Mamaru and I finshed the guitar parts on two more songs yesterday, which puts us at six songs completed (at least as far as the guitar parts are concerned - there’s still some various stuff left to do on some of those songs, like vocals or whatever.)

This session went pretty smooth, because one song we have been playing live for a long time, so I was very comfortable with it (”Fly”). I even threw in some slides, pick scrapes, pinch harmonics and all that genuine rock star guitar glitter. Then the other guys told me to cut it out and play the song right.

The other song (”heartdust”) is brand new, and it has one little part that for some reason I find very difficult to play. It doesn’t seem like it is technically demanding, but - frustratingly - it’s very hard for me to nail. I’m sure any musician has ran into a similar passage. Anyway, this little 3-chord arpeggiated thing took like a dozen takes to get right. I did manage to reduce the frustation level a lot by just letting everyone know up front this was a hard part for me, so everyone kinda knew what to expect.

I also helped Yasu with some English lyrics - he had a couple of very small spots where he wanted English, so we got that knocked out as well. That’s a fairly interesting challenge, because for one thing, I have to make sure I understand the meaning of the song - and as you might image it’s much harder to translate poetic writing than conversation. For another thing, Yasu has already laid down scratch vocals, so the English needs to match the existing sounds as close as possible. And finally, they have to be words that are easy to pronounce - no singing about “parallel lines” for example.

Luckily, my friend Maki has been helping out with translation, so it’s much easier now than it was before when it was just Yasu, me, and lots of dictionaries!