Sunday April 16
Had a jam session with Laramie, Wendi and Randall. The project is called Holy Hedonist House Party I was refered by Kai and had a blast. Easy, old timey, gospel-rock with lots of "guitar keys" A, G and E por ejemplo. They were really nice folks, feeding me smoothies and sammy's and I really liked the original songs they had to offer. Randall the drummer is great. Solid time, cool ideas, big ears and he can sing! I think they want me to come back as they had a lot of nice things to say about me and my playing. Cool. We shall see. I am trying to get more gigs for Agave and BCP, but nothing is going to happen until those bands have good demos. The good news is we are very close with both bands.

Saturday April 15
BCP Gig. The gig went well considering we had not rehearsed for a week. Props to Jesse and Brian. Jesse and I both got to solo more often and I REALLY dug that and am excited about the prospect of more soloing in the future. Jesse's soloing was mad fun! Pushing, and pulling the beat with smooth polyrhythms and creative ideas. Brian's voice sounded especially good that night and his solo's are always interesting and creative. My solo's were pretty good too ;)
I did get to practice that day, 40 minutes at 60 bpm on the interval study and about 20 minutes of triads in all keys moving up in 4ths. I find that if I practice the day of the gig (and everyday for that matter) that I am far more comfy, loose and relaxed on stage. One thing to point out is that I had NO STAGE FRIGHT at all. A big shift for me when in the past I was almost paralyzed with fear and it took a lot of energy just to remember what I was supposed to do. Don't get me wrong, I did make mistakes but, my pants did not fall down and even better, my head did not explode. Good thing too. Once a BCP demo is set and I can inundate Myspace with clips, photos and video, things will pick up. We did get a few friends out and the usual crowd of inebriated locals. Some who requested songs as we were playing! Well more later.

Friday April 14
Hung out with Paul most of the day, playing basses shopping for laptops and shooting the breeze. That night I saw Umphrey's McGee at the Fillmore in SF. Great band, great show, great songs but the sound sucked! Both guitars and all vocals were fine, almost no keys except for solos, and almost NO BASS AT ALL. The bass drum, over powered the bass guitar both sets. It was annoying to say the least. I really wanted to hear Ryan's Lakland/GK/Eden rig and even though I was 30 feet from his set up, I couldn't hear a damn thing as the bass drum was the loudest instrument onstage. I was bummed to say the least.

Thursday April 13
Agave Practice. We need to change the name, it was invented by a guy we booted from the band a YEAR ago. We have been kicking around some more names recently:

Second Street (2nd Street)
Vintage
Mountain Madman
Mindspeak
Ultra
Faithful
Weird
Humongous
Permanent Toast
Flux Mgr
Worked By the Rain
Grampa's Medicine
Universal Mind
PS Allstars
Interweb
2nd sonic
The New Deal

I kind of like, Second Street, Universal Mind, Worked By The Rain....