More on Agile

Hello, Kurt here. I know Evan promised a new recording today, but there appear to be some technical difficulties going on, so I'm going to take up the reins.

Agile Recording had a couple different inspirations--Evan already mentioned his and my background as software developers, but there are other factors. Notably, we tried to record one of our shows, intending to make a "live" album available while we finished up our first project. That didn't work out so well--it wasn't awful (the audience seemed to enjoy it), but when we got the raw tracks, we simply weren't happy with them. This is not to imply that they weren't useful; they were excellent learning tools. One really obvious problem we noticed was that we were playing too damned fast, but we also saw some arrangement issues and identified a few potential pitfalls to look out for in future gigs.

This led to discussions about recording our rehearsals so we could get a better idea about how the songs were coming together.

At the same time, I was invited to play an acoustic solo show, and I thought it might be fun to dust off some of my back catalog and put together some quick-and-dirty Kurt-with-a-guitar recordings of songs that weren't really on the band's radar anymore. This evolved into a discussion of doing Kurt-with-a-guitar versions of some some of the songs we're actively trying to record. Then Evan suggested we start with that and build from there, and then at the next practice we set up the drum kit and started tracking.

There were a few hard decisions along the way--particularly whether to record against a click or against a live drummer. Since we opted for the latter, we had to nix the Kurt-plus-guitar-only starting point, but we're confident it was the right choice. This way you get to see how songs come together. I wonder if it might be worth putting up some of my early demoes as part of this process.

We're still sort of figuring this all out.

-]{p