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negative tendencies
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2/28/2026 7:54:43 AM
Neg Ten collabs with Larree, does this live up to the hype?
We needed a real sitar player and I just happened to know one!
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Contemplating Waves
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2/28/2026 8:11:36 AM
Russ and I had a blast playing on this cooler-than-cool tune! Thank you, Scott, Weap, and Dave, for thinking about us and inviting us to participate on this classic!
We hope everyone digs it!
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Bryon Tosoff
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2/28/2026 10:55:22 AM
Tripping Cool great psychedelic vibe , superb instrumentation and tremendous production, Ft writes great songs and his band kills it , dig that sitar its a sitar star Larree the sitarist , great job NegTen
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Contemplating Waves
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2/28/2026 12:38:46 PM
Thank you, Bryon! Russ and I are very happy with the final mix and the video. It is totally rockin'! NegTen RULES!
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Social Spit
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2/28/2026 3:24:38 PM
Larree I was impressed with how you played along with my drony guitar part, you captured the melody and reproduced it on the sitar. That drone thing is something that I’ve done ever since I first picked up a guitar.
I was telling Scott one of the first bands I was ever in, the bass player had a beautiful sitar. He would let me play it sometimes, I could never get the hang of the weird pick but it affected my guitar playing from that moment on, I’ve always wanted to try to emulate the sound I was able to get. But I can’t exactly emulate the string bends that you can do on a sitar! You have mastered that.
Also, you did more than just add the sitar, what else did you guys do? I can hear a couple of things, but you took the ending and built on it. That was amazing.
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Larree
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2/28/2026 3:43:32 PM
---- Updated 2/28/2026 3:44:52 PM
Give Russ a lot of credit for that. He added to the sitar part by playing his Line-6 guitar with the sitar setting, and also added the acoustic guitar. So the part that was doubling your part was Russ! We had so much fun with this. And we both love the final mix. A spectacular job!
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Mike Lance
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2/28/2026 6:24:24 PM
That was pretty cool. A bit of a modern Norweigian Wood. I like the fluid story telling, and yeah the arrangements are fantastic. The synths and sitar weave a mesmerizing sonic tapestry.
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Psyche's Muse
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3/1/2026 2:04:42 AM
Dang! That's a lot of cool instrumentation going on there. Very nicely done!
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Social Spit
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3/1/2026 6:02:50 AM
Ok so you were doing the sitar parts during the verse parts.
It all sounds like one instrument. It’s brilliant. Hes got a Variax or is it something else?
My friend Steve Morgan who played bass for me when I was 15 was the one who had a sitar, he was quite serious about it. We tried incorporating it into songs, but he’d have to assume full lotus position within seconds! Because that’s how he learned to play it. I never recorded our songs when he played it, I had a crummy little cassette recorder. I MAY still have a tape.
He showed me some of his Sitar music, the songs were 3 measures long, but each measure has hundreds of beats. It took him a while to be able to improvise. But he would always sit in his full lotus position playing the thing. I tried to play it a few times but I could not assume full lotus. And these days my knees hurt badly.
Eventually, he released an album for my last band with him “Colour TV”, he played it on one of the songs, i had started that band with him but he took it over when I went on a country wide tour in 1977, they kinda lost the direction. But he was quite crazy, I don’t know if ultimately, I influenced him, but most likely he influenced me. He would always be writing these crazy songs, but then after I left, he tried to become more normal, more pop.
This was almost 50 years ago and I had always regretted never Recording some songs with him playing sitar and 50 years later, that dream is finally fulfilled here on IMP.
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Social Spit
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3/1/2026 6:04:12 AM
Thank you for that, Muse
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Social Spit
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3/1/2026 6:17:10 AM
I was also a little bit concerned because I had to create a mix of everything that I had done along with Scott to provide you something to play along with so I mixed the guitar parts up more loudly than normal just so you could hear what was going on in there. Normally when I’m adding parts, I have all of Scott’s parts to bring up and down as I need when I’m figuring out what the hell to do.
But when I first started playing with this project, Scott would send me a demo mix, and I would play along with that. Some of our first songs were done like that it was not that hard so I figured if I could do it then you could do it ha ha
I could have sent you guys all of the individual parts, but I didn’t know exactly how you were going to do it so I’m glad that the mixes that I sent were sufficient, you really filled in the ending quite well. It even sounds like you extended the length a little bit I had forgotten what I had played at the ending. It was mostly chords.
The only thing that was missing from the mix that I sent, was my short mandolin part right before the ending when you took over that’s a damn mandolin. It’s my new electric mandolin. I was playing it out out of my Jim Dunlop/Slash SW95 Wawa pedal, so it sounds not like a mandolin ha ha ha ha
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jingo
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3/1/2026 7:44:01 AM
That was a trip. Pretty sweet Marvel team up, kinda like empeethree Rushmore lol.
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Richard Scotti
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3/1/2026 8:00:21 AM
---- Updated 3/1/2026 8:14:38 AM
The 60’s called and said: kudos to all involved! This song is a radical product of love, creativity, hard work and dedication to the craft of classic rock music. The fun you all had was reminiscent of the joy that was the essence of how the Beatles created so many original works of art.
Congratulations on another musical milestone!
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Contemplating Waves
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3/1/2026 8:28:47 AM
---- Updated 3/1/2026 8:38:19 AM
lol, yes. The lotus position. That would have taken me about three hours these days! I had to prop it up against... well, it took some ingenuity, lol.
I will ask Russ later if it is a Variax. I am not sure. And the mix you sent was perfect. We just listened on a loop for a bit and started jamming. I had already practiced the lines I wanted to play, and then Russ went into full creative mode. And I am so glad you dug Russ's extended ending. That is a Russ trademark. He likes to add a little something at the end, or sometimes in the beginning, to trip our ears out.
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Contemplating Waves
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3/1/2026 8:31:36 AM
We love all the groovy, cool comments! We humbly thank all of you, and we are so glad we got to contribute to the greatness of this song! Much love to ALL! And much love to NegTen!
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Larree
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3/1/2026 10:42:47 AM
---- Updated 3/1/2026 10:43:27 AM
Weap! Just chatted with Russ. He says it's a Jim Taylor Variax. And he really likes the mandolin part - "a cool idea that fits well with the sitar!" :)
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Social Spit
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3/1/2026 2:08:56 PM
You always add a great element to these conversations, Richard!
Scott collected most of these comments and posted them up. I’ll have to do the same over on Reverbnation, there is a little area where we can add “press” I’ll have to just copy the link to this thread and then add all of the comments that he had collected! Many thanks.
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Social Spit
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3/1/2026 2:40:45 PM
---- Updated 3/1/2026 2:47:13 PM
Larree, I can’t add a picture of (my mandolin) unless I am missing something. Maybe in the future we will be able to do that. There’s probably a way of doing it now, but I don’t know how to use the markup code for IMP.. Scott says improvements are on the way.
OK, here comes another TOME, sorry
This is what I had envisioned the pipeline being good for, I just wanted to explain my methodology here, which is something that goes back to when I was 18 years old, my bedroom at my parents house was my home studio. I had a drum set on one end, a black face Bassman amp plugged into a traynor cabinet on one side, and my black face Fender, super reverb on the other side, underneath my… I don’t know what you would call it. I had taken big square bricks and set them down against the east wall of the room, and I bought long wooden planks about 2‘ x 6‘ and I had about three layers of those and I had my Recording equipment set up on the different shelves. That’s what they are called, shelves. I couldn’t think of it ha ha ha.
I had this big Sony reel to reel that had line inputs as well as microphone inputs. I had just bought these two big fat Shure Dukane microphones, Johnny Rotten microphones, and I had those above the drum set and I think I had some crummy white Peavey microphone (remember those? They were ugly, but they worked) into the kick drum. I also had a sharp cassette deck that also had Mike and line inputs, that you could adjust the levels during recording, which was something you did not see very much so I could record something like an acoustic part onto the reel to reel and then I would play it into the cassette deck while playing the drums. Or I might have done it the other way playing the cassette deck into the reel to reel, and that would have given me a better sound, and then I would just go back and forth, ping-ponging between the real to reel and the cassette deck. If I did not make too many overdubs, it would sound OK.
I would use that technique to do my earliest recordings. I still have those cassettes. I need to put them into my computer, but I am afraid to use my 4 track right now because it stopped working when I was right in the middle of moving songs into my brand new pro tool system (brand new in 2002 or so, I traded a Bose personal PA system for it plus the guy handed me an additional $800 which was great because the Bose PA was priced much more than a pro tool system at that time).
When I moved up to San Francisco, we shared a big practice room with two other bands, and my father brought me a Tascam 244, I immediately started making a little extra money with it recording demos for bands, but I mostly did it for free just to get experience, but sometimes they would give me decent renumeration.
Most of my early work in San Francisco was on that system. It got better after I got an external mixer. I would just mike up the whole band and I would use the various auxiliary and stereo outputs to put the music into my four track. I would end up sticking the instruments on one track each and then I would bounce those all down to one track and then I would start all over again with what I had left, I had these two Fostex studio monitors and they were perfectly flat so, what you heard out of those was exactly like what it sounded like on the recording so it was a good system to do bounces and mixes and to make sure the tracks were well recorded. Scott also had one of those, but he had more experience using drum machines and synthesizers, I used acoustic instruments, real drums, and I would mike up the instruments.
But my original 244 blew up the year that my dad died, I gave it to Some gearhead and I hoped he would be able to fix it, but it was just too broken. The electronics inside of the machine were fried and you have to be an electronics genius to replace what needed to be replaced so until I started doing work for MP3, I had nothing.
When they asked me what I wanted for monitoring the tech bulletin board I told them to get me a new 4 track, but they did not have anything new at Guitar Center. I ended up getting a display model 424 Mark 2. I should have asked for more, but that was all I wanted at the time and then I helped my friend Evan get hired over there and he helped get me fired and he changed my password, nice guy. He vanished immediately after the site went down, I never saw him ever again. He never really cared about the job. He cared about the prestige of having it. He promised people a bunch of stuff couldn’t do it, and then the site was gone.
That place was where we all had a real chance at getting our music, listened to by other people at least, but it was abused by people cheating. That kind of disappointed me, but at least I was able to make a couple of good connections. It was originally a good idea one that I supported, but it just got way too crazy and then we find out that the people with the largest amounts of plays were using computer farms to boost their plays and make money, otherwise do you think a band like “caution tape“ really had that many listeners? They recorded something on a cheap crummy cassette recorder, put it up on the site and then they had about 400 computers. Downloading it every day. I think that made a lot of people angry, and I used to speak to the MP3 techs about it, nobody seemed to want to stop that kind of activity, because they were trying to entice big named acts to join the site and they didn’t want to talk about cheating to get to those people. Who knows. I have both good and very bad memories of the place and, it doesn’t even exist anymore. Look it up. It’s for sale again and again and again and again nobody buys it.
That whole dot com thing got way out of hand, and financially it crashed, it’s not very good today either it’s just where a lot of scammers run POS websites and then they invade your email and get into your home computers.
There are better things to do, musical projects that we can participate in and that is a much better goal and we have this place at least for now where we can share those endeavors and talk about how we did it and in my case, what brought me to this point.
I’ve had my pro Tools machine for about 23 years and I have rebuilt it about 10 times, it’s working great still and I have a replacement sitting here, a Digi 003. But I need to set up a Windows seven computer where I can install ProTools eight because that’s what works the best on those systems. My Digi 001 only works with Pro Tools five or 6.4 LE, and it will not run on any system, but Microsoft Windows XP or some early version of macOS before OSX I think my remaining McIntosh tower that was connected to my machine has macOS 9.2. But when my 001 goes out, I have to figure out how to get this 003 working. Until then it’s just sitting there connected to a Mac Pro that cannot install the version of ProTools that it needs because the operating system system is too high.
Oh Ve what a mess!
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Larree
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3/1/2026 4:45:18 PM
All that early work sure paid off. You got the ears and skills. And a great sense of taste and arrangement. You and Russ have a lot of parallels. Ears, taste, and great skills.
I remember the gaming scandals. That crap overshadowed all the good things about that site. Now it is the site that shall not be named. Coincidentally, I did go to the site about a month ago and saw the for-sale sign, lol. Only a fool would buy that.
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weAponX
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3/1/2026 5:35:31 PM
Maybe we should. So many other entities, companies, people, have purchased it and didn’t do anything with it. I wonder how much it cost? I’m sure we could do something better with it. I wonder if it would be worth it?
I remember you used to post all kinds of recordings of jam sessions maybe even videos you had them all over the place. I put my personal stuff here, and on Reverb nation. I only did that because I ran out of space here.
I need to go through my songs and get rid of a few of them. That way I can put up the same kind of thing, jam sessions from long ago I remember the first time I played slide. I was at a party and we didn’t exactly have a band yet. It was me and the drummer and the bass player that also played sitar, I picked up a long neck, Budweiser beer bottle and I flipped it around and used it as a slide and I found it was easy. I wish I still had that beer bottle. It was just the right shape. I think later on I had the glass cut so I could fit it over my finger.
These days I use a brass one, but I also have one that flips over my finger. I don’t know where it is. I think I saw it underneath my printer ha ha.
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Larree
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3/1/2026 7:24:06 PM
LOL, I've used beer bottles for a slide before! But when I was in high school, I had the best slide. Remember the old Bic lighters? The ones with the flame regulators? I used to break off the regulator completely and play my guitar with a Bic blowtorch!
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Larree
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3/1/2026 9:40:46 PM
I love how the more you listen to a song, the more sounds pop out in the mix.
I just hit a higher level of clarity and transparency of sound. I need to listen again!
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weAponX
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3/2/2026 2:56:38 AM
I do my all of my parts through my Kenwood VR-209 in stereo mode, the 5.1 is kind of worthless on that, need a better amp for my klipsch subwoofer, but I never use surround to listen to music anyway. it’s got massive sidefills with 15” woofers.
When I’m playing back mixes, I use my Samsung HW-A47M soundbar as well as the VR-209, It’s only 4.0 surround so it plays back stereo without coloring the mix by sending parts into the rear speakers. It’s hooked into my TV via light pipe, and I can send the output from my Apple TV 4K into that, or into the Kenwood. By default it sends to the Kenwood, unless I tell it to use Bluetooth, then it goes to the soundbar, which is better for videos. It has a massive sub, most of the wattage goes to that. Some songs (or movies) shake the house.
Those are my main 2 sound systems, I also have a collection of BT speaker towers and I have a Bluetooth Corona “ghetto blaster” (made by the beer company!), and a bunch of other smaller Bluetooth speakers that I can test things out on. I have one large Vivitar Bluetooth tower that is pretty loud and clear and it doesn’t change the output so it’s a good speaker to play songs out of.
But when I am doing serious musical playback, I route the output of my Apple TV into the Kenwood and then I can use AirPlay into the Apple TV. Ironically, they don’t have any music apps available for the Apple TV, except for file explorer, which I can use to playback songs from my home computers that are shared into the app.
The main thing is being able to switch playback devices rapidly, also I copy song files into my workstation so I can play them back directly into the Kenwood and compare to the Bluetooth output because sometimes I just don’t trust Bluetooth. But so far what I hear from AirPlay matches what I hear from files directly on my computer…
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weAponX
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3/2/2026 3:02:17 AM
Ha! I’ve used those Bic Blowtorches as slides before. Also, mic stands, if you have a straight stand. It doesn’t work with boom stands. I will have to remember what other crazy things I have used as slide, drink glasses from a club, half filled with booze. You have to be careful with those.
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The Rhythm Kings
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3/2/2026 6:33:47 AM
Fantastic Musicianship. Trippin'!!! I need a Hit of Acid and a Bong. LOVED IT!
Please make this available for station adss if not already.
Out done yourselves Neg T.!
Best,
Bruce
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Father Time
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3/2/2026 9:09:47 AM
Jonny is the #1 swiss army knife of guitarists in the world. Great bass player too. I recommend everybody check out his solos on our songs, I mean some of them are downright legendary. The one on Year of the Snake is my favorite. Also The Man Who Hugged The Flag. and IYF Obstruction, and check out his bass playing on Have You Never Been Mellow.
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Father Time
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3/2/2026 9:11:57 AM
Wouldn't that end up being the biggest twist if FT owned mp3.com? ha ha ha Hard to imagine since I generally don't have a pot to piss in.
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Father Time
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3/2/2026 9:16:42 AM
Bruce, we uploaded it HERE yesterday.
Thanks everyone for the tremendous response, so greatly appreciated. and thanks Contemplating Waves for adding great legitimacy to our psychedelic aspirations!
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Larree
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3/2/2026 3:35:47 PM
I knew all those doses I took in the last century would pay off someday!
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Social Spit
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3/4/2026 11:05:09 AM
---- Updated 3/4/2026 11:16:04 AM
Have you ever been mellow was probably the most difficult bass I added, and I think I was still using your demo to play against. That was when I was first getting the hang of doing this kind of collaboration. I found it quite refreshing.
I’ve been trying to get Scott to understand something that’s happening across the world right now. There is a song that was done by a band from Zambia in the 1970s and they recently started touring again with new younger musicians and the same singer.
Scott gave me this new song and he sang it quite a bit like this guy would have sung the song that I heard. And the instrumentation is a lot like well. It’s not like me only. It’s also a lot like the way Russ plays and the way Scott plays and the way.Larree plays. Not to mention all of the other things underneath the main body of music that David does for us, there’s somebody adding that into the song for them as well.
Until our new song gets released, you won’t be able to compare the vocals but when we do, I will bring this up again, but I think this is a worldwide phenomenon of musicians and bands, thinking the same way, and making the same kinds of statements and even playing like each other, this only occurs with bands like this which came from a Third World country and they are not part of the American music system, even though they have come to the United States and played live shows. But nobody tells them how to play or what to write songs about. It doesn’t sound like they have producers that say hey throw in this Taylor Swift style vocal over here or we won’t produce the song. This is something that’s happening between individuals that are thinking alike and agreeing, even without meeting. See what you think. Listen to the guitar players and watch all of the little things that are going on underneath and mainly listen to the singers which sound a lot like what we might have done.
I don’t know exactly how to attach YouTube links so I’m going to do this, here we go…
OK, that was an effort to post the link. Let’s see if it works, ha! Well, I messed it up and it would not allow me to correct it. I’m even going to try it again.
Ok nope, I can’t add the link again. The page is spitting out a database error and it won’t allow me to correct it. Sorry I posted the link below. Can somebody delete the response I made to this post here? Just get rid of what I said in between.
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Social Spit
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3/4/2026 11:42:40 AM
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Social Spit
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3/4/2026 12:11:57 PM
Thanks Scott. At least you were able to see what it does hopefully that can get fixed later.
Just remember when posting a link we have only one chance to get it right because we can’t edit it after that
Hopefully this shows how the way that these guys play is so much like the way that we play and that’s the important thing
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Larree
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3/9/2026 7:27:04 PM
I had to run out the door ten minutes ago, but check out the Contemplating Waves page to hear Russ's and my isolated sitar and guitar tracks. Russ did a cool mix of our outro, and I think you will all dig it!
Laterz!
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