It’s time for another RPM Challenge progress report.  This one covers days five through 11…

Day Five

Two new songs sketched out.  Just music, no lyrics.  I’m up to 11 songs in progress now but somehow I’m starting to feel like I’m falling behind.  The lack of lyrics is already starting to weigh me down.

Day Six

Wrapping up day six.  I added all of the rhythm guitar parts to two songs.  No new ideas, no lyrics, no melodies, no vocals.  Better than nothing though.  One song has a lot of wah-wah, so there’s that, right?

Day Seven

I’m calling it a night a little early tonight.  I’m really tired, but I managed to get some real work done today.  I wrote lyrics and melody for three songs, and then recorded the vocals and added the lead guitars for all three songs.

The lyrics are crap, the melodies are cheap, the vocals are atrocious, and everything is as it always is.

As for the lead guitars… Back in December I decided to restrict myself to just three pedals.  A wah, a phaser, and a low gain overdrive.  No fuzz, no heavy dirt.  I wanted to do something different.  Well for rhythm guitars it sounds cool.  For leads I thought I would crank my amp and then push the gain with the overdrive pedal.  A good plan, but not very practical when people are home.  The result is I turned the gain on the pedal all the way up and went with that… and it’s not enough.  I need more gain to feel comfortable when I play leads.  I’m going to have to either add a fuzz pedal or redo the leads I recorded tonight at a time when I can let the tubes in the amp give me the gain I need.  I can live with this for now and if I don’t get a chance to fix it I will survive… we’ll see.

Day Eight

I was going to keep working for a while, but my wife is out at a bar with a friend and apparently there is an Elvis impersonator and she is texting me video clips and I just can’t even.

I mixed a song!  Officially one song complete.  At least until I decide to re-record the lead guitar.

Day Nine

I got a crap ton of work done today.

Last night I went to bed a little late and couldn’t sleep.  Around 12:30 AM I gave up and started noodling bass lines in GarageBand on my iPad.  By the time I had fallen asleep I had two songs worth of phrases.

When I woke up I watched the new episode of That Pedal Show on youtube and then started messing with the two new song ideas.  I wanted to expand them out into song full song forms.  When I was done with them I went to Trello.  It told me that I still had four songs in the ideas bucket that also needed to have song forms worked out.  So I took care of all four of them.

When I was done with that I was feeling pretty pleased with my day’s output so I wrote the music for another song.  At that point I had to run some errands and be a functioning adult.  Oh well.  Eventually I got home and could get back to music so I recorded the rhythm guitars for two songs.  Now looking at Trello again, I have one song finished, two songs ready to mix, four songs ready for lyrics and vocals, and seven songs ready for rhythm guitars.  That’s 14 songs in total.  Not bad for Day Nine.

I normally combine the RPM Challenge and FAWM, so 14 songs is my goal.  This year though I screwed things up for FAWM by using some riffs and changes and rough ideas that were worked out prior to February 1st.  As of now only eight of the 14 songs are FAWM worthy.  I had planned on skipping FAWM all together this year, but hey… I’m more than halfway there.  Maybe this year I make a double RPM album and finish FAWM while I’m at it.

Clearly I have reached the massively overconfident phase of the month.  I’m enjoying it while it lasts.  Eventually the panic will take over, as it always does.

Day 10

Just finished a mix.  I don’t know if I like it or not.  I’m kind of on the fence for the whole song.  Sometimes I really dig it, sometimes… eh?

It’s in 7/8 time and it overuses the hell out of the wah pedal, so it ticks the major boxes for me.

My absolute favorite part of this song comes at 0:30, bar 19.  It’s just a D major 7 chord and it just really makes me happy.

Day 11

Today I recorded rhythm guitars for two songs.  After yesterday’s full output being one mix down, I feel like the pace has fallen off a cliff.

Two songs mixed
One song ready to mix
Six songs ready for vocals and lyrics
Five songs ready for rhythm guitars

The plan for tomorrow is to take on those five rhythm guitar parts.  If all goes according to plan, Wednesday will be vocals day and hopefully I will be able to get through all 11 remaining songs.  Thursday is up in the air, and it’s the last day of my mini-vacation/Six day weekend.

I’d still like to add some more songs if I can.  The goal is a 20 song double album.

I took a night off from recording to have a band practice. It was our first in something like three weeks and somehow we weren’t terrible.

Oh the bliss.

Two songs down, some arbitrary number greater than or equal to eight to go.

7/8 time, lots of wah-wah pedal, and a really “classy” Dmaj7 in the 19th measure.

I mixed a song tonight!  I still might re-do the lead guitar, but for now it’s one down and at least nine to go.

I recorded some vocals before work this morning. Three songs worth of suck. Then after work I recorded some lead guitars. Three songs worth of suck again.

I vowed to only use one low gain overdrive pedal but now that I’m knee deep in things I don’t know if that is going to be enough. I might have to collude with the Russians like a fascist named Trump.

I added rhythm guitars to two songs tonight.  One of them is okay, the other is sloppy.  You can clearly hear the punch ins.  I hope I don’t have to do it again.

Usually when February comes around and I start making a buffoon of myself with the whole RPM Challenge thing, I write a blog entry to sum up each day’s progress.  I wasn’t going to do that this year.  I don’t know why, I just said no.  Then when February hit I found myself posting daily updates on the RPM Challenge website itself.  Now that we’re five days in I feel like my real blog is jealous so I’ve decided that every few days I’m going to copy the RPM blogs here as well.  I’m also thinking that it’s time for a new theme, but that’s irrelevant to this post.  Anyway, here are the first four RPM updates.  Very short and not very sweet:

Day One

Two songs underway. One is a bass and drums groove in 7/8 that I came up with tonight. The other includes a guitar riff that was in my idea backlog that I’ve been building up for the last couple of weeks.

We are underway!

Day Two

Started three more pieces today.  One new one and two with riffs from the January riff storage file.  That makes five so far.  Not bad for day two.  I would really like to put some guitars down on some of these songs tomorrow, but it’s going to be a busy day.  Fingers crossed.

Day Three

I’ve done enough work this weekend that I have to check the Trello board in order to make an update.

I added two more songs to the idea list.  Fleshed out a full song form on two songs, and recorded rhythm guitars for two songs.

The musical theme this year is starting to lean toward a common one for me.  Over-using the wah pedal.

Back to work tomorrow.  I’ve been really busy over the last month.  I’m a little nervous that I will be lacking energy when I get home and won’t be able to get any RPM work done.  We’ll see.

Day Four

February 4th: My step son’s 16th birthday.  My nephew’s 8th birthday.  The day I recorded rhythm guitars for one song and started messing with ideas for two more.  The day I recorded my amplifier’s tremolo for the first time.  It was only two beats, but it’s there.

Not a bad day.  I would have liked a little more, but this isn’t bad.

For the first time ever I recorded the sound of my Fender Deluxe Reverb’s tremolo! It was on for a grand total of two beats, but it’s on the recording!