Okay, I’ve got the guitar rig for the summer in place. Welcome back to my sweet little 15 watt Fender Bassbreaker.
Dusting faux tweed is hard.
Just add a shiny new Les Paul and we are on our way.
Addendum: My iPhone autocorrected “on our” to “In-N-Out”. WTF, I ask you. W. T. F?
I signed up for this year’s 50/90 today. We’ll see how long it takes before I burn out on it. Initial plans are to swap out the Vox amp for one of the Fenders and to keep using the same 3-4 pedals I’ve been using over the last few months. I will start the first day (Sunday the 4th) at my parents’ house. I won’t have much to do outside of Nana Sitting duties so maybe I can get a good jump on things. I have a Trello board setup, but we only get five freebies now so I will probably delete it when I’m done. Whatever. I used to have a Tumblr account that I used for daily check ins on recording projects. I might do that again too. Anything to manufacture some phony BS motivation.
I am up to date on Loki now. Episode four was totally worth the wait. I will be up to date on The Bad Batch in about six minutes when the episode I am watching right now ends. Disney+, I am keeping up with your mad pace.
What else is going on? Right now? Not much. It’s Friday and this weekend is a three day weekend. Glorious. Quitting time is in about nine hours. I can make it that far. Just hold on, fat boy. You can make it that far.
My lunch break is ending and I haven’t thought of anything to talk about.
It’s hot. There’s that. It’s not as hot as it is out Oregon way and the Pacific Northwest, but it’s hot. It’s 94 degrees here in Tewksbury, MA right now. We might get another degree or so, but it’s about as hot as it’s going to get today. The heat index, whatever that is, says it could feel about 10 degrees hotter than it is. The forecast for Portland, OR calls for afternoon temps around 113. It’s still June. Summer isn’t even 10 days old and already Portland is looking at 113 degrees. Nothing to see here. Please disburse. Nothing to see here.
I just took out the trash and the recycling. We have security alarms on the doors because my mother went wandering at the crack of dawn recently and snuck out silently enough that she didn’t wake anyone. So now the doors make noise when we open them. At night they make tremendous noise a la a rock band in a stadium volume level noise. I took four trips to bring everything out and didn’t want to keep setting off the quieter, daytime noise so I just left the door open… and now there’s a fly in here with me. Sonofabitch.
Hold it a second, I have to give mother her 2:00 pills. Be right back………
Okay, I am back. It’s 2:00 so I have to get back to work. I was trying to think of what to write about and didn’t come up with much. Here were the rejected topics, all of which might come up again later. Should I call Mike the Bass Player and ask if he’s going to be around this weekend so that I can pick up my amp and my little pedal board, both of which have been in his cellar waiting for a band practice since the first day of February 2020? Should I finally shut up about it and bring that guitar and that amp over to Guitar Center in Nashua and trade them in? On Saturday, maybe? Should I try again to make an eye doctor’s appointment for this weekend? We tried last weekend and their online appointment scheduler was down. Ugh.
Okay. Back to work, you. You have code to patch!
50/90 starts next weekend so I probably shouldn’t be using up new song ideas now. Oh well.
Written on Saturday, recorded on Saturday and Sunday, and mixed before work on Monday. Not a bad little weekend tune.
I think I already wrote a bit about this. The first song I worked on this month was based on a guitar riff I came up with back in May. On the day I recorded the vocals I started work on another song and, accidentally and totally without realizing it, used almost exactly the same guitar riff. It was slower by quite a bit, but for the most part it was the same thing.
Oops.
Now the question is, which song is better? Here’s Part One:
Now here is Part Two:
I am leaning toward part two, but that might just be because I’ve been listening to it all day.
I did vocals for two songs first thing this morning, and now I put leads on those songs too. Tracking is done for both. I’m trying to make myself love the Blues Breaker clone pedal. I used it as a boost yesterday and as a light drive pushing a huge Klon Klone boost today. I like it. It’s just not… I don’t know. It’s not love. It makes me sad, though why? It’s just a friggin’ guitar pedal, right? Stupid red head.
The 50/90 challenge starts in about a week. It’s probably not the best idea to try and force out a song this close to the starting point. A song that had it waited a week would have been one of the (hopefully) 50 but now cannot be. You know.
Maybe a little patience is warranted on the musical front right now?
Screw that, I need this.
I took out my new guitar again and told myself that the first thing I play is going to be worked into a song. Welp, here we are a little while later and there aren’t any lyrics and there isn’t a melody, but the song structure is there and the rhythm guitars, bass, and drum parts are all down.
Good boy.
I need to come up with lyrics for this one and the one from the other day so that I can do some car music in the morning. Tomorrow is my last chance this month… I think. Schedules are screwy, you know?
Want some unrelated good news?
Harry’s paying us a visit tonight. WOOHOO! Harry time!
I think I had a little too much caffeine this afternoon. It’s late but I’m not really tired at all. The Vegas Knights and Montreal Canadiens are going to overtime in game six. Vegas has to win. Vegas. Must. Win.
So in my non-sleepiness I mixed a song. The Record Every Month Challenge thingie will have an entry from me for June.
Note how the link to the song is a link and not a little embedded audio player. Why is that? Well, kids, I found out the hard way that hearthis.at has an upload limit for free accounts and I’ve reached it. I’ll make a second free account and somehow link them together, but not tonight. Tonight I am not up for that challenge. Tonight we’ll just settle for a link to alonetone.
I went down a YouTube rabbit hole a little and ended up here. A live recording of Procol Harum playing Whaling Stories not long before Robin Trower left the band and stopped playing Gibson guitars.
I’ve never heard this recording before, but the song is from a record called Home and I knew that album like the back of my hand. So did everyone in my house and most of my neighbors. Not only did I play it a lot, but I played my guitar along with it a lot too. Loudly.
I could fake my way through most of the songs, and even learned a couple of them (poorly) on piano. This one was a favorite to play along with. Those double bends Trower did… damn.
Interesting guitar question. How many do you actually need?
The video doesn’t really answer the question realistically. You need one, yes. But there are other answers too.
I only need one, but I need to keep looking and trying different guitars until I find THE ONE. Specifically, the one that makes me not want any others.
x = n + 1 where x is the number you need and n is the number you have.
For me, I need two. Two of everything. I play bars in a cover band. I don’t have a tech sitting off stage who can fix things if my equipment should fail. I need to get to the set break. If a guitar (or amp, or cable, or mic, or pedal) should fail I need to swap it for something that’s working immediately. I can tinker with stuff all I want in between sets, but while the band is on stage I need to be up and playing right now.
In the video he talks about needing different types of instruments for different situations. This song needs a strat sound, that song needs a Les Paul. I am guilty of that all the time. In fact, when I think about trading in my strat I think about picking up another guitar with single coil pick ups. The strat is the only single coil guitar I own, so I should get another instrument that fills that role even though that logic is bullshit. No one is ever going to call me up for a gig that requires single coils. That’s absurd. If they want me, then they’ll be perfectly fine with double coils, all day long.
So maybe the answer is just that your needs aren’t as important as your wants. Who knows.
