Category: Guitar

RPM Challenge Day 3/28

Day three was similar to days one and two. One new song. This time it has bass and drums finished and a guide track for a sax part. It’s looking like it will be instrumental. I had this idea of having the album open with a short instrumental and this could be it. Unless it sucks, of course, or I can’t play the sax anymore, of course. The usual caveats.

RPM Challenge Day 2/28

Day two was mostly spent recovering from travel on day one (day three will be similar, I fear). I did add a second song idea and I worked out a full song form for both day 2’s song and day 1’s. So I now have two songs with full form done, including bass and drums. One of them may have a sax part already too, but it’s just a keyboard as a place holder for now.

RPM Challenge Day 1/28

It is February again so it is time for daily RPM Challenge updates.

Not much yesterday (Day one, Sunday), just one song idea noodled out in GarageBand for iPhone while sitting in a hotel room near Orlando, Florida waiting to check out and fly home. Hopefully I’ll get to a little more than that today.

Oxblood

Question: What is the most expensive Gibson Les Paul on Earth?

Answer: Jeff Beck’s super modified 1954 Les Paul Standard, commonly known as the Oxblood Les Paul.

Question: How much did the Oxblood sell for?

Answer: It is commonly believed that Beck bought the guitar for about $300 in 1972, but two days ago it sold at auction for $1,315,708.

Beck’s wife put up his gear collection for auction and the results were pretty staggering. While the hope was the guitars would be bought by people who would actually play them, I think it’s safe to say that most of the big tickets are going to museums and private collections where they will likely be on display and never actually touched again. That’s sad, but at these prices what can you do?

There were a couple of guitars that I would have bid on if money were no object. The Oxblood and the Yardburst being the two big ones, but there were supposed to be some signature models and prototypes of signature models (of the Oxblood, at least) that I would have liked to get my greedy mitts on.

Still… I think I would rather we still had Jeff Beck playing all of this stuff rather than having to live in a world without him. That would be way better than this world.

New/Old Song

A new song from The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project, also known as Quarantine Tunes Volume Eight.

Volume eight is all songs written during the 2020 50/90 Challenge. I think. Volume five was all songs from the 2021 50/90, I think… those songs were better than the 2020 songs and it shows with this one. If this was one of the 50 songs that was good enough to consider re-recording then… we’re definitely scraping the bottom of the artistic barrel.

Oh well. It’s done.

New/Old song mixed and uploaded to alonetone.com.

Guitar Shake to Shuffle

I just finished putting rhythm guitar tracks onto two song demos. Look at me being musically productive!

Also, I used Hipstamatic’s Shake-To-Shuffle on my new iPhone for the first time. Wow!

Still Looks Good

It still looks like Sunday will have a band practice. The first one in ages.

I need to put new strings on my Les Paul Standard. I also need to not get too excited because statistically speaking it’s probably safe to assume something will take the plans and cock them up.

Ugh. I want to be in a band again! AARRGGHH!!!

Fingers Crossed

4:00pm on Sunday?

We’re trying to setup a time for the band to get together this weekend. I think everyone is in. At least we’re all in as of this moment. I need this. I so need this. I don’t even know when the last time all four of us got together to play was. It’s been way too long. So long that I was pretty convinced it would never happen again. Pessimistically I am still pretty convinced that it is never going to happen again but I am choosing to look on the bright side right now, like the ray of fucking sunshine that I am.

My fingers are crossed. Band practice on Sunday. Make it so.