I was just wondering, with the release of Steve Vai's naked tracks, would some of dev's songs bring a different light if the vox were taken and lead guitar solos stripped off (Not that there is a lot to begin with). If you ask me, it could work but only with a few songs. I feel that for it work, then whatever leads your jamming around with has to be revolved around some melody line, like a catchy verse feeling. Then the wacky solos could arrive. I know doing some slow slide leads in Nobody's Here sounds enlightening enough to me. So far I'm thinking stuff like:

-Away
-Terminal
-Winter
-Bend it like Bender
-Nobody's Here
-Tiny Tears
-Gaia
-Irish Maiden
-Christeen
-Deadhead

But then again, I'm also thinking that taking the vox would be like taking the steering wheel off the car. His vocals seem to be a poweful and intergral part of his emotive music especially on the produciton side of the music. I'm just curious to hear other thoughts.

I believe Devin's vocals are as much a part of his music as his guitar playing is. I do believe it would be cool to get ahold of the session tracks (like Trent did with the NIN stuff) of each individual instrument/vocal track to mess around with in Logic/ProTools. That said, Devin uses a ridiculous amount of tracks for each song, I would imagine that a single song would take up a massive amount of disk space Would still be a cool idea though!

He could do the same as Trent did and just combine some of the more ridiculously complicated parts into single files. For instance, there is no way Dev would need to give us each individual vocal overdub. He could combine twenty odd vocal layers into a Backing Vocals file and all two/three/four lead vocals into a Lead Vocals file.

Same goes with guitars. No need to give left and right panned guitars separately if they're playing the same parts. So when you reduce everything it would still be a large track count but nowhere near as many files as you would need to have every separate channel.

This idea would be pretty cool but I'd rather hear the arrangements be tweaked specifically for this sort of release rather than have him just mute the guitar and vocals and render what's left. But then, if Dev ever did something like this he would undoubtedly spend a bit of time making sure it worked well.

I wouldn't be so down with hearing full-on songey songs in this manner (Bend it Like Bender, for instance) but would be really down with hearing the more drifting, atmospheric tracks like Nobody's Here and Away put into this context.