BR Cohn Redux

Two versions of the story:

1. We were so freakin' awesome when we opened for The Doobie Brothers, Little Feat, Jackie Greene and Pablo Cruise last year that they just had to have us back again at the B.R. Cohn Fall Music Festival this October OR...
   
2. We weaseled our way in again

We'll leave that up to history to decide. All we know is this: we're on the schedule for Sunday, October 10th. Tickets go on sale in a few weeks, and the other acts haven't been announced yet, but you know they'll be big. Bigger than us, but no more thrilled to be there!

The Metronome

Quick: what's the tempo of a favorite song (pick any song you like) in beats per minute (BPM)?

We all know "fast" from "slow", but that doesn't help much. Plus, it's a law of playing live music that you'll always play faster on stage than you want to--something about adrenaline (and maybe alcohol) speeding up the process.

I bring this up because after many, many months of playing some of our songs, our resident musical genius Chris is challenging us to lock in our tempo--with real numbers. That means using a metronome to practice, and I'm finding it to be damned hard work.

It's easy enough to start a well-known song and match the metronome. But keeping the tempo locked-in...well, that's real work. There's a lot of muscle memory to unlearn. I was just working on "Gloria", which is supposed to be at 130 BPM. I can start at 130, but within a dozen measures, I find myself drifting.

Gotta get back to work. By the way, here's a handy resource where you can look up the BPM of a whole lot of songs.