We rehearsed last night for the first time since December.  All things considered it wasn’t too much of a train wreck.

Overall it’s always challenging to tell how we’re doing since we’re in a basement and the sound is slopping all over the place.  Amps on top of amps, drums in your grill, vocals buried somewhere in the rafters.  At least Mike’s bass comes through.

However, it was certainly fun.  It’s a blast to actually figure out how to play these tunes that we’ve labored over in the studio.  Some of them were written primarily on keyboards, but I don’t play keys in DD69 (at least not right now).  So KBilly and I have to come up with parts that we can play on guitar instead.

Add to that the mental coordination required to play new parts and sing over them, and you have a recipe for what KB described as “demoralizing”.  But we’ll keep at it.  That’s been the only way for me to get better at singing while playing: constant repetition.  Eventually my hands know what to do all by themselves and that frees up my brain for vocals.

We’ll convene again next week and see if we’ve improved enough to get out of the basement.  Oh, and I will continue to navigate stairs very carefully.