Today is a good day. I got a bonus from work today. That’s good. I got my tax documents from work too. By the time this posts my taxes might even already be filed because my wife is amazing. That’s also good. I just spent my lunch break working on a time sensitive issue and I figured it out with a minimum of stress. That’s good too.
The RPM Challenge starts in less than nine hours. That’s good, but I highly doubt I’ll be awake at midnight to celebrate. We have a gig tomorrow night. That’s good as well. I’m not nearly as stressed as I was for the last gig and that is doubly good.
There are some things that royally suck but I am not letting them bring me down. The triumph of authoritarianism over democracy is progressing in the US Senate right now as the republican party makes a farce out of the constitutionally mandated impeachment process. That royally sucks. I am beginning to think that secession is a viable option. Brexit takes place today. Midnight Brussels time, 11:00PM London time, That’s 6:00PM Boston time, I think. That royally sucks too.
I’m weighing the good against the incredibly bad and choosing to ignore the fact that, in the grand scheme of things, the bad is infinitely more important than the good. Today I am deciding that the good will outweigh the bad even though that is amazingly, shockingly naive. Screw it, I’m going to Disney in a couple of weeks.
For now though, I have to start planning my packing for the gig tomorrow. I need my Les Paul and my SG, my Bassbreaker 18/30 and my Vox MV50 with the 12″ cab, my full pedal board, the handful of new cables I bought (bright orange so you can see them from space), a couple of backup pedals (looking at you, Keeley D&M Drive) and power cables for each one, the microphones, stands, and cables I took home from the rehearsal room recently, the little pick/slide holding microphone stand attachment, and a new glass slide. Then I’ll go to Mike’s house and get the rest of the mics, stands, and cables, my gig bag with all my emergency stuff in it, and the little stand I sit my amp on when we play. Oh yeah, and I have to change the strings on both guitars! Can’t forget about that!
Sunday after the gig I’ll put the amp and the pedal board (and the associated cables) back into my room where they currently sit (see the pic from last night), Setup a mic, stand, and cable on that amp and on the Bassbreaker 15 that is not leaving my room for the gig, then plug those into the 16 channel USB interface that I also took home from the rehearsal room recently. I will plug the USB cable into my MacBook and make sure I can get both mic signals into GarageBand. Once that’s done, I’ll be ready to record guitar parts in stereo. When I record the acoustic guitar or a vocal or a saxophone I can just swing up one of the mic’s that will be on a guitar speaker and use that. I also dug out my little acoustic guitar pickup that I got a few years ago and still haven’t taken out of the package. I can use that to record as well. I’ll keep the laptop and my iPad and my iPhone good and charged so if an idea comes to me I can play it into one version of GarageBand or another. Once that’s all taken care of I just have to… you know… write a shit load of songs. Yikes.
This year is a leap year so we get a whole extra day for the RPM shenanigans. So really it’s no problem at all this year.
Yikes indeed!
But it’s still a good day.
Inside the Red Head's Head 