Hey, happy leap day. I guess it is a special day. But that isn’t what this post is about.

We had a really enjoyable studio night last night. After what seemes like years of mixing and mastering, we’ve finally started to get back to the fun part: making new music.

We’ve got a storehouse of riffs that we’ve amassed over the years. Lots of the musical ideas have come from teensy little pieces of really long jams that we’ve recorded. Other ideas have dropped, fully-formed, out of our heads and hands. Generally that’s what we start with.

Last night for example, we recorded some general noodling around. We set up a simple session in Pro Tools and let it run while we fired up different rhythms on the trusty Dr. Groove drum machine and improvised. We weren’t really coming up with anything that was rocking our collective world, so we changed tacks (keeping the jams, of course, we might find something inspring in there after all).

We pulled up an old riff called “today special”, named for a sign that used to hang in our favorite east-side Chinese food take out place. We had created the jam at Mike’s place immediately after setting up his “remote” studio, which is a kind of stripped down affair. We recorded directly into Acid (we only did the acid 10 times… uh, I mean ONE time, man) and posted it online so I could drag it into my system and goof around with it.

We almost lost the whole idea, forgetting that it was out there in cyberspace. I thought about it much later and wondered where it had gone. Fortunately I found it, or the idea would have been completely lost – a very frustrating thing, and something that I’ll probably touch on in another post sometime.

In any event, we pulled it up last night and found that it fit our mood quite nicely (r&b funky, which seems to vie with heavy-duty rock for our attention). After monkeying around with it for a while we came up with what could be a good chorus, and stripped down the verse a little. As always, it’s going to continue to evolve until we reach the final product, but that’s the really wicked cool part of the creative process. When it’s done it may have changed from the original so much that it’s only got a passing resemblance, but we’ll have ourselves a new DD69 tune.