeing as how we've pretty much agreed that it's going to be about Tina Fey's cleavage) but the melody is pretty and the chords are thus far fairly accessible. So that's cool. Of course, when we agreed to start on that style of song the first thing we did was hit Record and both of us started plunking on the piano at the same time, and next thing you know we're 20 minutes into a crazy jam mashup of the Pink Panther Theme, Hedwig's Theme, and some random part from Phantom. After that, we settled down to some normal writing, and I think the song is going to kick ass.
I have an idea for an experiment that I'm going to start soon, which is to let my girls join in on a jam at the beginning of music night, before they go to bed. It's pretty much guaranteed to shake things up, and we can always mute their tracks later if they suck. :)
