Writing and Rehearsing

We spent the next fifteen months writing music and rehearsing. The whole process was incredible. On one day, I'd show up with a new song, and we'd work on it for a few days, getting the "bugs" out. Although I have always been a reasonably good player, one of my strongest skill as a musician has always been arranging and producing, and I was thriving on the work. At times, we would have disagreements about how the music should be arranged, but we had a method that worked...we would try all the options or ideas, and the "right" one would always become obvious...we could all hear when we had found it. The next week, Mark would walk in with a new song...or some ideas for a song, and we'd spend a few days learning it, or refining the arrangement.  He and I would "finish each others' sentences"...musically, that is. I'd "hear" a bridge that was missing in one of his songs, or he'd "hear" a chorus for one of mine. We had quite a few songs that were collaborative efforts, and together, we had no shortage of ideas. And it always seemed that no matter what we were working on, we brought out the best in each other. As the musical style of our writing gelled, all four of us became more attuned to each others' nuances, and the songs often came together in a day or two. We would rehearse them over and over again, because the playing had to become automatic, before the singers in the group would be able to focus on lyrics, vocal stylings, and harmonies...and still play their instrumental parts with the same intensity. And all the music was ours...it was euphoric to hear songs materialize out of thin air, and become finished products...and very good ones, at that. We were rapidly approaching our goal of three sets of all-original music, and I can only remember one cover song in our entire repertoire, and it was an old Deep Purple song called "Hush"...and even that was totally rearranged. As we got comfortable playing and singing the material, we began to focus on the details...the sound mixes, the flanges and the echoes...we had spent a lot of money to get those tools, and now, we were learning how to use them, and incorporating them into our music...it was all falling into place. We used eight Sennheiser microphones on Barry's drums alone. We were starting to sound like the bands we listened to on records... and we just kept practicing, because the next part of the plan was to record, and to get Avalanche on the radio airwaves..before we ever played a gig.