So the plan was to take a week or two off after the panic of the gig and chill out and do nothing of any musical value. Then I got this vague idea about doing an EP of the tunes from the gig while they were still fresh and well-practised so I spent a little bit of time dumping the basic tracks (i.e. hit record in Ableton and then perform them as you would on stage) with a view to tweaking, tidying, adding some things that would be nice to have but are impossible to do live like switching between acoustic + electric guitars and using a greater variety of sounds and introducing some "found sound" type elements for texture.
Then, as you do, I actually asked my brother what the technical definition of an EP was and looked it up on Wikipedia and it's sort of 4-7 tunes with a running time of 10-25 minutes. Just prior to the gig it looked like there might be a need to extend the set by 10 minutes so I had a play round just randomly combining bits from the set tunes together at different tempos and through different FX and loops to make new songs and came up with a few different pieces that sounded very different but shared a lot both tonally and musically. In fact they were in some ways more coherent that the set.
Then, all these ideas kinda mashed up together and, not wishing to completely bastardise or distort the six "pop" tunes that currently my repertoire, I sat down on the bank holiday weekend and recorded a nearly equivalent amount of loops in different styles and started mashing those up on the fly and experimenting and giving up and walking away and coming back to it and trying again for a day or two. The result as of Monday is a 20 minute and 35 second continuous piece of music with 4(ish) distinctive "sections". I've not really unpacked everything yet so it has no vocals or guitars in it, it's mostly just a mashed together backing track but I have some nice ideas about where I wanna take it. I'm rather enjoying it - it's just been sat looping on the iPod since.
So that might end up being the EP instead. Now I'm just wondering if I can have it in place in time for the next gig. I think in order to that I technically need to have had it recorded a fortnight ago.
