Category: Guitar

Morning Music

Stuff going on here in chez OurHouse but I am not going to mention it because it’s nunya. So here’s a music update instead.

When I woke up, very early, today I had 42 songs finished, one ready to mix, two ready for leads, and five ready to sing. I finished the vocals on all five of them, and added leads to three. I think all three were sung today, so the two from yesterday are still ready. Woah! 50/90 is almost done!

Here you can see the last vocal being tracked:

Here you can see that I am back upstairs with the Fender amp, and I put the Keeley D&M Drive onto the board. I used it a lot this morning. This little rig is pretty damn sweet.

Still a lot to do before 50/90 is finished, but with eight days left it’s starting to feel pretty good.

Now if only the songs didn’t suck.

Ripped Myself Off

I hate it when I write a song that rips off a song that I already wrote… and it’s happening A LOT these days.

I mentioned the other day that it happened again. The two songs don’t exactly sound a like, but the structures involved were practically identical. Let’s see how they sound back to back.

Here’s the second song, which I mixed tonight… poorly. This might be the shoddiest recording/mixing job of the year. Whatever, it’s done.

Now here is the song I posted the other night, reposted here for your listening torture.

Can you hear what I’m talking about? From my point of view this is shameful, but to a listener who wasn’t there when the self robbery happened? I don’t know if it’s quite as clear.

Whatever, I’m up to 42 completed songs with nine days left.

ADDENDUM: Holy shit! It’s worse than I thought! They are so similar they are almost identical in every way imaginable. Good lord, I SUCK!!!!!

Song Number 40

I’m sharing this song not because it’s good but because another song I started working on a couple of days later has almost exactly the same structure… and at the time of writing the second song I had no idea I was repeating myself.

The second song isn’t done yet, though I did write words for it this morning. Car music tomorrow? Maybe.

I’m curious to hear how similar they will sound when they are both finished. I’m guessing they will be pretty identical, to me at least.

Crazy Day

As crazy days go, today was definitely one. There’s a situation at work that has had a bunch of us running flat out all day every day for a full week. Some of us are going to be working on it through the weekend. I’m not going into specifics, but there are things that no one has done before that we suddenly have to do. Entire workflows are being built on the fly. In a word: craziness. I think we are going to pull it off though and when we do it’s going to be epic.

I already mentioned 50/90 in the last post. I’ve played guitar two days in a row. Yesterday I played like shite. Today was a smidge better but only a smidge. Tomorrow… I want to do some car singing in the morning but I’ve been so beat each bed time that I’ve actually been sleeping kind of late each morning. We will see about tomorrow.

There isn’t much else going down right now. I visited my folks at their new place on Tuesday. It was all right. Neither of them seem thrilled with the new normal, for different reasons, but they are managing. I really hope they are okay.

The COVID stats aren’t getting any better. We are more or less back to pre-vaccine lock down levels in our house. It’s been 18 months. I’m so sick of this shite. Am I using the word shite correctly? I don’t know. I just like the sound of it… shite.

Probably going to turn in soon. I’m going to get myself a bottle of water and then lay down. I want to be up early tomorrow, but who are we kidding.

G’night, folks.

Repetition

I was working on some lead guitar parts tonight and realized that I once again wrote the same song twice. Insert frustrated sigh here. The structure of song #48 is almost exactly the same as the structure of song #51. I mean the actual chord changes are similar but not too similar. It’s the idea that is the same. I keep doing it. I think I have to use some of the same lyrics and make it a two part song. Lame.

Gear nerd put the Black Lives Matter pedal back onto the big pedal board. The whole reason I bought it was to pair it with the KTR which is the best overdrive pedal on Earth.

Dusty stuff

Also, Klon is about to start shipping a slightly redesigned KTR and I might have to get one because Klon.

Also, this guitar is fucking awesome.

New Tune

I’m sharing this one because I’m 90% sure I have written it at least once in the past. Possibly in the not so distant past. Also, because I threw it together very quickly and now that it’s done I have like 10 ideas for changes to it and if it weren’t part of a song writing challenge in the final days I might have just started over but nope, here it is, crap and all.

One other 50/90 note… I put rhythm guitars onto two songs tonight… I now have rhythm guitars on 50 songs. Two weeks left and I have enough songs with significant progress made and I am dangerously close to finishing this puppy. Now watch me blow it somehow.

Audience

Between singing in the car this morning, writing lyrics this afternoon, and playing guitar tonight, I have honestly lost track of everything I’ve done today.

It was cool though, I had an audience while I was tracking guitars. I was down cellar because I was too lazy to set up the bedroom rig that I partially cannibalized for the cellar rig and as I was playing along I noticed this big honkin’ spider hanging out at the base of the stairs, just grooving along.

It was not, as far as I could tell, from Mars.*

*If you don’t get that reference… well I don’t even know what to tell you.