That was rough.

Day nine started out okay. I got up early, did my morning exercise, had breakfast, picked up my Les Paul Custom and opened up a GarageBand file on my laptop and…

Nothing.

Equipment issues up the wazoo. It’s my fault for not taking the time over the last couple of weeks to line check everything and make sure my setup from last year, which is still in place in my cellar music nook, was still in working order. I ended up tracking the issues to a bad cable and maybe a dead pedal. I had signal getting into the laptop at first but it sounded like shit. I recorded a few things and will probably keep them, but as soon as I stepped on a pedal it all went to hell. In troubleshooting I eventually plugged directly into an amp and that was how I narrowed it down to the cable. When I swapped out the bad cable I was okay with my direct to the amp situation so I ran with it and finished the song I was working on.

I had hoped to get through two or three songs worth of rhythm guitar tracks and I barely survived one.

I felt pretty useless overall so I made myself do a couple of additional things. During my lunch break I added another song. Bass and drums and song form are all set. That was song idea number 11. Before I went to bed I added another one. Again, bass, drums, and form. That brings me up to 12.

Today is day 10 and I am so far behind my usual pace that I am already starting to panic. I did sneak in some more guitar today and the only issues I had were due to me being a bad guitar player who is super rusty. It was all on me, not the gear. I can live with that.

More to come tomorrow.

I am way behind on these stupid posts and I am way behind on the project as a whole.

Crap.

Day six I added one new song idea. Just bass riffs with drums, no arrangement or anything. Day seven… Day eight I took four of the unarranged riff collections and worked out the song form. Still just bass and drums, but they are ready for guitars.

In a preview of day nine, I recorded one song worth of guitars and it sucked. I had a cable die and a pedal die and great big gobs of noise coming out of my amp sim pedal (possibly due to the dying cable and pedal). I had to swap out the entire rig halfway through. I was hoping to crank out two or three songs and I barely got through one.

Crap.

Today is February 6th but I need to sum up my progress from February 5th. It should be easy except that I have already done some work on the 6th that I can’t rightfully include on the write up of the 5th. Why do I do this to myself? Why do I care?

Q: What difference does it make?
A: It doesn’t make any difference at all.

Given that stupid preamble, what did I do on day 5? Well I worked in the office, spent an eternity in traffic, spent hours and hours and hours in meetings, and went to bed early.

I also added the start of two new song ideas. Just MIDI bass and drums and just a few eight bar bass riffs. They should eventually evolve into songs number eight and nine. The RPM Challenge wants 10 songs or 35 minutes. FAWM wants 14 songs. As always, I want both.

I might have a few minutes worth of time to spend recording guitars in the morning tomorrow. Possibly through an obnoxiously loud amplifier. No promises, but things could work out that way. I have to start tracking actual musical instruments soon or all of this MIDI crap will be for not.

So that’s the deal for day five. I’ve done a little work already on day six. Day seven could be something big… maybe. Probably not, but maybe. We’ll see.

I do these silly little recap posts one day after the fact. As I write this it is day five but I’m writing about day four. Not confusing at all, right? Not to mention pointless, but what can you do, right?

Day four was insanely busy at work. Also insanely frustrating. It’s a miracle I accomplished anything other than screaming into the void and pulling out fist fulls of my own hair.

I did accomplish a couple of things though. After work I sat in the living room with my laptop and worked a simple MIDI bass line in 7/8 time into a song form that runs for almost six minutes. I’ll betcha a buck that when the song is finished and I have a listenable demo recorded it’s going to be as boring as shit but I’m not worried about that today. That’s a problem for March, not February. Later, before I went to bed, I noodled out a couple of little bass things on my iPad. No song form for that one yet.

That brings the grand total of song ideas up to seven. Three have a song form, four do not. No actual real live instruments have been recorded yet. All I have at this point are MIDI bass and drum parts. I expect that day five’s update tomorrow will be similar.

Also, I just gave myself a paper cut on my left thumb and it hurts like a mutha. Moron.

Progress was made on day three. I added one song (number five). This officially became the first song to have the song form worked out. I also took another song (number three, the one in 9/8 time) and worked out the song form for that too. I had a thought that on day four (which turns out to be today) I would track some guitars and I needed to have a couple of songs ready.

Spoiler alert for tomorrow, I did not play guitar. Sorry.

Day three is done and documented. Day four is underway but I spent the whole work day in meetings and it was brutal. I need a nap.

My arm feels so much better today. 90% better. Maybe even 95% better. I think I’m going to be okay to play the guitar again. Assuming we don’t get more snow in the immediate future and I screw myself up again. We’ll see.

I added three songs worth of bass riffs and drum parts yesterday. It’s all just MIDI at this point and there are no arrangements or song forms or anything. Just riffs. Nothing to write home about yet. I’m up to four total. All four are in different time signatures (4/4, 7/8, 9/8, 3/4) and I’ve only repeated a key signature once (A minor, B minor, and two in E minor… I’m totally a guitar player).

I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the songs will be on the really long side this year, but I almost always have that suspicion and they generally barely hit three minutes. We’ll have to see how things play out. I also want to follow a similar plan as last year’s RPM Challenge where I played more acoustic guitar than usual, and I played a little saxophone. I’d like to do those two things again, but given my time constraints this year (and the fact that there are more people living in the house this year) I might just stick to electric guitar and headphone amps.

As far as lyrics go… I haven’t written anything yet but it’s safe to say that a running theme might be something like fuck fascists. You know… the usual.

So that’s where we stand after two days. Hopefully I’ll be able to carve out some time to make a little progress today on day three.

So I have this arm injury thing right now. I think it’s going to be okay. I am way better today than yesterday, and yesterday was better than the day before. I just haven’t been able to play guitar at all because I haven’t been able to move my arm. I think that by the time the RPM Challenge will require me to record guitar tracks I will be well enough to get by, but the idea of this whole thing crashing and burning before I even start is a real thing.

On top of the injury, I am traveling for the entire last week of February. That means that all of my tracking needs to be done before I leave home on February 22nd. I can make time for mixing while I’m on the road, but not for recording. This year’s project is under a serious time crunch. I don’t think a double album is in the cards this time around. I think I might just get to 10 songs or 35 minutes (the minimum requirements for success) and stop. We’ll have to see.

Day one was yesterday and I noodled out some MIDI bass and drums for one song idea. I have a weird sort of theme in mind as far as song forms and arrangements go. Nothing stylistically or lyrically or anything like that. Just an idea of how I want verses and choruses to be related. This first song idea fits that theme. Other than that, nothing to report on day one.

Let’s hope my left arm starts playing along soon. I don’t want to break my streak of success. I’ve pulled this off every year since 2012 and I really don’t want to stop now.