Phew!

Thought that I'd lost all the lyrics yesterday. I don't write lyrics with pen and paper for a couple of reasons: firstly, most of the lyrics are usually written in work so I'm not sure I want my co-workers to see the lyrics and think that I'm a total freak (well, no more than they already do) and secondly, I can't read my own writing most of the time.

As a consequence of this, I usually write on my trusty PDA but I had forgotten to re-charge it over the past couple of weeks and last night it wouldn't turn on. Naturally I feared the worst and that all the lyrics had gone forever, but after a quick re-charge everything was restored to normal.

Phew.

So, the current plan is: I'm going to get the second song alpha demo to Paul so that he can learn it for January and we're going to record in the first half of January unless something comes up (like it has done at every time we've tried to record to date!). Guitars will be done the week after the drums, bass can be done at my lesiure and vocals will happen the week after. Hopefully all will be done half way through February or by the beginning of March.

We're also going to do a cover version at some point in the near future. Actually we're going to do a couple. The first is 'Vote with a Bullet' by Corrosion of Conformity which is just a storming tune and the second is 'Strange Town' by the Ground Hogs from their 'Thank Christ for the Bomb' album. It's a bit of an odd choice as it's a late 1960s / early 1970s song but it's the complete opposite of what you'd expect from that time period, so it's not a peace and love song. So the alpha demo is going to be completed before the new year. I may also have a go at an alpha version of Vote with a Bullet and see how we can Mjolnir-ise that tune.

Also, there's another original song I'm working on so it's all going swimmingly at the moment. Apart from not actually having gotten any drum tracks recorded yet. Obviously.

The best laid plans of mice and men

Yeah, so recording still hasn't happened. This time of year sucks for actually organising anything so I'm working on getting some new tunes finished so that when we do record, we won't just be doing the one song.

There's also the question of getting something out there for you all to listen to so I'm going through our library of practices and picking the best stuff. So there's going to be five stages of demo that we're going to release and they are:

• Practice: just a microphone in the room recording us jam
  
• Alpha demo: drum machine, rough guitars and bass with no vocals, just to capture the idea of the song - this is the basis for the following steps
  
• Beta demo: real drums, rough guitars and bass with no vocals
• Pre-release demo: real drums, finished guitars and bass. No vocals
• Final release: Everything finished with vocals.
  

Currently we've got two songs at the second stage and a whole bunch of practices. So if anyone has any good places to host mp3s, then please stick a message on the end of this post. But, bear in mind that we're looking for free hosting mainly, cause we're tight!

We will record at some point

Yeah, so it hasn't happened yet.

Hopefully the drums will be recorded this Friday. The music for the song we're doing is complete and we've got two sets of lyrics for it and we're going to record both and see which one sounds best.
We've been recording all our practice jams so far and there are some really good ideas in there and one song that just wrote itself, so we'll be going back over the tapes and picking out the best riffs and creating a few more songs for you all.

In fact, I think what we'll do is post some of the best bits from the practices on the web and let you have a listen while we're finishing off our demo.

Watch this space.