Three original songs plus one cover selected as the first to undergo re-recording

This is starting to get interesting for me - John and I got together, reviewed the equipment he has and his installation of Reaper on his PC, as well as investigating how to use some of the "-nodrums" versions of songs I sent him to generate tempo maps in Reaper for his purposes. Reaper (the DAW) impresses me each time I take time to look at it - the developers have really ramped it up to start acting very much like a real workstation software, including hosting vsts and other proprietary virtual instruments/effects. It might be very well that in the next year or two I'll dump the commercial DAW software in favor of Reaper...

Ok, that said, here's the detail for the headline of the post:

Songs selected were mostly instrumentals - they're among the hardest of the material to hit the changes, but we're also going back to redo a lot of the guitars/basses and keyboards for them, so lets make them sound as live as we can. The one vocal song is a very difficult time signature, but has a very well defined feel to it so John should be able to find a groove to work with it. The cover song selected could end up being the very first tune to record in order to get great drum sounds - "Fooling Yourself (the angry young man)" by Styx is a great song, has a nice 3/4 meter and groove to it, and I can play all of the parts to it very well. That will truly be the warm up tune allowing me to work off the rust both doing wood-shedding at home, and also playing it live at open mics in various places between now and the recording time.

Song list:

1. htfk - this is a great instrumental, in 4/4 thru the entire running length of the tune, with tons of syncopation and overlapping counter-melodies. It was never recorded with real drums either, so it will most definitely feel the big huge lift from a live band treatment.
2. Pentelho Vermelho - John wants to see this gain some speed, I'd almost like to see this slow down deliberately to gain more heaviness. This one has meter changes all over the place so much to learn on this one...
3. This Mortal Coil - the vocal tune that has the most to gain of all the "AFLB" songs. It's in a really wacky 15/8 time signature for the verses, then shifts to 9/8 (I think) for the chorus, but the whole time this has a very defined groove which makes you forget the odd meter - a bit clunky though in the AFLB form. Vocally, it will experience a huge upgrade as after almost 10 years I have a better definition of the main melodic vocal line.
4. Fooling Yourself - it was between this song, and Xanadu (the Rush tune) for the first of the covers to hit. I have others on the list as well and each one will get a treatment - but this is the first. It will keep us honest w.r.t. dealing with the complexities of the originals, and help to focus on simply getting good sounds and performances to disk. Very much looking forward to getting this song down.

John needs to pick up a couple more pieces - another kick drum mic (I think), a couple mic stands for the kick drums, the dual mic mount bit (for the x-pattern overhead mics). Once he gets those, we set up mics, get sounds and tweak placements, and then start going for broke. I'm guessing first sets of drums tracks will come my way within the next two weeks and then I'll be able to start laying the supporting tracks down at home.

We're still more or less on target for getting the redux drums done by end of June (my estimate), and then we can start working on drums for new material as some will be written by then...

As far as new material - I'm taking two pieces from the past as starting points for both individual songs, and building blocks for my progressive rock classical long form piece that will fill an entire CD by itself. I'm targeting having my first draft of the long form piece done by July and likely 5-7 stems of new individual songs / material by then as well. How I will choose to package and release will be determined as we get closer to that milestone, and its likely I'll start a PledgeMusic campaign up and going for certain by June to fund production and manufacture of the new stuff in addition to repackaging the old material for release.

Ah - I'm late, need to go take my kid to his first baseball game of the year. Have fun everyone!