Category: Guitar

RIP Peter Banks

I don’t know how this bad news slipped past me, but Peter Banks died last week.

If you’re a prog rock fan, you know who Peter Banks is.  No, he wasn’t the keyboard player in Genesis.  That’s Tony Banks.  Peter was a founding member of Yes.  He was the guitar player on their first two records.

Much like ex-Rush drummer John Rutsey, Banks has the misfortune of having his abilities rated not so much on his own playing, but by the guy who replaced him.  Rutsey was replaced by arguably the greatest drummer in the history of recorded music, Neil Peart.  Peter Banks was replaced by one of the most staggeringly talented guitarists ever, Steve Howe.

Don’t let the comparisons distract you though, Peter Banks could flat out play.  The guy was awesome.  This Birds cover from the first album is probably my favorite example of his playing…

When I was in High School I turned into a Yes fanatic. Unfortunately for me, Steve Howe’s playing was way beyond me. I could play a phrase or a riff here and there, but there were very few songs I could survive all the way through. Well… I could play a bunch of Asia songs, but there weren’t many Yes songs I could survive. I could fudge through Roundabout, and big chunks of Perpetual Change. Thanks to a very productive guitar lesson I could get through Siberian Khatru, but I had to hack through my own solo. Howe was just too fast for me. Thankfully, I had the first Yes record on vinyl, and I could get through pretty much all of that one. I played along with Peter Banks on that album about a billion times. Granted he left me in the dust every time, but I loved every second of it.

Rest in Peace Peter Banks. Gone but not forgotten.

Another Song

Over the last two days I threw together a new recording of the first song I wrote for my 2009 finished-way-after-the-deadline RPM Challenge.

Why?  Because the old recordings sound like vomit and I can’t tell if the songs themselves are vomit or just the recording.  So maybe if I dust some of them off I can make that determination.

Here’s the new recording…

And here is the old recording…

Both of these files are going to be deleted at some point, when I figure out what to do with the new version.

Early Morning Visit

Look who came out for a visit this morning.

HipstaPrint

The rest of this post is yet another music home demo recording nerd post.

I have three songs in the works right now.  Thanks to the acoustic guitar that suddenly needs a new nut (uh oh) and the leaky, mostly out of tune sax, one of them is ready to be mixed.  A second is missing just a lead guitar.  The third still needs all guitars and vocals.  That one might not get finished until next week.

So I seem to be on a pretty quick pace right now.  I have posted four songs since March 1st, which followed the 14 from February.  My free soundcould account is going to run out of room again.  That means this year’s RPM will get deleted and all of those previous posts that include embeded soundcloud files will lose their audio.  Oh well.  I think I might make a new page for playlists of recent music.  I will use bandcamp to host the playlists, and keep soundcloud for works in progress kinda things.

I’ve also decided that the four songs I have finished this month, and two of the three I’m playing around with now do not belong with the left over songs project.  I started a new playlist for the re-recorded songs.  That is meaningless to everyone on Earth except me, but what are ya gonna do, right?

I will take my lunch break at 1:00.  My MacBook and my Les Paul are ready and waiting to finish tracking another song.  I might be posting two new ones tonight.  We’ll see.

…Where the 80’s Live Forever!

I consider the first “real” band I ever played in to be Tempest Fero.  Horrible name.  Fun band.  It was Mike on bass, Jeff on drums, Jim on keyboards, and some fat doofus on guitar.

We had a number of “songs” that we’d come up with that were just instrumental riffs that were fun to jam on.  Goldfish, Toilet Water from Hell, Guppies from Mars and Beyond.  Yeah, we were 16 and 17 year old nerds.  I remember toward the end of my junior year in high school we had decided to stop looking for a singer and start just doing it ourselves.  Jim was good.  Jeff was better.  I wasn’t so hot.  Mike only sang when it was funny.  I thought that if we were becoming a real band we should probably write lyrics to our instrumental songs.  My first attempt was really bad, but I fudged it into a melody that went over Goldfish.  Time for a Change was born.  It was the first song I’d ever written or cowritten that was really complete.  My simple melody got trashed in favor of a better one that Jim came up with.  They were sort of similar, but Jim’s blew mine out of the water.

All of that happened about 25 years ago.  Now, after all of this time, I give to you, oh internets, a sloppy little GarageBand demo recording of Time for a Change, 2013.  Gasp in wonder at how lame it is…

But wait, there’s more!

I had to dig through a box full of old cassette tapes to find the arrangement and the lyrics, but I eventually found a tape that was in awful shape, with the worst wow and flutter in the history of magnetism.  It also didn’t have Mike playing bass. That made me sad.  Still, there were four other songs on the tape.  One of them was a song that Mike and I wrote in his basement while playing with his 4-track recorder.  This was probably either late ’88 or early ’89.  I really can’t recall.  Jeff took over the melody this time and made my simple, feeble attempt a billion times better.

The lyrics came from two places. I bought a copy of Steve Hackett’s Till We Have Faces album and the opening track was called Duel.  It was based on a Spielberg movie of the same name about a commuter who is stalked by a psycho driving a truck.  That idea, combined with nearly getting in a head on collision while driving home from work late one night made up the basis of what was sadly probably my best lyric effort with Tempest Fero.  Not to imply my lyrics ever got much better, but this was the best I had come up with at the time.  Jeff had started writing lyrics for T.F. too and his squashed mine like the proverbial grape.  Anyway, in the hopes of not making Time for a Change feel all lonely and stuff, I also made a new GarageBand demo of One on One Duel…

Enjoy these two flashbacks to Rob’s early days of writing music, way back in the 80’s!

Now What

I probably wrote this exact same post last March, but it needs to be stated again.

I have finished the RPM Challenge and FAWM. I’m very proud of my goofy self, despite the fact that the music I made isn’t very good. I wrote and recorded 14 songs in less than 28 days. It feels like a nice accomplishment.

Now what?

Last year I made a list of a big batch of unfinished songs I’d started in 2007 and 2008, as well as a few newer songs that needed to either be re-recorded or re-written and decided that I’d pick them off one at a time over the course of March and April or so in order to keep the happy RPM vibe alive for a while.

I finished recording 2/6 remaining 2007 left overs, and started tracking the other four, which are all at various stages of incompletion. I re-recorded one song, and re-wrote another. In November I started writing two new songs and have finished one of them.

For 2013 I have two little ideas on what to do next. One is to continue picking off the unfinished songs. There are eight of them, including the one from this past November. I also recently found a cd full of random songs I had written and played along with Mike and Maria back in the late 90’s. some of those songs might deserve a long awaited recording. I’ve picked two to start with, maybe three… or four.

So that’s the plan going forward. Finish more of the left overs, record some more ancient artifacts, and once in a while actually write something from scratch.

Lets see how long it takes me to run out of steam this year.

RPM Day 26

I know it’s late for this, but I’ve had a busy day.  Deal, okay?

I added the final lead guitar parts to four of the remaining six songs.  I haven’t made a final mix of any of them yet.  I might do that tonight, or I might wait until tomorrow.  I’m so close to finishing that I can almost taste it.  I should probably start thinking of a cover, and maybe a title.  What do you think of Rock Music for Old People?

RPM Day 24

Holy crap!  It’s the 24th already??

I finished two more songs today.  Aren’t you pleased?  I bet you all can’t wait for March 1st, right?

This song was declared finished, then yesterday was declared unfinished, and then after a remix today is again declared finished.  I was going to redo the vocals, but I decided I probably couldn’t do any better on the next attempt so I just fixed some things that I didn’t like about the previous mix.

This next one is actually one that is finished for the first and last time.  Please don’t be scared off by the very long fade in.  Sometimes the prog nerd in me takes over when I least expect it.  There is a song there somewhere, I promise.  Also, I told myself that I was going to keep this as a guitar/bass/drums/vocal project with the occasional keyboard part thrown in as an exception.  Well, this one sort of centers on an electric piano (although it sort of gets pushed around by the bass on the right side and the rhythm guitar on the left) and it has a sax solo.  Yup, I was listening to this on the way to the grocery store this morning and I sort of sighed reluctantly when I realized that I had to put some sax on this one.  My days of being a competent sax player are long, long past me.  The pitch is a little suspect, but what are you going to do?

I might try to sneak in more lead guitar tonight.  I have two more songs that are ready for it.  We’ll see what the day brings.  My fingers aren’t feeling all that great right now and I need a break.

RPM Day 23

It’s almost 8:00pm here and I haven’t done my stupid daily update that is boring all of you to tears.  Never fear.  In the words of the Yardbirds, Here’s ‘Tis.

Earlier this week I had announced that this particular song:

was complete and done and finished.  Today I changed my mind.  I remixed it.  It’s not much different, just a little more care was taken with it.  Oh, and I put some seriously retarded goofiness into it as well.  Gotta love idiots who put flangers onto drums, right?  Am I right?

This little song:

Was not finished, but now it is.  I used a fuzz box.  How have I made it this far into life without owning a real fuzz box?  Fuzz boxes and Phasers are the big overused stomp box gimmicks for this year’s project.

This particular little ditty:

Was also not finished, but now it is.  This holds the distinction of being the only song in the batch of 14 that did not have any work done on an iOS device.  This was all done on the full GarageBand on my MacBook Pro.  I think you can hear the difference.  I am a little sad that I didn’t do the whole thing on a computer now.  The iPad and the iPhone are just so damn convenient   I mean it would have been tough to have written a song in the car in a parking lot waiting for a take out order to be ready if I had to do it all on an actual computer, right?  Am I right?

So that’s three songs that are finished, finished, finished.  There is one other that used to be finished but I have decided it will get a new vocal take on Monday.  There are two other songs that have vocals that I want to re-record, at least in part, that still need lead guitar parts.  Then there are seven (7) more that don’t have any vocals yet.  RPM requires 10 songs.  FAWM requires 14.  I have 14 in progress, I could call FAWM done now but I won’t.  Finishing the vocals for a total of 10 songs on Monday is definitely doable.  Getting up to a total of 14?  That’s a little more difficult.

We shall see.