Hurricane Alley Preps For Category Two by George Ziemann -- February 18, 2010 Since last August, Hurricane Alley has taken their first album, Category One, pulled most of the album contents into our set list, and gave them an extended test-run with live audiences, which responded favorably to them all. Now it's time to make another one. We were supposed to already have started recording, but two things slowed us down. The first one was the fact that Carl's Marshall was in the shop getting its bias reset and a bunch of various connections needed resoldering, many years of rocking out having finally worked them loose. Since our recording is more or less done outdoors, the other delaying factor was winter, which lasted almost two whole weeks this year. Fortunately, this past weekend was back to 70°, so I travelled down to get a rehearsal in. We had already added at least one new song into the live show that hadn't been recorded yet (maybe two) and they had added six more to the list. I was able to throw a couple in myself -- one of my own and another written by Steve Swindler (TrainWreck). So we've almost written the entire thing before we even start. All we have to do is rehearse a bit more and record it. Lessons Learned If we learned anything from the last album, it was not to put our ugly mugs on the cover. So we went back to Chris Davies, who had also designed the Hayden's Wall cover and offered to give him money this time, which resulted in the art at right. I was producing the first album, but wasn't actually a member of the band until we were about 3/4 finished recording. I didn't put enough effort into incorporating keys into the record, since Carl had done a lot of fine guitar work and some of the songs just didn't need keys. This ended up pushing me to play rhythm guitar, which was fine until we put the whole album into one set and I had to play guitar for almost an hour straight. Our live shows are really coming together. One thing I like about the band is how we break up the night. Most bands play 45 minutes and take a 15-minute break. Our sets are at least an hour long, and so we only take two breaks. Within the sets, we try not to waste a lot of time between songs. No witty reparté, we don't talk about the drink specials, just one song after the other so that we can keep people on the dance floor and play as many tunes as possible. If no one is dancing, it's time to roll out Pink Floyd. In the little bubble that is the stage, I stay most focused on Carl. Manny and the drums are in my periphery but they dominate the stage. I can feel the drums, I don't always have to watch. Tim has a wireless rig, so half the time his stage space is empty because he's out running around the club. Sometimes he'll pop in on my side of the stage for a while to see how it sounds from over there. A lot of the time, though, I have no clue where he is -- but he's still playing right on, I can feel it from the opposite end of the stage and I know I can count on it. Since the rhythm section is so solid, this gives Carl and I an opportunity to take a few chances live, do some improvisational jamming, push the dynamics. We've been playing together for almost 8 years now. We know how to cover for each other and when we're going to need to because we anticipate each other, even when we go off on a tangent. Carl is our front man, by default, because he is simply the best showman of us. We've gotten pretty tight over the past year with almost no internal friction. As Al Franken would say, we're good enough, we're smart enough, and gosh-darn it, people like us. Even bikers. Moving Ahead So I showed up to practice with Carl and Manny (Tim was out of town). Usually our reheasals are kind of like playing out -- here's how the song goes, bam, bam, bam, verse, chorus, verse, chorius, lead, chorus and out. We play it, if it worked the first time, we've got it, next song. Not this time.They took me through all the new songs twice. First, Carl taught them to me on the guitar, we played through them a couple of times, then I set up the keys and we went through them again. This was a great approach to a learning session as far as I was concerned. The guitar and keyboards are two totally different perspectives and this gave me a chance to try them both out, go home and work out a few ideas before it's recording time. Carl is also concerned about making sure he's using different tones. Manny is taking his style through a self-examination as well, asking questions about overall drum tones (rock vs. metal, acoustic vs. electronic) that we should have discussed the first time around. I've got 1,000 sounds looking for a song to star in, although I need a second keyboard just like the one I've got (an Alesis 6.1) just to have an extra sound always available. As far as the recording itself, we're going to try and slow down a little, maybe listen to the songs back once or twice before calling the rhythm tracks acceptable. This means dumping the ADAT and recording 16 tracks into ProTools at once, possibly while I'm playing, just for that "degree of difficulty" thing that turns a relatively ordinary activity (skating, skiing) into an Olympic event. That's the scoop for now.