Eight months since our last CD. Okay, so maybe that really isn't that long of a time between albums, especially when you consider that Steely Dan went a whopping 20 years without releasing a new studio album after Gaucho. But for as quickly as the last one came together (one afternoon), we figured that it wouldn't be another eight months before I'd get myself back to Iowa to continue with our "experiment."

But it was. But… I think it was worth it. We put together a lot of fresh ideas on this one, and though it really is a lot different than our previous, it still presents a lot of the same flow and feel.

The tracks were written one after the other and appear on the CD in the order they were composed. We used the same dance-type patches on the Korg Triton as the last, and we improvised a great deal of the songs. The differences include introducing a new synthesizer to the two we used on the last one, playing a lot more solos, and actually doing a lot more composing before performing the tracks.

The New Synthesizer

Yes, Nathan bought another keyboard. To go

along with his extensive collection (Korg Triton LE, Roland JV-90, Alesis Quadra Synth+, Korg X5D, Korg M1, Roland JP-8000, Evolution MK-461C), he added an Alesis ion. It's got a ton of great patches and has a bunch of knobs and switches that can change all the patches in real-time. But without getting all technical it was a great addition because now we were able to fill-up our sound in places where it may have been lacking.

More Solos

We didn't really plan it this way, but Drew came up with a lot of great chord progressions so we thought we should go with it and see what happened, and that left a lot of room for solos and improvisation.

More Composing

Especially on tracks 1 – 5, we pretty much had the songs written and rehearsed before actually performing and recording them. Definitely different than the last, where I think we had one, maybe two songs written before we performed them, but again it presented some very fresh and exciting ideas.

So there you have it… A New Dimension – A new dimension full of new ideas, new directions, and new possibilities.