James Lee Stanley

Rehearsing with Cliff Eberhardt (www.cliffeberhardt.net) for  our upcoming shows of the All Wood and Doors (www.allwoodanddoors.com), our acoustic celebration of Doors music.

It has been interesting to play these songs after months of working on them in the studio with the other musicians.  

Initially, Cliff came out to California in May for a week and then another week in July, where we layed down first the arrangements and then his guitar and vocal parts, as his schedule on the road had him very busy.

In any event, my good friend Bill Wence (www.billwencepromotions.com), graciously offered Cliff and I his guest house to rehearse in during this layover until we go to the annual FAI conference (www.folk.org).

We have charts and what we did was to first listen to the CD with the charts in front of us and play along, after each song, we’d stop the CD and play the song a couple of times to fix it in our memories and then play the next one and do the same thing again.

That gave us a familiarity with what we had come up with during those hectic ten days last year.

We then listened to the CD again and decided which parts were crucial to the arrangements, regardless of what instrument was playing it, then one of us would take over that part, or add it to the part we were already playing.  The deciding factor being, which part really needed to be there to make the arrangement pop?

Then after we had decided that, we started playing the songs again and this time paying closer attention to the blend of the voices and the guitars, and as we became more and more familiar with the arrangements and our muscle memory began to respond, we started paying attention to the dynamics.

As a solo performer, both of us make extensive use of dynamics and now we were bringing that awareness to our two guitar, two voice versions of a fully produced and arranged CD.

What you have to do is distill the arrangement and take what must be in there, and leave out other parts that may be wonderful texture changes, but not absolutely necessary to a simple duet performance of the music.

It’s working great and we look forward to playing the entire CD for you when we start touring in earnest later on this year.