Day one. Packed up the laptop, omnisphere, renoise and jupiter 8 V. Goal, Me, Disease Factory to learn keyboard parts for Twilight Garden, Opening act for the upcoming “Velvet Acid Christ: After The End of the World Tour”. To cut costs, and get rid of some tour drama and minimize things, I agreed to learn TTG synths and play them live in the opening act on the road this winder and next summer. It’s fun. Todd’s strings and arp lines are complex and fun to play and kind of a challenge. I don’t know how much hardware we will bring now. might keep it simple so when we go to Europe we don’t have to bring a ton of shit.

I learned 4 songs on the first day, and man am I rusty. I have never, ever play keys or guitar on stage before. In the studio all the time, in little bricks of measures. Nothing long and continuous because I work in sections when I write and rarely do I learn a song from start to end and play it. Well, now I am doing it and I find that I rather like it. No faking on stage, I will be playing shit and not just on top of shit that is there. We are dropping stuff out of the mix. Lots of pressure. I bet I will not be dancing and bopping around behind the keyboards. I bet I will be focused and in a stone position the whole time to not fuck up any of my playing. Kind of like when I saw ladytron. Lots of people were like WTF that was boring. I was like, THEY WERE FUCKING PLAYING THE PARTS. When you play complex synth lines and want to be tight you kind of cant start bopping around and being entertaining. That is for the vocalist to do. I also made a couple of sounds to mimic the right ones in the mix, and found some cool presets to use for strings, add fx and tweak tho. Lots of fun.

Our Practice space is barren, no chairs, just a hard floor. My legs kept falling asleep because i was sitting on the floor with legs crossed most of the time with a laptop and a controller in front of a pa. Hopefully we will get some keyboard stands up next time. LOL Roughing it on the first day.

Still when i left practice yesterday I was giddy. It was really fun to be in a band setting. Fun to learn complex things and play them. I think its exciting to work on music that is so different than your own. I really respect the keyboard work on the new Twilight Garden LP. So much so I wish I was kind of in this band part time as a real contributor. With the VAC and toxic coma loads that makes it kind of Impossible for me. Having Todd and Chris kutz come on this VAC tour with TTG has been a real blessing so far. We will learn the TTG material over the next weeks, then we start the VAC show. Gotta get Steve over to set the sampler up for him. That comes way later tho.

BTW: In Colorado it was so fucking cold yesterday, yikes. Hope our tour is not super cold, i have a bad feeling it will be with all this crazy wonky weather we have been having lately. Yikes.