As I sit in a hotel room somewhere between Fredericksburg, VA and Washington, DC I managed to mix one song. That’s it for today. There are still two more to go and I could probably squeeze one more in but I’m really tired and I want to watch Starfleet Academy before I conk out.
I was expecting to hate this song. I am scraping the bottom of the barrel now and I thought this would be unbearably awful. It’s better than I expected though. Let’s say it is bearably awful.
The RPM Challenge asks for 10 songs or 35 minutes of music. FAWM asks for 14 songs.
With two songs mixed tonight while sitting in a hotel room near Knoxville, Tennessee I am up to 13 songs finished with three more still left to mix and three days left to finish. I think we’re going to have another success this year, don’t you?
Today was the day I had scheduled for the big mixing push. My wife and I are on an epic road trip, the basis for which is her job. She had to work today and I was planning to spend the day sitting in a hotel room with my MacBook mixing songs in GarageBand.
It didn’t come out quite as planned as her meeting ended at 1:00pm and not 5:00pm and as soon as she was free we hit the road to Tennessee and Arkansas. I did, however, manage to mix six songs today. Speed mixing is not conducive to great music, but it gets the job done for me.
I was going to post all six songs but that would be silly so here’s one…
What the hell, here’s another one too…
The epic road trip took us from Louisville, KY to Nashville, TN and back. My gastric bypass disagreed with lunch and I puked on the side of the highway, route 65 North, somewhere in Kentucky.
I had also hoped to mix three songs but I am exhausted and only managed two. I’m going to bed now even though it’s still laughably early. I’m so old it’s like a joke, man.
I woke up this morning in Syracuse, NY and now I am about to go to sleep in Louisville, KY. After about 11 hours driving I have reduced myself to mush, mentally speaking.
I managed to mix a couple of songs though. Three down, 13 to go.
Today is the 21st. I didn’t get a chance to give a summary of yesterday’s progress and now it’s bed time and I guess I’ll just summarize yesterday and today at the same time.
I finished all of the lyrics, all of the vocal tracking, and all of the lead guitars. My wife and I left on our week long road trip a day early but I managed to get everything recorded. Most of my guitar playing sucks, all of my singing sucks, and the songwriting in general sucks, but all of the tracking is done and now I can get down to mixing all 16 songs.
One down, 15 to go….
The original RPM Challenge website had a blog section. That was where I started these goofy daily update posts. When it went away I moved those posts to a tumblr account and then after a while to this page. It’s silly. I don’t get anything out of this and it makes zero sense to anyone else on the planet Earth..
But here I am posting them. Sorry, Earth.
The difficulty with these stupid posts is that when I have a couple of productive days in a row I lose track of what I did on each day. I’m in that boat right now. Day 19 was yesterday. What did I do yesterday?
I started the day by blowing off my daily exercise routine and playing guitar. I put leads on four songs. When I was done, my un-callused fingertips and I were in huge pain but we managed to drive in to work for the day. After work the only project work I had queued up was writing lyrics and melodies. I made it through three songs before I ran out of mental gas. Those three songs plus two that I had written out the day before set me up for some car music on day 20. You’ll get that write up tomorrow. Be patient.
At the end of day 19 I had 16 songs in progress. Eight were ready to mix, five were ready for vocals, and three were still waiting on lyrics. We are traveling from the 22nd to the 28th so I am quickly running out of time to finish tracking everything. I will mix the recordings while traveling (I hope). Reminder, the RPM Challenge requires either 10 songs or 35 minutes of music for success. The other February songwriting challenge, FAWM, requires 14 songs. RPM is looking good. FAWM is looking good too but maybe not quite as good. I’m dedicated to success though so we’ll see how it goes.
Over the last 3-4 years I have become a weird sort of creature of routine. I have an agenda set for early each morning and any time I stray from or vary that agenda it makes my teeth ache and it sets me on edge for the whole day.
Yesterday (day 18) I nuked the whole damn thing in the name of the RPM Challenge (and I did the same thing today, day 19). Instead of drinking a water bottle->taking my morning vitamins->doing my daily exercise->eating breakfast I drank a water bottle->took my morning vitamins->recorded rhythm guitars until my fingers hurt too much to play anymore.
I had five songs ready for rhythm guitars… the last five songs for the month… unless I do something stupid like add more, which if I do I will punch myself square in the nose for being such an idiot… and I tracked ’em. As of about 8:00am yesterday, all of the rhythm guitar parts for this year’s album were complete. The ready-for-rhythm-guitars bucket on my trello board is empty.
Of course that doesn’t help me at all if I can’t get lyrics and melodies written and vocals recorded and lead guitars recorded before we leave for our epic road trip on Sunday. There were eight songs in the ready-for-lyrics bucket on said trello board at that time. After work I managed to get through two of those eight songs. They are now in the ready-for-vocals bucket. Hopefully they will be joined by a few more songs tonight and then I will do a car music tomorrow to track some vocals. Then, hopefully, I will write lyrics for the remaining songs after that and then do another, final, car music vocal tracking session on Saturday morning. Then I will hopefully crank out lead guitars for all of them before going to bed on Saturday and oh my shit have I dug a deep hole for myself this year.
After 15 days I was starting to feel optimistic again. Then yesterday, day 17, happened and now I am in full blown panic mode again.
I did exactly one thing on day 17 and all it did was make things more difficult. Instead of writing lyrics or recording guitars I just added a new song idea. Song number 16, to be exact. A completely unnecessary move that just gave me more work to do and one less day to get it all done.
Crud.
As a preview for tomorrow’s summary post, I destroyed my morning routine today in order to have more time to record and I have had some success. I still have a mountain of work to do today and tomorrow is another day in the office that won’t have any time to record before work. Friday and Saturday are going to be the last chance to get any recording done before we start traveling on Sunday.
Again I say, crud. What a dumb ass.
Day 16 started out with a bang but then fizzled toward the end. I got a lot done, just not what I was hoping for.
I started the day with some car music. I drove to an empty parking lot and recorded some terrible singing. Four songs worth. That brings me to eight songs with finished vocal tracks. I made a rough estimate of the running time for those eight songs and it comes up a few minutes short of the 35 minute goal for the month. I’ll have to knock out at least one more song to achieve the bare minimum of success. That’s okay.
After work I wanted to write some more melodies and lyrics. I had three songs that were ready for it. I didn’t get to any of them though. Instead I came up with song forms for the last three songs. They are all ready for rhythm guitars now. I am not sure when I will be able to record them though. I was hoping for more car music tomorrow but maybe I should focus on guitars instead and then do a big push on Friday and Saturday. Maybe that’s the way to go. It will give me more time to write terrible lyrics.
In the spirit of stupidity I was having trouble falling asleep last night so I took out my iPad and added another song. 15 just sounds better than 14, doesn’t it? Spoiler alert, this morning before work (today is day 17) I added a 16th song because I’m dumb.
I’m traveling next week so I have to have all of the tracking done before we leave. There isn’t much time left for this stuff. We’ll see what I can piece together.
Inside the Red Head's Head 