Well, we have rehearsed 3 times and it sounds amazing. Un-freaking-real. I stop and close my eyes and it is literally difficult to tell many parts from the original artists. We are doing some Dream Theater (of course), Kansas, Triumph, Steve Vai and Porcupine Tree. We are adding a third Dream Theater song next.

We have a few singers lined up to audition starting next week. Some sound pretty good, so it should be interesting.

In the band, everyone is relaxed, professional, fun with no attitude. The guitarist is astounding. He pulls together Petrucci solos in a week, nails them in a band situation and does it consistently – wow.

So I’m really hopeful, It’s not, strictly speaking, a purely prog project, but it’s prog dominated. We may be adding some Queen, Peter Gabriel, and other artists to our set list. Rehearsals are great because everyone comes prepared, relaxed, no attitude and excited to play.

We jam in the drummer’s finsnished basement which is a multi-room studio. I am currently only using my Trace AH500X head with my 4×10 and 4052h cabs, gigs will be played with my AH250S and 2×15 (both lighter than the 4×10 and AH500X).

I’ve sold my TC Electronic G System. It was just a bad fit for me. I’m going back to he pedalboard type I had before – bass into tuner into Eletro-Harmonix Tri Parallel Mixer – channel A – clean bass; channel B – Darkglass Vintage Ultra V2, Hyper Luminal Compressor and Brimstone Audio XD-2, channel 3 will be my TC Nova System, which has an awesome analog drive and, for my purposes, is way more usable than the bigger, more expensive G-System.

It’s gonna get really cool and fun,