Again and again, the lessons long learned but often forgotten, come back to us in the form of a sweet reward. If you persevere and keep at it for long enough, your patience will eventually pay off.

Tonight was one such night. We had decided to work on the song "The Disco Machine" which I had originally titled "The Death of Disco" and later renamed "Disco is Dead" before finally settling on its present title which I hope sticks this time. The newer band members had insisted on polishing this one song. Boobop in particular. I think we all agreed then that the last arrangement was already good but that we could still do some more tweaking.

I had been content to keep my guitar part the same basically all throughout the song thinking it works ok. The concept being an anti-disco song, what better way to kill any semblance of pop than by keeping it dreadfully boring and dragging. I was both right and wrong. Logic was on my side but artistically, I was dead wrong.

So now I introduced variations to my guitar approach. Keeping to the same chords, I simply reduced my riffs in certain song parts and changed my strumming on others. The process was basically reduction but lo and behold, the outcome was so much better than the original arrangement. Reduction is elevation.

In our own ways, each band member experimented with reduction and variations. The rhythm section took pains to arrange appropriate song breaks and cadences. By adding a short line, I was able to break the monotony of a refrain comprising of a line repeated 4 times achieving a more musically sound song structure. Ian in particular stumbled on a simple riff that instantly piqued our combined ears, effectively trashing the slide guitar effects that we had been working on painfully for the longest time.

Playing the song by the session's end, we felt we had greatly improved the song so much so that I think for this song at least, we are ready for the recording studio. Jerros though, still thinks he could still work on his drum parts more. I wanted to assure him it sounded ok to me but I held back remembering the lessons long learned but often forgotten.