Sometimes I feel like Gibson will create a replica of any Gibson guitar that Eric Clapton ever looked at. Oh, Clapton was in the same building as that Les Paul back in 1968? Let’s make a copy and sell it!
This one though… this one, I am down for. His custom three pick up. The Black Beauty from those Disreali Gears photos and from all of those Delany and Bonnie photos and, I think(?) from some of those early Derek and the Dominoes concert photos too. Yeah… sign me up. $19,999? I’m sure I have that laying around here somewhere.
Right… Day 20… I took a vacation day to focus on the RPM Challenge. It was a fairly successful move.
When the day started I had zero songs mixed, zero songs ready to mix, six songs ready for lead guitars and/or saxophone, and seven songs ready for vocals. Now that you know the back story…
I put vocals on seven songs, saxophone on five songs, and lead guitars on 10 songs. As the night came to a close I mixed one song.
That means the current state of the project is that I have one song mixed and finished, 11 songs ready to mix. One song is still ready for vocals.
Yeah, that was a full day. I’m not sure what I will get to today (Friday, day 21), and tomorrow has a very strong chance of seeing exactly zero progress. There are a lot of non-musical things on my agenda for this Saturday.
After 20 days I finally have a finished mix of an RPM Challenge song. The mix is pretty shitty but I don’t care. As I was working on this one I had visions of it being the single pulled from this year’s album (that’s assuming singles were still a thing that people like me thought about, which they really aren’t) but the closer I got to finishing it the less it felt like a stand out. It’s not my worst song but it’s not my best either. So far all of this year’s songs feel that way, though they are all much closer to being the worst than they are to being the best. The pickings are slim this time around.
After a second round of guitar playing and a second short round of sax playing I can honestly say I have reduced myself to mush. The tips of my fingers on my left hand are looking a little like ground beef, and my lips and my jaw don’t work anymore and I am kinda drooling everywhere.
So worth it.
When I started my day I had zero songs ready to mix. Now, as I am about to start cooking dinner for the love of my life, I have 12 songs ready to mix.
The saxophone came out of its case and amazingly, miraculously, I can still play it.
Can I play it well? Oh my sweet christmas I CANNOT. I SUCK! I put sax parts onto three songs including the instrumental where the sax plays the melody. It sounds awful, my playing is awful, and the whole thing is just awful and I don’t care because oh my goodness was that fun.
I lasted about 10 minutes before my body started to reject the whole experience. I mentioned calluses in the last post. When you don’t play guitar often you lose your calluses and it hurts. It is a similar thing with wind instruments except it is about muscle strength. There are muscles in your mouth and around your jaw that you don’t use very often that are used A TON when you play a woodwind instrument. I made it about 10 minutes before those muscles decided they were done. I would then play for 20 seconds or so and follow up with a 2-3 minute rest. After about half an hour of that I had to stop. For now at least. I am going to break for lunch and maybe watch a TV show and then see how I feel. It’s entirely possible the 2025 saxophone experiment might be over. We’ll see.
Speaking of lunch, one thing about playing sax that I forgot all about is that it makes you wicked hungry. I think that’s a wind instrument thing in general because I remember everyone in my high school band complaining about how they were starving at the end of each rehearsal. Yeah, I needs me some lunch now.
I just got home from some car music. I think it was a success. I’m not sure though because I am literally frozen solid and can’t tell if I am even alive or not. It is soooo freaking cold out right now.
I spent about an hour and a half in the car in the (mostly) empty movie theater parking lot, singing my lungs out while trying to keep my extremities safe from frost bite. It is tough to use a laptop while wearing winter gloves, but I sort of made it work. I put vocals onto seven RPM Challenge songs all while the temperature topped out at 19 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s -7.2 or so for our metric, Celsius using friends).
Right now I am sitting in my living room, hoping that the feeling will return to my toes soon. Once it does, I will go down cellar to my music nook and start recording lead guitar tracks. Today is Music Day, boys and girls, and it is off to a cracking good start.
Day 19 (yesterday) was an office day so there wasn’t a lot of time for music. I spent too much of my off-work time stuck in traffic to be super productive.
I added guitars to one song before I left in the morning, and then before bed last night I added lyrics and melodies to two songs.
Today (day 20) is a vacation day for me and I plan to run a couple of errands but otherwise it’s a music day for me. At least on paper. My stomach has been… difficult… over the last 24 hours or so and the start of the day today is more of the same. Yippee.
I was sneaky this morning and I did something that if I were smart and responsible I probably would not have done. I did not oversleep at all, which is kind of miraculous. That means I was able to get my morning exercise in nice and early. It’s an in-the-office work day today and usually on those days I start packing up and getting ready to go as soon as the exercise is over.
Because I finished early I decided to sneak in a little guitar playing. I put two tracks of acoustic guitar onto one RPM Challenge song. It was the one that I started working on last night. Now it’s on the list of songs that are ready for tomorrow’s expected singing in the car session. Nice. If I had more time I would have tried to sneak in a second song, but that would have been pressing my luck. I smartly didn’t even try.
I did take today’s photo a day picture. Day 172/365, to be exact. It’s a guitar pic, of course.
This wasn’t the pic I had planned though. The pic I had planned ended up being awful, as you can see here:
Oh well. Here’s hoping I can write some lyrics and some melodies so that I can have a lot of stuff ready for singing in the car on my vacation day tomorrow. Fingers crossed I can make the time for it tonight.
Yesterday was day 18… what did I do, what did I do…
I put rhythm guitars onto two songs. They were both easy songs but I struggled with them for some reason. I was hoping to get to three songs (the only three songs I had that still needed guitars) before work, but I only managed two.
Later in the day I added a new song idea. This makes 17. By the time the day was over it had MIDI bass and drums, a MIDI guide track for the guitar parts, a MIDI piano track acting as a guide for the melody, and lyrics. Nice. Spoiler alert for tomorrow’s post, it now has guitars too.
After that I finished the lyrics and melody for a song I started working on the day before (at least I think it was the day before) and then added lyrics and melodies to two more songs.
That’s it for day 18. Tomorrow (day 20) is a day dedicated to music as it’s my annual oh-crap-I’m-not-going-to-finish-so-I-need-to-book-a-vacation-day day. Today (day 19) is an in the office day so who knows if I’ll have time for much tonight.
The current state of the project (including work I’ve already done today):
Zero songs complete
Zero songs ready to mix
Six songs ready for leads (be they sax or guitar or both). Five have vocals and one is a planned instrumental
Five songs ready for vocals (which I expect to record during my day off tomorrow)
Five songs ready for lyrics and melodies
One song ready for rhythm guitars
Three songs ready to exist because I have 17 songs in progress and I want to get up to at least 20
Inside the Red Head's Head 