3/5/2015

This was a night Rich was not supposed to jam with us and he didn't so I prepared several songs I wanted to try using the EZ-Drummer software that provides a significant drumbeat as a backbone to the music. We successfully used it several weeks ago when we didn't have any drummer whatsoever and it was pretty successful then, but using it as the lead drummer for the first certainly take some getting used to.

We ended up using it for the first eight songs, and if you give them a listen, there are mostly good moments and bad moments, but it certainly is a good teaching tool as well as practice tool to keep you on a strict beat. This sort of discipline is the right type of medicine for Deadstein, and no matter how painful it may be to play with it, the drum machine certainly yields future dividends. As I am blogging about this in the future we have jammed several weeks subsequent to this EZ-Drummer jam and I have noticed some changes for the better in the solidity of how we approach some of the songs. So the drum machine is a good thing.

Second half of the night we did a lot of Jerry Garcia Band and that also went very well and was probably very liberating because it gave us the opportunity to not be shackled by the drum machine. Nevertheless it's a good shackle to be shackled to. I had recently also purchased a sample Hammond B3 organ plug-in that I added in post which you could hear on several of the songs. I thought it sounded okay. It's filled in some of the cracks with that cheesy sauce that seems to melt all over and glop the mess that we are. With that, I say, "Freak Out!"