I went a little nuts on day 28.
When I woke up yesterday I looked at my Trello board (the place where I keep track of all of this music stuff) and saw that I had three songs ready to mix, two songs ready for vocals, and one song that was just a couple of bass riffs. It was July 31st. I wondered to myself, could I finish all of these todays and then start August with a clean slate?
Interesting…
First I went to the song that wasn’t a song yet. It was just three eight bar phrases consisting of just a MIDI bass and MIDI drums. The drums weren’t good and needed to be replaced, but we’ll deal with that later. I added a MIDI guitar to act as a guide and then added a little melody to each of the three sections. After that I packed up the laptop and a mic and headed to the movie theater.
Car music. That’s what I call it when I go to the empty movie theater parking lot to record vocals without annoying the hell out of everyone in the house and also without feeling soul crushing embarrassment over my lack of singing skill. I added the vocals tracks to the two songs that were ready. Then I wrote lyrics to fit the melodies for the thing I’d noodled out earlier and recorded those vocals as well. At that point every song still in progress had vocal tracks.
When I got home I took the un-structured thingie and worked out a song form and redid all of the MIDI drums. It was now ready for rhythm guitars. The other two songs were ready for lead guitars. I then went down cellar to my music nook and plugged in my Les Paul Custom and added the rhythm tracks. Since the vocals were already done I was able to then immediately add the leads too. Next I put the leads onto the other two songs from the car music experience and at that point it brought me up to six songs ready to mix. Look at me being all out of control and shit.
I next went upstairs to the comfy chair in my bedroom, put on a good pair of headphones and started mixing. It took hours, but I managed to crank out all six songs. Done. So as July came to an end I had 21 songs and they were all finished. There is nothing in progress right now. 21 songs in 28 days. How the hell did that happen?
So now that July is over and the 50 songs in 90 days challenge moves on to month two, what do I do next? I’m thinking about this. Write and record an album in one day? I’ve done that once. I came up with one half decent song and 5-6 utterly forgettable pieces of crap that I never thought about again. I promise I am not going to do 24 hours without sleep. I’m 55 years old. My days of all nighters are over. I’m thinking about starting at around 3-4:00pm today and seeing if I can get 20-30 minutes of new stuff to the point where it is all ready for vocals. Then wake up early tomorrow morning and go do some car music, then spend the rest of the morning finishing the tracking and doing quick and dirty mixes. That could be fun.
We’ll see how it goes.
Inside the Red Head's Head 