Who knows what the end product will be? In the past, Bun E. Carlos from Cheap Trick was selling CDs of his drum licks… you could piece them together to get a performance and then record on top of them. I’m wondering what they’re thinking of doing with Neil’s set? Maybe loops? Certainly, we’ll get samples. This’ll be great for keyboard drummers!

Check out the Studio ProFiles site for a clue as to what may be coming… it appears that they’re doing the sampling work.

I just updated WordPress to its latest version and now I’ve got to go back and re-do my customizations. I’m sure everyone is up-to-date regarding Rush and their tour, so I won’t bore you with any of those details.

However, Neil Peart did post an update to his news site. If you haven’t ventured over there, I highly recommend it. His updates are rather entertaining and insightful. The latest update confirms the old saying… “it’s a bitch getting old”.

If anyone figures out how to save the file, please let me know. While listening to the Neil-only version of the track, I had some riffs and melodies pop into my head. I’d love to import it into GarageBand and see what my ideas would sound like over that drum track.

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before some folks start posting their interpretations online. Could be very interesting indeed!

“I’m a cheap device for exposition,” Neil Peart says over the phone from California, establishing two things straightaway. One: he knows his function in his role in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. Two: He’s a comedy buff, who goes on to explain that he’s quoting an old SCTV parody of Fantasy Island.

“When I first listen to a rough sketch of guitar, bass, vocal, and drum machine, I am hearing it as the lyricist, seeing how the words work, and I am also listening as the drummer, knowing I will have to learn that song and play it, maybe hundreds of times. In a larger sense, though, I’m really listening as a “fan”— someone who wants to love that song. Even on first listen, I felt that way about “Bravest Face” and “The Way the Wind Blows,” and I was especially excited by how different they were from anything we had done before—fresh and vital, yet rooted in some deeper musical streams.”

As I have been writing to my friends over the past few weeks, “Sorry I haven’t been writing—I’ve been too busy writing.”

The first big job I had to do was the essay I always write to accompany the release of a new Rush album. It might seem fairly easy to put together a few pages about a piece of work like that, but I find it to be the hardest kind of writing—except for lyrics, it occurs to me now. For similar reasons, too, because I’m trying to use the fewest words possible to convey the greatest amount of information. Lyrics are the most difficult, yet have the fewest words—maybe two hundred—and the next hardest are short prose pieces, a couple thousand words or so, because they carry a heavy load.

Neil covers the writing process for the essay, some insight into his MySpace “presence”, his love of touring (heh) and some new drums that will appear on the upcoming tour. It’s just a guess, but it sounds to me like they will be red with black hardware.

Excellent stuff. It’s a shame that things are gearing up and that it may be a while before we get another update.