Category: Guitar

Ah, the Weekend

Saturday… at last. Actually, I was convinced that Thursday was Saturday, and then further convinced that Friday was Monday. Man, Thanksgiving is the best but it messes up my internal calendar like crazy.

We need to buy a christmas tree today. The kids will be here tomorrow to do some decorating before they go back to school. I want to have a tree up in the living room before they get here, and I want to give it a little time to shake itself out too. Ideally I would have put it up a few days ago but say no to pre-Thanksgiving christmas stuff.

I also need to go out and buy myself a warm jacket that actually fits me, unlike the warm jacket I own now. Our Saturday in New York plan is still on for now. We haven’t chickened out yet. Jen actually booked a hotel room yesterday. It’s outside of the city but near a commuter train station. It’s going to be cold out there in the big city and I need to stay warm. You see, one unexpected side effect of losing a shit load of weight is that I am cold all the time. All of that built in insulation I used to have is gone and now I find that the world is a very cold place. Jen was teasing me about it yesterday. I was teasing myself too. Brrr, babie.

I’m down to five days left in November, including today. How’s the album in a month project going? Well, it’s going to fail, but other than that it’s going well. Eight songs, about 33 minutes. The goal for this project is 29:09. None of the songs have vocals yet and only two have melody and lyrics. See? I’m going to fail. I want to do car music tomorrow morning and get some singin’ in. I’m not sure what the forecast looks like so I don’t know if I’ll be singin’ in the rain or not (hardy har har). That means I have to crank out melodies and lyrics today. Once the lyrics are done (which will likely take two or three car music attempts) I will have to do leads. That should be terrible. First, I am grossly out of of practice and brutally drowning in rusty. Also, I have no calluses on my finger tips so the playing will also be painful. It’s sort of a lose lose, right? I might not get it done by December 1st, but I’ll finish these eight songs (and maybe add a couple of minutes of instrumental noodling to get myself over 35 minutes).

Okay, folks. It’s 7:08am. My exercise is done for the day. I’ve watched an episode of Pennyworth and a couple of youtube videos on photography. Now it’s time to get my shite together and start my day. Happy Saturday, everyone.

Busy Holiday Morning

It’s been a busy morning so far. Since my last post I showered and shaved and had a Covid scare and visited both of my parents and played a little guitar to relieve the stress from the Covid scare and from my mother being in a less than wonderful state. Ugh.

No more amp sims for NaSoAlMo. All eight songs have rhythm guitars played through a mic’d up amp. Good.

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Amp Fun

The guitar was played tonight. It was played through an amplifier, not through a digital amplifier simulation. It was glorious, as always.

I redid the rhythm guitar parts for three of the five NaSoAlMo songs that I did with sims over the weekend. In all honesty, the sims probably sound better than what I can get with my meager skills, but the real thing feels better when I am playing and that’s what really matters for me.

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Catching Up

Right then. The turkey is in the oven, the first round of dishes are in the dishwasher, I finished Bellana’s laundry, I took out the trash and the recycling, and the camera batteries are all charged up. That means I can post the pics I would have posted in the last post.

My first stop on the film shootin’ journey today was Walnut Grove Cemetery. It looks something like this:

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My second stop was Greycourt Park which looks a little something like this:

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My third stop was the guitar nook which you’ve already seen in the last post, but this time the pic is from my DSLR because I’m a total fucking snob:

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Now, in honor of The Great Black and White Film Experiment of 2022, which was the reason for the first of the two stops this morning, here are the same three digital pictures in black and white:

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Busy Morning

Sunday has been eventful so far and it’s not even 10:00am yet.

I got out of bed around 5:30, went to the cellar and took care of my exercise ring while watching the second to last episode of The Midnight Club. I still haven’t decided whether or not I like that show, but it looks like I am going to finish it. I then ate breakfast. Just a protein bar. When that was done the clock told me it was 6:30 and the Google told me the sunrise was at 6:42 so I put on a coat (it was 26 degrees out, yikes!), grabbed Dad’s camera and out the door I went. I took a few pics at the Walnut Grove Cemetery and the camera didn’t have any issues. Curse broken? I then went to Greycourt Park and took a few pics of the castle ruins. I was thinking of getting a couple of downtown pics too but it was so cold out I decided not to. I went to Market Basket instead. I walked in the door at 7:20 and it was mobbed. What? 20 minutes after opening on a Sunday morning and it’s mobbed? I guess everyone is doing Thanksgiving today? Crazy. After the shopping was home and put away I washed some dishes in preparation for our faux Thanksgiving and then retired to the cellar where I put rhythm guitars (with amp sims, sadly) onto two songs and then came up with a third song. That brings the NaSoAlMo pipeline up to eight songs, all of which have rhythm guitars (though only three used a real amp).

Now I’m sitting at my desk typing this masterpiece, waiting for Jen to call me upstairs to start cooking the five-day-early-feast.

It’s been a pretty decent morning so far, wouldn’t you say? I might need a nap today.

Oh, I’d post some guitar pictures, and a couple of quick point-and-shoot snaps I took at my two photo shoot destinations this morning, but both my DSLR and my point-and-shoot are on the charger. The DSLR was about to die and the point and shoot did die. I could use my iPhone but… aw, hell, I’ll take one with my iPhone…

The pedals are on, but the amp is not. Sad face.

Direct Input

I said in a post from earlier today that I was thinking about just saying screw it and recording some guitar tracks via direct input into Garageband so that I could play while people were sleeping… and then I did it. I added guitars to two NaSoAlMo songs. They sound okay. I am so rusty that the playing was just bad. Who knows, if I get a burst of energy at a time when I can make noise I might redo the tracks from today through the glory that is my Deluxe Reverb. Until then, this will do.

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Harry is Home

Harry is home and it’s glorious!

Not sure what we have on the agenda today. Jen and Harry are going to go shopping for desserts for tomorrow’s mini-thanksgiving. I am going to make short visits to both parents. Also, in film camera news, there are train tracks running behind the rehab facility that Dad is currently visiting and I have black and white film in the camera… cliche, anyone?

I did 30 minutes of faux running today already. My sort of plan these days is 45 minutes on weekdays and 30 on weekends to give my feet a little bit of a break. I haven’t closed my calorie/move ring, but it’s 2/3 closed. I’ll close it today, no sweat.

What else? I want to play some guitar today, but I want to hang around doin’ nuttin’ with Harry and Jen more so… National Solo Album Month may be dying on the vine this year. I might try to get up stupidly early this week and spend an hour or so recording using DI and amp sims rather than my Deluxe Reverb. That feels like cheating after all these years of only using a real amp, but what can you do.

I mentioned yesterday that I had a really bad time with lunch. The same thing happened with dinner. I dished out a little less than four ounces of food, took 2-3 bites, and hit the pain/nausea failure point. I ended up pausing dinner for an hour or so and then I was okay. I was nervous about breakfast today after two bad experiences in a row, but I am almost finished an I feel okay. Here’s hoping lunch and dinner go okay too.

All right, kids. Time to go get my shit together and go visit a couple of parents. We’ll talk later, m’kay? M’kay.

Film vs Digital Exercise

I did this recently and today I did it again, while suffering through stomach pain because I don’t know how to eat food anymore.

I put my DSLR onto the tripod, set the ISO to as close as I could get to the new roll of film, zoomed in to a point that is similar to the lens currently on Dad’s camera, used the light meter on my iPhone and set the aperture and shutter speed manually, manually focused while basically laying on the ground (I’m tall), and took a picture.

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Then I put the DSLR away and did all of the same steps with Dad’s film camera. Assuming I didn’t mangle the film while struggling to load the camera earlier today, then I have one picture down and 35 to go.

Some day in the distant future I will get this new roll developed and then I will compare the results. the focal length won’t be the same because the lenses don’t match up exactly, and the ISO on the film is 100 and my DSLR only goes down to 200 so really the two pics won’t have much of anything to do with each other… but so what.

I did notice that even with the aperture set the same, the depth of field was massively different. I couldn’t get the guitar and the amp both into focus with Dad’s camera so I focused on the guitar. We’ll see if it comes out… someday.

Also, just to note, I had to move my guitar nook to the other side of my office because of something to do with work that I don’t want to mention. This is how it looks now.

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Two Recent Items of Note

Two things that I have been wanting to post here just so that I could find them if I need them in the future. One music related, one marriage related.

First, the music one. I plugged one of my USB audio interfaces into a USB-C adapter and then into my iPad. It works perfectly. I can bring up the mic input in GarageBand, pick an available channel from the interface, and record without lag or errors. Sigh of relief. Now I actually have to have a song to add guitars and vocals to. Maybe I can still sneak in a Record Every Month Challenge song for October. There’s NaSoAlMo next month to think about too. Also, I haven’t played guitar in ages and I am starting to get the shakes from guitar withdrawals. You know how it is. I still haven’t tried GarageBand on my MacBook since taking the last OS top off update. It shouldn’t make a difference. I don’t think anything audio related was included in the update. I am still thinking about wiping the whole thing and restoring from a backup and seeing if that fixes whatever crap was wrong last month. Have you tried turning it off and on again? Yes. Have you tried killing everything and reinstalling it? Not yet.

That’s the music thing I wanted to write down. What’s the marriage thing? My wedding ring is in the shop. I took it back to the jewelry shop we bought it from back in 2009 to get it resized. It was a size 14. It will be a size 12. I mentioned the cause of the weight loss and asked if it will be okay if I need to get it resized a second time. They said sure. We did that on Saturday, October 22nd. They said I could expect to be without it for a week or so. Jen also dropped off her engagement ring as one of the clasps that holds the diamond in place is broken. Hopefully they will both come back at the same time. I seriously miss my ring. I keep absent mindedly reaching for it and being surprised that it isn’t there. I am looking forward to not having to wrap yard around it to make it fit better though. I won’t miss that annoying little thing.

There. Now we’re all up to date.

PRS

As I was sitting in the living room feeling terribly nauseous and sick I put on Youtube and poked around. I found a rig rundown video with Alex Lifeson’s guitar tech from the Time Machine Tour in 2010. They checked out his guitars. Most of them were his signature Les Paul model, the Les Paul Access. There were a couple of older Les Pauls too and his gorgeous ES-355, and that one Telecaster he plays now and then. There were also a couple of 90’s Paul Reed Smiths.

Lifeson started playing those in the late 80’s or early 90’s (I think) after he stopped playing those Signature strat copy things that I think he was a part owner of the company. I was so happy when he stopped playing those things and I really liked how he sounded playing those PRS guitars but I was sort of hoping he’d start playing Les Pauls again, which eventually he did. I mean, Geddy Lee once said something along the lines of Alex doesn’t sound like Alex unless he’s playing a Les Paul. I don’t remember the exact quote but it was something like that, and once Mike my lifelong bass player said the same thing about me and that was pretty much the best compliment I’ve ever heard.

Anyway…

After I watched that rig rundown video I found today’s new episode of That Pedal Show and who should they have as a guest? Paul Reed Smith himself.

Maybe someday after I win the lottery and buy a bunch of Les Paul Standards from 1957-1960 I might treat myself to a two humbucker Paul Reed Smith model. They are great guitars. Even that weird strat copy they make for John Mayer is a great guitar, even if it’s basically a stratocaster with a funny looking headstock.