Category: Guitar

2026 RPM Challenge Day 4/28

I do these silly little recap posts one day after the fact. As I write this it is day five but I’m writing about day four. Not confusing at all, right? Not to mention pointless, but what can you do, right?

Day four was insanely busy at work. Also insanely frustrating. It’s a miracle I accomplished anything other than screaming into the void and pulling out fist fulls of my own hair.

I did accomplish a couple of things though. After work I sat in the living room with my laptop and worked a simple MIDI bass line in 7/8 time into a song form that runs for almost six minutes. I’ll betcha a buck that when the song is finished and I have a listenable demo recorded it’s going to be as boring as shit but I’m not worried about that today. That’s a problem for March, not February. Later, before I went to bed, I noodled out a couple of little bass things on my iPad. No song form for that one yet.

That brings the grand total of song ideas up to seven. Three have a song form, four do not. No actual real live instruments have been recorded yet. All I have at this point are MIDI bass and drum parts. I expect that day five’s update tomorrow will be similar.

Also, I just gave myself a paper cut on my left thumb and it hurts like a mutha. Moron.

2026 RPM Challenge Day 3/28

Progress was made on day three. I added one song (number five). This officially became the first song to have the song form worked out. I also took another song (number three, the one in 9/8 time) and worked out the song form for that too. I had a thought that on day four (which turns out to be today) I would track some guitars and I needed to have a couple of songs ready.

Spoiler alert for tomorrow, I did not play guitar. Sorry.

Day three is done and documented. Day four is underway but I spent the whole work day in meetings and it was brutal. I need a nap.

2026 RPM Challenge Day 2/28

My arm feels so much better today. 90% better. Maybe even 95% better. I think I’m going to be okay to play the guitar again. Assuming we don’t get more snow in the immediate future and I screw myself up again. We’ll see.

I added three songs worth of bass riffs and drum parts yesterday. It’s all just MIDI at this point and there are no arrangements or song forms or anything. Just riffs. Nothing to write home about yet. I’m up to four total. All four are in different time signatures (4/4, 7/8, 9/8, 3/4) and I’ve only repeated a key signature once (A minor, B minor, and two in E minor… I’m totally a guitar player).

I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the songs will be on the really long side this year, but I almost always have that suspicion and they generally barely hit three minutes. We’ll have to see how things play out. I also want to follow a similar plan as last year’s RPM Challenge where I played more acoustic guitar than usual, and I played a little saxophone. I’d like to do those two things again, but given my time constraints this year (and the fact that there are more people living in the house this year) I might just stick to electric guitar and headphone amps.

As far as lyrics go… I haven’t written anything yet but it’s safe to say that a running theme might be something like fuck fascists. You know… the usual.

So that’s where we stand after two days. Hopefully I’ll be able to carve out some time to make a little progress today on day three.

2026 RPM Challenge Day 1/28

So I have this arm injury thing right now. I think it’s going to be okay. I am way better today than yesterday, and yesterday was better than the day before. I just haven’t been able to play guitar at all because I haven’t been able to move my arm. I think that by the time the RPM Challenge will require me to record guitar tracks I will be well enough to get by, but the idea of this whole thing crashing and burning before I even start is a real thing.

On top of the injury, I am traveling for the entire last week of February. That means that all of my tracking needs to be done before I leave home on February 22nd. I can make time for mixing while I’m on the road, but not for recording. This year’s project is under a serious time crunch. I don’t think a double album is in the cards this time around. I think I might just get to 10 songs or 35 minutes (the minimum requirements for success) and stop. We’ll have to see.

Day one was yesterday and I noodled out some MIDI bass and drums for one song idea. I have a weird sort of theme in mind as far as song forms and arrangements go. Nothing stylistically or lyrically or anything like that. Just an idea of how I want verses and choruses to be related. This first song idea fits that theme. Other than that, nothing to report on day one.

Let’s hope my left arm starts playing along soon. I don’t want to break my streak of success. I’ve pulled this off every year since 2012 and I really don’t want to stop now.

2025 50/90 Challenge Day 1/90

Today is July 4th. While that means something to the nation formerly known as the US it now just means that it is the first day of the 50 Songs in 90 Days Challenge. Welcome!

I would link to the 50/90 website but apparently it no longer exists. I guess 50/90 as an organized thing is over? Sure looks that way. I’ll still try it on my own though. There are 90 days between July 4th and October 1st. During that stretch of time I plan to write 50 songs… because I am an insane.

It’s after 11:00pm now. We just came home from watching fireworks up in Derry, NH. Do I have a 50/90 recap? Why yes, yes I do.

There are two songs in the pipeline. One has the full song form and the MIDI bass and drums done. The other is just three loose fitting eight-bar phrases.

That’s it. Two songs under way. Come back again tomorrow and see if I made any additional progress. One day down, 89 to go!

Boss

When I was a kid and starting to become obsessed with guitar gear, there weren’t a lot of options around. My local music stores carried pedals from DoD and Boss for the most part. You could find occasional Ibanez, MXR, or Electro Harmonix pedals, but for the most part it was DoD and Boss. The few pedals I owned were DoD. Every time I took a Boss pedal for a test drive I was massively underwhelmed. Those music store visits back in the late 1980’s lead to a lifetime of not liking Boss gear. To this day I have never owned a Boss pedal because I have never played through one that I liked. The closest I’ve come is a Keeley pedal (the Super Phat Mod) which is a modified version of a Boss Blues Driver pedal. I like the Keeley pedal, but I don’t love it (unlike my Keeley D&M Drive which I absolutely adore).

I have never consciously boycotted Boss, I just never wanted anything they sold…

Until now.

A few years ago a couple of companies released super sophisticated amp load boxes. Universal Audio put out the Ox, which seems like the greatest thing since sliced bread. Unfortunately you can almost buy a car with the amount of money you need to shell out for an Ox.* Boss released a similar item called the Tube Amp Expander. The reviews I watched made the thing look pretty amazing, though maybe not quite as amazing as the Ox. The price was similar though and I never gave it a second thought.

Not long ago Boss released a new product. It’s a smaller version of the Tube Amp Expander. It’s called the Tube Amp Expander Core. It has all of the functionality I would want but at a much lower price. Granted, $700 is a ton of money for something like this (in my book, at least) and I don’t know if that price is before or after the orange shit clown’s Japanese tariffs. It is a low enough cost to make me consider it, but probably still too high to actually pull the trigger. It would be really cool to be able to run a direct signal out of my Fender Deluxe Reverb and into my Audio Interface, or even directly into my Macintosh.

…….it’s Boss though…. if I tried one out, history dictates that I would be disappointed. Still…….. oh the places I could go with a box like that. We’ll have to see how the economy holds up in the near future. There’s a really good chance the orange shit clown could collapse the whole country which would take the decision to blow $700 on a reactive load box out of my hands, you know?

Anyway, here’s a video that I can drool over as I watch it over and over again.

*Slight exaggeration

Practice: Complete

Just got home from band practice. Lucy did not pull the football away from Charlie Brown.

My finger tips ARE KILLING ME. The last two songs we did I could barely play. My fingers just said, “yeah we’re done for the day” and that was it. Outside of that, things went pretty well. There probably won’t be a practice next week as our drummer is traveling, but after that I hope we can get onto something like a regular schedule.

238/365

I Think We’re On

As of this moment, band practice is on for 6:00pm tonight. I’m swapping out my amp and my pedals so I have a bunch of things to test drive before I go. I might put new strings on one of the guitars while I’m at it. I have to clean the kitchen first though.

225/365

Friday at Last

Work has been good this week. No disasters, no scary moments. I did get a call from a customer (service programmers, like me, are not supposed to get calls directly from customers) but I was able to help the guy and it actually felt pretty good. Nope, this past week was a good week at work.

It was the rest of civilization that blew chunks. My wife and I agreed when we discussed it last night that this week has been the longest six months of our lives.

I need to do something creative this weekend. I NEED TO. Photography. Let’s go out and snap some pictures! Let’s play with the new long lens I bought a few months ago. Let’s play with the 120 film camera I bought a few months ago. Let’s go to the ocean and watch the sunrise and shoot all sorts of good stuff. Of course we should check the weather first… snow and rain today and tomorrow and rain on Sunday. Well you can just bite me, mother nature.

Music it is then! Guitar! I will play guitar this weekend if it kills me! I don’t know if we’re going to have a band practice or not. I’ll post something to our messenger thread later today (when it’s not pre-8:00am so that the other three guys don’t think I am weird and obsessed or anything) and see what’s up. If not then I need to find something else to do.

I do not want this weekend to be spent doom scrolling news sites and reading stories about the collapse of american democracy that will build up inside of me until I have a stroke. No. That would be bad, even if it is more or less inevitable. I must play guitar! I! Must! Play! Guitar!