I’m in typical post-February mode.  Now that RPM is over, what do I do to carry on the momentum?  I guess I’ll do the same as most years.  I don’t have any unfinished songs, but I do have a pile of little music memo files from January.  There is also the reddit Song a Week thing that I messed around with a little last year.  There is also that re-recording project thing I’ve been trying to do since 2015.  I started picking off a couple of things today.  I put some guitars down on one of the leftover idea things, and I wrote something new for Song a Week.  I’m temporarily restricting myself to my Vox MV50 amp and my Keeley Super Phat Mod overdrive pedal.  I used the Les Paul tonight, but I’ll likely swap between that and the SG.

We’ll see how long this goes.

Practicing at home….

Practicing with the band….

I put the pedals I bought for RPM onto the little pedal board today. The new Tumnus in place of the Tube Screamer and the new Phase 95 in place of the Vintage Phase. I also put the Tri Pi 70 back on in place of the Super Phat Mod. That means I have two Wren and Cuff Big Muff clones on the board. Just sit back and try to imagine the joyous noise I can make with this set up. Bliss.

I worked out a sequence for each of the two completed RPM Challenge projects this morning before work.  I uploaded them to the site and marked myself as finished… and then the website went down and hasn’t come back.  Yikes!  Bad timing there.  Either that, or so many people trying to finish at the same time that the site couldn’t handle it.

I haven’t uploaded anything to Bandcamp.com yet, but I have Alonetone.com and Soundcloud.com all wrapped up.

So now that February is over… what am I gonna do for March?

 

They look cold.

I just finished mixing the last song.  20 songs.  Two 10 song albums.  One is all New England ghost stories and it clocks in at 33:20.  the others 10 non-ghost stories and it clocks in at 29:58.  Both are a little on the short side for my taste, and it would be nice to add another song or two to each one, but tomorrow is the deadline and I am as done as done can be.  My brain is toast.

Tomorrow I need to sequence the two albums and then upload them to the RPM Challenge website.  They don’t actually take multiple submissions so I will upload them both under one title and one cover art, but put them onto alonetone and bandcamp as two separate albums.

Here’s the last song I worked on.  I finished it about half an hour ago.

Only two days left for the RPM Challenge.  How am I doing?

As of 8:00 this evening, all of the tracking is done.  All I have left to do is mix five songs.  15 songs are complete.  After three or four years of trying it looks like I could finally finish the month with a double album.  Half of the songs are based on ghost stories.  The other half… aren’t.  So maybe it’s more accurate to call it two albums instead of one double album.

Who cares, I’m almost done!  Welcome to the home stretch, kiddos!

Oh, and did I mention my step son got his drivers license today?  I can’t wait to send him off to a convenience store to buy chocolate at 1:00am or so!  WOOHOO!  Congratulations, dude!  You did it!

That felt like a productive hour and 45 minutes or so.