Category: Guitar

Incentive

I’ve been thinking about it.  Sometimes Americans are able to do the right thing.  Other times, not so much.  Maybe if we bribe America they will not be stupid regarding this whole COVID-19 mess.

How about when it’s all over we all get a Les Paul.  What do you say?  Everyone gets a shiny new Les Paul.  Some people have a weird thing about Gibson, so they can get a boutique copy that’s really sweet.  Most of us though will get a perfect sounding, beautifully built 50’s spec Les Paul Standard.  Of course, because this was my idea I’ll get an actual 1959 Les Paul Standard.  A nice burst with a really good flame top that’s all faded to gold the way the good ones all did.

I think that’s a good plan.

Guitars and Statistics

I doubled the number of songs with guitars recorded tonight.  I had three, now I have six.  They all suck and my attempts at keeping things low-fi are making them suck even more.  What can you do, right?  Two of the songs are in 7/8 time because prog, and two are in 3/4 time because… I don’t know, waltz maybe?

So… COVID-19.  WHO has declared it a pandemic.  Duh.  It is pretty global now so, yeah.  Pandemic.  Dig it?

I’m seeing all sorts of people calling the responses so far “panic”.  They don’t seem to get it.  It’s not panic, it’s resource management.  Every single infectious disease expert is telling us to put “social distance” into practice.  Why?  Resource management.  There are going to be x number of infections, based on the data we have from China, and y percent of those infections will require hospital care.  Finally, we only have z number of hospital beds available at any given time.  y is less than x, but y is greater than z.  Dig?  Statistically speaking there will be more infections requiring hospital care than there are hospital beds to put them in.  If we put “social distance” (I fucking LOVE that term and I’ve been practicing it since I was about four years old) into place then we spread out the infections over time, thus reducing the number of cases requiring hospital care at any one time so that suddenly y is less than z.  Boom.  Problem if not solved then partially alleviated.  Statistics, babie.  Stats for the win.

Read this from the New York Times: Flattening the Coronavirus Curve

Read this from WBUR: Harvard Global Health Expert: Mass. Hospitals Face Capacity Problem If Coronavirus Cases Spike Quickly

Strat… Delay

I brought my Fender Stratocaster up from the cellar this morning.  I cleaned everything out of the case (except for the whammy bar and a couple of strap locks that were there when I bought the guitar six years ago).  I plugged it into the little Bassbreaker and made sure everything worked.  The volume pot is a touch on the scratchy side, other than that it’s top notch.

Then I put it back in the case and leaned it against the wall and left it there.  I was going to take it to Guitar Center tonight after work to see how much they would give me for a trade in.  I paid $700.  Strangely, $700 is about the retail price for a Vox AC15 amplifier.  Weird how that works out, eh?  I know Guitar Center has a reputation for being stingy about trades and if they offer anything less than $700 I’ll take it somewhere else.  Maybe ebay.  Maybe reverb.  I’m not taking a loss on this baby.  No way.

I’m not doing any of that tonight though.  I’ll take a look at the world situation on Saturday and see how things look.  This is the very definition of non-essential.  It can wait.

 193/365

RPMarch 2020

Back in 2014 when I insanely did an album in a month project almost every month for the entire year, I started with RPM in February and then kicked off a new project in March.  I was looking at an old blog post where I referred to this 2nd month as RPMarch.  I also referred to how the nickname is ridiculously stupid, but I kept using it anyway.

Welp kiddies, RPMarch 2020 is well underway.  Three songs arranged with rhythm guitars.  One more is just a two bar guitar riff that I haven’t done anything with yet.  I will though, it’s mildly groovy in a dad-rock-bluesy kinda way (in other words it’s about as cool as rotting cheese).  I am such a tool.

The plan is simple.  Literally, that’s the plan.  Guitar, bass, drums, voice.  No doubling, just one rhythm guitar track played with as few punches as I can manage.  I’m also (gasp) not using any pedals (gasp, again).  I told you this was insane.  It’s just my Les Paul straight into my 15 watt Bassbreaker.  I’m not even using my tuner pedal.  Last Christmas I got a clip-on headstock tuner from my Secret Santa.  I’m using that.  I am only using one cable.  It’s utter madness!

191/365

Recording stuff before work also gives me a built in chance to cheat my way through the Flickr Photo a Day thingie. Happy day #191.

Just When You Thought it was Safe

Just when you thought it was safe to come to this page without being inundated with soul crushingly boring discussions about mind numbingly bad music…

I recorded some guitar today.  I snuck it in before I left for work.  Nothing special, no doubling, no multiple amps.  I didn’t even use any pedals, just straight into the amp.  I can almost hear r/guitarpedals screaming in horror from here.

Untitled

One Last RPM Post

I am still waiting on the good folks over at RPM headquarters to mark my album as received.  It usually takes a little while for them to acknowledge everyone’s submissions so I’m not concerned.  There was also the issue they had with the site crashing on the 29th so they let everyone have an extra day to check things in.  I had all of that done before noon on the 1st.

Here is my entry on the RPM profile page:

2020 Album name:

I Only Believe in Truth

Received

–

Date submitted:

02/29/2020

2020 Preferred Track name:

We’re Coming for You

About this preferred track:

Simple (mostly) 12-bar recorded mostly live.

About this album:

My original idea was half electric and half acoustic. That went out the window quickly and I ended up with a mostly disjointed mess of songs that are not so bad.

Favorite moment:

I used to be a sax player first and foremost, but once I started playing guitar while I was in high school I became a full time guitar player. On this album I decided to see if I could still play the sax. I can. Not well, but I can still do it. That felt great.

Words of wisdom:

I lost a full week due to a family vacation, though I did mix a few of the songs while sitting in a hotel in Disney World (we stayed at the Yacht Club). I was able to find the time to get all of the tracking done in plenty of time. You can do it if you need to, you just need to be creative with your time management.

Lessons learned:

I can still play the saxophone. A guitar played through two amps just sounds better than a guitar part played through one amp. Writing out a melody prior to writing the lyrics or sitting at a mic lead to me writing much more creative melodies that were not only more fun (and harder) to sing, but lead to songs that overall seem more interesting to me.

I also wrote a blog post during lunch today to act as a sort of recap for the month. Everything I wrote had been written on this blog at some point or another (except maybe the bit at the end about wishing I could change my mind on the sequencing).

I did it.  That’s nine years in a row with a finished album by March 1st.  I know that in terms of the real world it’s silly and stupid and not important, but for me it’s a huge thing and the feeling of accomplishment I feel cannot be overstated.

The finished product doesn’t look anything like what I planned.  I knew I was going to lose a full week to a family vacation so I kept my expectations kinda low.  I wanted 10 songs.  Five arranged for an electric three-piece rock band, and five arranged for an acoustic group in a coffee shop: Acoustic guitar, cajon and hand percussion, alto saxophone, and vocals.

It didn’t take me long to change the 10 song plan to 14 songs (seven of each type).  That was simply due to me writing too much music.  Even the 7/7 plan went down the tubes as I kept writing electric songs long after I should have stopped.  I ended up with seven acoustic songs and 11 electric songs.

If that wasn’t overdoing it enough, as I was working on a couple of the acoustic songs I starting thinking that they would sound pretty good with a set of drums instead of just hand percussion.  Eventually all seven of them had bass, drums, and electric guitar parts added and I ended up with two different mixes.  One for the coffee shop and one for a rock band.  So now instead of 18 possible mixes to use for the final album I had 25.

I thought about doing a three sided album where side one was all electric, side two was all coffee shop (my coffee shop analogy is starting to get annoying, but I’m rolling with it), and side three was band mixes of acoustic songs.

I scrapped that idea too.  Instead I went through all of the acoustic songs and picked the mix I thought sounded best and then went through all 18 songs and sorted them into three categories: Good, Kinda Good, and Crap.  Two songs went into the crap bucket, and three into kinda good.  I decided to drop them all from the final album and just go with the 13 that landed in the good bucket.

Here they are… 13 disjointed songs that no longer fit to any theme or structure, but which were the least offensively bad of the batch:

I Only Believe in Truth

So what did that leave me with?  Seven alternate mixes and five outtakes.  Two of the outtakes were acoustic so I really had five alternates of album tracks, five outtakes, and two alternate mixes of outtakes.  12 leftover tracks.  I figured the alternate mixes of the album tracks were all still pretty okay so I packed them all together into an alternate RPM album:

I Only Believe in Alternates and Outtakes

The saddest part of all of this is that last night I was listening through the dropped songs and I really think I should have kept one of them.  If I had paid a little more attention during the sequencing I would have made a better decision and the final album would have been a little different.  I am afraid that when I listen to the main album I’ll decide there were things I should have dropped.

Oh well.  February is over.  As with all RPM Challenges it’s now time to figure out what I want to do next.

What do I want to do next?

So yeah… what do I do next?

Guitar Goofy

Here’s one of the songs I finished today.  I started this a day or two before we left for Florida but I never got a chance to add the guitars.  I was able to carve out enough time to do it today.

It’s goofy… I own three Gibson guitars.  This song used them all.  The rhythm guitar is my 1979 ES 335 Pro, the melody/solo coming mostly out of your left speaker is my 2018 SG Standard, and the melody/solo coming mostly out of your right speaker is my 1978 Les Paul Custom.

Silly, but fun.

I took a picture of each guitar too but one of them didn’t make it to Flickr and I don’t know why.  It’s on my phone, but my phone is in the other room so you’ll just have to wait.

No More #RPM2020 For This Vacation

I just posted this to the RPM Challenge website:

Everything that I can do while on vacation in Florida has been done.  Nine electric songs mixed, seven acoustic songs mixed, six of those seven acoustic songs’ alternate versions mixed.

I have a few songs worth of guitars still to do once I get home on Saturday.  Every guitar part I have done this year has been played through a pair of amplifiers (one Fender Bassbreaker 15 and one Fender Bassbreaker 18/30 at 18 watts) and the 18/30 is a seriously loud little bastard.  I have been playing it with the volume set as low as I can get it and still produce a sound.  The 15 watt guy needs to get cranked a bit in order to keep up.

Last Saturday I tried to pick off the last three songs worth of guitars but my family had reached their limit and told me to shut up (in the most polite, supportive way possible).  I got pissy and shut it all down.  On Saturday I am going to finish those damned songs using just the 15 watt amp so that I don’t deafen my family.  I have leads to add to one of the acoustic songs, and leads to add to one of the electric songs.  The last thing is an instrumental idea that needs rhythm and two leads.  I want to finish all three, mix them, and then sequence the album, including figuring out which songs need to be dropped.  I think two or three electric songs need to go.  I don’t know if any of the acoustic songs are bad enough to eliminate, but one might be.  We’ll see.

Everything I can do in my hotel room is done.  Saturday is the final day of the month so it will be musical crunch time.

For now though… sleeeeeeeep