Much progress has been made.   Tom is back and practicing with us again, eagerly writing guitar parts for the songs we wrote in his absence.  I also acquired a fast new laptop for the sole purpose of music production, and it has made a HUGE difference in our productivity.   We've been going through our list of songs and "checking off" the ones that are "show ready" and just need practice.  At this point, it is almost half the songs, which is great news.  I've also really streamlined the prep-time for shows and setup our computer and software so that we can generate our set list on the fly and then control the whole show from the controller keyboard, which makes our live shows a lot more dynamic and (hopefully) interesting (and means nobody has to "man" the computer during our shows).  Soon (once at least most of the list is considered "show ready") we will start booking shows and practicing the set.   When that happens i will post news here and on our myspace and facebook pages.

Until then...

Never a dull moment.  Kether has been moving forward at a fairly steady pace.  We have more than enough material to do a show now, and are working on refining it and working out parts to do live, etc.  Such is the hazard of computer-based music: You can click in parts that sound great, but then when you want to perform it, you have to essentially learn your own music! Alas, that is really the least of our concern.   Chiefly the issue we face is that we only regularly get 3 hours a week to practice together as a band.  This means that it can take weeks to write a song together.  So I write a lot of the material myself in my home studio, and then bring it to the band to "flesh it out".  As is said, long live the new flesh!

Aside from that, we haven't seen Tom (our friend, guitar player and co-conspirator) in something like two months.  He has been touring all over the US and Europe with his other band In Defence.  Of course we're very happy for them and their successes, but we miss our tom!  

At any rate, (to steal another cliche) the music must go on, so we push forward, producing and practicing as much as we can, in hopes that soon we will have our material polished enough to start booking some shows here around the twin cities.  Along the way we hope to master a few of our newer singles and release them here and on our Myspace so that everyone can see what we've been spending our time on. 

Wish us luck

I thought it worth doing an actual "band news" update of how things are going with Kether. We've got just about enough material to start booking some shows, but we've had a really hard time coordinating a practice schedule since February. When we do get together we're generally quite productive, and I think that if we get a few good practices in a row, we'll be a lot closer to "showtime".
 
Along with getting the people ready (which is really by far the hardest part!), I've spent a lot of time on ironing out bugs in our hardware and software setup. This has consisted mostly of figuring out how to not have to deal with the computer while onstage (achieved using a great new feature in beta 3 of Reaper) and minimizing setup/teardown time. This has gone very well, and I can now bring the whole band's worth of gear to practice and setup in less than 15 minutes. With a couple more modifications I have planned, this should be cut down even more.
 
Overall things go well, and I'm still working on the content types for the site (including all of our music, which will be freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial license). Check back soon and there will likely be more content on this site, as it is just in its infancy. Until then, peace.