How record companies select bands

Met an entertainment lawyer last night at a party. He has worked with bands like Rush, and was involved in screening demos from bands in the past. His take is that the only thing you can't fix is a bad song. He went on to explain that many bands make the mistake of confusing production quality with song quality, whereas the production can always be fixed, but if the song is bad, that is fatal. So what happens is bands spend money on studio time, fancy equipment, hired musicians, etc, with the vain hope of impressing distributors, when the distributors would re-record stuff in any case, and are really listening for song quality - not production.

Other than that, he had several entertaining stories about how to promote a band, playing in strip clubs, and digital versus analog equipment. A fun evening.

Pod update

I brought the Pod to Long and McQuade's yesterday, there is something wrong with the rom on it. I think I had a copy of my sound settings on the PC, I hope, otherwise I will have to re-create them. I might not get it back for a month or two. I will use realtime effects processing of Sonar meanwhile.

With the Roland UA25 connected to the pc it gives me a zero latency solution and allows me to use Sonar digital effects. I will create some track templates with the effects and EQ I need and we will go from there. This means I need to rely on a computer though.

Al

Vocals

Tonite's practice was a blast. I had some problems with my Bass POD, it did not want to bootstrap, dam computers!! I shook it a bit and everything was ok after a song or two. We practiced a fair bit of songs tonite. We even discussed the possibility of live mic'ing Ian's drums using our USB UA25s, this would give us 6 lines in, enough to record drums.

We played Cab Driver, Wish You Were Here, Ete, Lezard, Qrt45, Liege, Sanctuary. Qrt45 was really a good jam. We were able to obtain a rolling feeling between the 3 instruments (bass, drums and guitars), intertwined solos and grooves. This was good. I took a chance and sang on Wish you were here, it is in my tone so it works. I just need to practice playing and singing.

We find our live sound to be very much influenced by Pink Floyd, without the keys and brass.

A.