Gearing Up for Sunday Jamming Session

I don’t do any team sport.  I wonder what players would do one day before, say, a football practice.  My guitarist Jason wants to check out my new toy.  Not just any guitar amp and effect processor but one that comes with a – hold your breath – VOX Valve Reactor.  So he suggested a Sunday jamming session at my humble home studio.  I brainstormed with my bassist Cynthia as we both want to do something different.  And we suggested a retro theme.  Not the eighties retro but rather dig up some of the old materials we were used to play back in 2004.

So one day before the jamming session, I started the day asking my band mates what their personal favorites are.  Interestingly, none of us picks up the same song.  Jason picks “Broken” and “A Little Bit of Love”.  Good choices they are.  “Broken” is a ballad with lots of space for Jason’s guitar solo to shine and “A Little of Love” has some nice tune.  Cynthia picks “Dark Cloud”.  I know she likes the song’s dark theme.  It’s about humanity in desperation.  I wrote that song during the Iraq War.  As for me, it has to be “The Sweetest Thing” – a song written after my dinner trip to the red light district feeling melancholy that girls so pretty have to go down that path – and “Not Today”, a favorite pick from Jeremy – one of our ex-founding band member.

This new toy of mine – VOX ToneLab LE – comes with so much functionality.  I spent the entire morning attempting to narrow down a set of preset programs that suit my song style.  I could of course spend another 1,400 words just to describe the physics behind that sturdy processor.  But I’d rather not.

The rest of the day, I spent much time finding the right key, rewriting the songs into radio edit version.  Radio edit?  You may ask.  Well, you know how it’s like.  Think Pink Floyd back in 1975.  The song “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” has a total duration of 26 minutes.  It’s a whole world of difference between then and their last studio album “The Division Bell” (1994).  When our band first recording our signature song “Jealousy” at my home back in 2005, the song was close to 17 minutes.  Subsequently, we progressively trim it down and today, we have a radio edit version that is kept below 4 minutes.  Personally, I still prefer the 17 minutes version.

And perhaps I shall apply the same philosophy to my own blog entries.

By the time I normalized the volume of the different preset programs from my VOX ToneLab LE, it was close to midnight (without normalization would mean a tougher time during the recording session).  What a way to spend Saturday.  Now, I have a football match to watch.  Or rather, Cynthia has a football match to watch while I accompany her.