This is one of those days where I got so much done that I have probably lost track of it all. When I look at my folder with all of my GarageBand files in it I can see that 10 files were updated yesterday. Oh, just 10? That’s all?
Okay, let’s try to piece it all together. I had six songs ready for vocals when the day began. I also had one song ready to mix and three songs ready for lyrics and three songs ready for rhythm guitars. I think. That sounds right.
The first thing I did was vocals. I finished all six of the songs that were ready. I then took one of the songs that was waiting for rhythm guitars but had a fake MIDI guitar guide track and added lyrics, melody, and vocals. That gave me seven songs in one car music session (that’s when I drive to an empty parking lot and sing badly without bothering anyone in the house). That might be a world record. I probably could have tried another song but I had to pee so… yeah.
When I got home it was time for guitars. When all was said and done, six songs got lead guitars, two songs got rhythm guitars, and one song (the one that got the extra vocals) got both rhythm guitars and lead guitars. I know you’re wanting to ask so yes, my finger tips were killing me. I am so out of playing shape these days.
At this point I didn’t have anything ready for more guitar tracks, I didn’t have anything ready for vocal tracks. I had songs that needed melodies and lyrics, and songs that were ready to mix. I had a choice and I chose mixing. I finished four songs. I now have 41 songs finished. Only nine more to go, and I already have four ready to mix.
I’m so freakin close to being done with this and I still have over a month to go.
It took something like 36 years but I finally saw King’s X live. They played at a bar in Foxborough, MA. I spent the day working in our Foxborough office so that I could get there when the doors opened but I got slammed by a highway closure and was super late to work, so I worked super late to make up the missed time.
I got to the venue a after the doors opened but a little bit before the opening act was scheduled to go on. I sat in the car eating dinner and watching that day’s new episode of Star Trek Strange New Worlds and I didn’t get in until about 7:15. The opening act was supposed to go on at 7:00, but when I got there they announced that they had one more song. Apologies to the band. Their name was Third Knuckle.
During the one song I managed to hear I learned something important. The bar, which is called Six String Grill and Stage (I think) might be the single worst sounding room on the planet Earth. Seriously. I couldn’t hear anything. It was all bass and mud and nothing else. I could see that the band was working hard but I couldn’t hear any evidence of it. I could not see the sound board to see if the engineer was freaking out. I was pretty sure that it was the room itself. Brick walls and odd shape and a wooden floor. Just lots of weird choices for a live music venue. I wrote something on Threads about hoping King’s X had a sound crew who could make things work. They did… sort of… almost.
King’s X came on at 8:00pm and opened with Groove Machine which was what I expected (though I don’t really know why, other than it’s a killer opening song). The sound was definitely better than the first band but it also was not good. Most of what I could hear was just bass frequencies bouncing all over the room. Big booming bass rumble washing out the entire low end. The vocals were sort of getting through it, thankfully, and the lead guitar was also sort of audible, but the bass guitar, the kick drum and the toms and most of the rhythm guitar were just gone.
For the first half hour of the show it was clear the band was struggling. They were playing fine. Excellent, even, but it was obvious that they couldn’t hear anything. They kept signaling the monitor guy and asking for changes but it never seemed to work. Eventually guitarist Ty Tabor spoke to the sound guy directly over this vocal mic and more or less begged for help. The next song started and almost immediately bassist Dug Pinnick actually stopped it. He went back to his amp, which he had already done a number of times, and did something that seemed pretty drastic. I don’t think he turned down, but he might have cut out all of his low end. It helped a little. They restarted the song and it was better. Over the next few songs the sound guy started to figure things out and the sound impoved some, but it was never good.
I think what we witnessed was a group of pros handling a really shitty room. That is the impression I got at least. I tip my hat to all of them. Had I been on the stage or working the soundboard I probably would have lost my shit and just given up. That’s why I am not a professional. That’s the difference.
Dispite the rough sound the band played great. They are all top of the line musicians and they’ve been playing together since the dawn of history and by this point in their careers they can probably lock in with each other in their sleep. They were as tight as a tight band can be.
Dug Pinnick is an excellent bass player. Jerry Gaskill is an absolute animal on the drums. I mean, I knew he was good but he was so much better than I expected. Ty Tabor is pretty much the perfect guitar player in my book. He’s definitely a guitar hero for me. Gaskill and Tabor are also excellent singers and they both nailed everything. Dug Pinnick though… holy shit. He may be the best male rock vocalist I’ve ever heard. He’s 75 years old and I am not going to say he’s as good as he was 30 years ago because that’s probably not true. I will say that I’ll put 75 year old Dug Pinnick up against any singer in any rock band and Dug will absolutely destroy them. He’s just that good.
I mentioned in a post the other day that there are a bunch of songs in their catelog that I just don’t like, usually because the lyrics rub me the wrong way, and there are a couple that really piss me off. Fortunately they didn’t play any of them. It was almost as if they read my mind while picking the set. I was honestly relieved. There were a lot of somewhat recent songs in the set which I was really happy about. They could have played a show that never got more recent than 1994 and it would have been fine, but they didn’t. Their most recent record is a few years old now but they played three songs off of it, including my favorite song from the record.
In guitar gear nerd news, Ty Tabor played a Les Paul for most of the show. It was gold with humbuckers but I doubt it was a 1957. If it was a standard it was probably a reissue or something. I hope it was a good custom shop model because he deserves top of the line stuff. He played a Fender Stratocaster for a couple of songs too. I couldn’t see his pedal board so I don’t know what sort of toys he had, but he was playing through a couple of Orange half stacks. I’ve never used Orange amps before but I’ve always like what I heard. The one cool thing was an e-bow. Is it e-bow or ebow? I am not sure. He’s only the second person I’ve ever seen use one. Eric Bloom from Blue Oyster Cult uses one for that super long sustained note coming out of the guitar solo on Don’t Fear the Reaper and I’ve seen him using it in person twice. Ty used it for a solo instead of using a pick. I’ve always been curious about those little suckers but I’ve never thought about actually buying one… am I going to have to think about it now? Maybe.
So in summation, the sound ranged between bad and really fucking bad. I think it was the room’s fault and everyone worked really hard to make things work. The band was fantastic. The performance was fantastic. The set was fantastic. It only took me 36 years to see this band but I am really glad I did.
Now a few pictures. Every shot I took sucked. Not surprising. It was dark in that room after all. Lots of blurry pics. I set the camera to burst mode so once in a while I would get four blurry nightmares and one marginally focused shot. I’ll take it.
I’m a guitar player so of course I stood in front of the guitar player
Unfortunately standing on the right side made it hard to get focused pics of the left side. Sorry
All three of them
There’s the Strat. I don’t know if I got any pics of Dug playing his 12-string bass
Jerry might be the worlds most energetic drummer. He doesn’t just move his arms, he moves his whole body.
One more pic for the road. I think this was right around the time they stopped mid song
I came close to getting shut out on day 56 (yesterday) but at the literal last minute I pulled off the barest of bare minimums and got something done.
Song idea number 49 was three eight bar bass/drum riffs. I took those three riffs and worked them into a song structure about 3-4 minutes long. I did that just before I fell asleep. And just like that I was not shut out.
I did a couple of additional things. Songs 48-50 were started on either my iPhone or my iPad. There’s a bug in the GarageBand Drummer function that pops up when you import an iOS or iPadOS file to MacOS. The drummer function gets converted to a regular, plain old MIDI drum track. It didn’t used to do that. It used to show up on the Mac as a Drummer track that you can edit as normal. Recently that stopped happening. The additional work I did last night was to replace the MIDI drums with Drummers, which are also just MIDI drums but have better editing tools. I should probably call the Drummer function an A.I. type of thing, but A.I. is lame and I don’t wanna.
So that was it for day 56. One song form and three replaced drum tracks. Spoiler alert for tomorrow’s day 58 post… there’s going to be more significant progress. What fun!
I played Magic the Gathering for the first time ever tonight. Did I understand what was going on? Nope. Did I lose in spectacular fashion? Yup. We’ll play again tomorrow and see if maybe some of it starts sinking into my tiny little brain.
Weekend plans include (on top of playing Magic again) lots of music, writing and recording, maybe getting a little bit of work in, visiting the in laws, and maybe taking some pictures. We will have to see how it all shakes out.
Last night, after something like 36 years of fandom, I finally saw King’s X in concert. I’ll write up my thoughts later, but for now I will make one comment (it’s a question, actually) in response to the show that only the geekiest of guitar gear geeks will understand:
Do I have to buy an e-bow now?
That thing in King’s X guitarist Ty Tabor’s right hand is called an e-bow
No progress on day 55. I spent hours stuck in traffic on a closed highway in the morning and then went to a concert in the evening. I got home early enough that I might have been able to spend a few minutes on musical stuff but my brain was completely fried and it just didn’t wanna.
I might have better luck today (day 56) but I’m not holding my breath. The weekend is almost here though and I’m looking forward to a couple of productive days.
I hit a bit of a milestone yesterday. Day 54 had the potential for being shut out with no progress on the ol’ 50 songs in 90 days challenge thing. Fortunately I was able to get a couple of things done. (Spoiler alert for day 55, today, I have about a 99.999% chance of getting shut out)
Before work I sat in my car in the parking lot outside of my office and squeaked out a few bass/drum riffs. No song form yet, just a few 8-bar phrases. I grouped them together as song idea number 49. I thought that would be it for the day and it almost was.
At bed time last night (similar to day 53) I sat up in bed with my iPad and felt inspired with a new little idea. by 10:20pm I had a whole song form worked out with bass and drums down and two tracks of MIDI guitars to act as guides for when I record the real guitars. If the thing I came up with before work was song idea number 49 then logically this second thing must be song idea number 50, right? Correct. My 50 songs in 90 days pipeline officially has 50 songs in it. Granted, 13 of those songs are in various stages of incomplete ranging from pretty much done to barely started, but there are 50 ideas in total.
I’m trying to remember but I think I have finished this challenged three times. The first time I got exactly 50 songs. The second had 51 and the third had 52. I have to check the old playlists to verify that, but I think that’s how it worked out. Should I stop at 50 this time? Should I stop at 53 to continue the trend? Should I shoot for 60? 70? I still have over a month to go… should we turn this into a how-many-songs-can-I-write-and-record-in-90 days challenge?
I have to work in the office 40% of each month. I didn’t go in at all for the first half of the month because I was under the weather and stuff. I had to squeeze it all in during the last two weeks.
Tomorrow, when I work in the office, I will reach my 40% for August. Oh what a freakin’ relief that will be. My desk is 45 miles from my house and that is brutal. Worse, twice this week (yesterday and tomorrow) I will be working in a different building that is 74 miles from home. Yeah, you read that correctly. 74 miles.
I made that drive yesterday for some meetings that I wanted to attend in person. I will do it tomorrow because that building is very close to a venue where I will be attending a concert after work. Yup, Robbie’s going to a rock and roll show.
I started listening to King’s X in 1990 when they had a sort of almost hit record called “It’s Love.” Great song, out of this world vocals with ridiculous three part harmonies, and a shredding guitar solo that made all of those obnoxious hair bands from the ‘80’s look like talentless chumps.
I thought about buying the album the song came from. I read a review in a guitar magazine that really surprised me. It basically said the band’s previous album was great but the new one, the one the article was acutally reviewing, kinda sucked. Based on the one song I knew I found that really hard to believe so I decided to ignore the advice and buy the record anyway.
The next time I was at a record store they didn’t have the new album but they did have the previous album (on cassette, not CD) so I bought it. It was called Gretchen Goes to Nebraska and it was great. It was awesome. It was outstanding. Looking back I feel lucky that I bought that record first because when I eventually did get the record I wanted to buy in the first place… well… it kinda sucked. A few good songs, a few mediocre songs, a few terrible songs with lyrics that made me want to punch the band members in their friggin’ faces (if you know this band and this record then you know which song I’m talking about).
It was okay though, Gretchen was so good that I could overlook the shitty stuff in favor of the good stuff. A few years later they released an album called Dogman that was better than Gretchen. A few years later there was an album called Tape Head that was just as good. Those three records alone justify this band’s entire existance. Every record is good, even the couple of bad ones they’ve released over the years. As musicians, they might be the best band in the world. As lyricists… they are great instrumental performers. Yeah, they often rub me the wrong way. Religion and politics… the two things they tell you not to argue about… yeah. Sorry guys.
Anyway, I’ve been a fan since 1990 and I’ve never seen them live. The three band members ages range from 64 to 75 (I Googled it before I wrote this post just to make sure) and the days are probably numbered. The drummer almost died of a heart attack a few years ago and I thought I missed my chance to see them live.
I had no idea they were touring but Spotify, of all things, told me they had a show in Massachusetts coming up and I bought a ticket. I didn’t ask anyone to go with me because I don’t know anyone else who likes them. That’s okay. I will work down the street from the venue and casually wander over when the doors open. I’ve never been to this place before. I don’t know if its a small theater or a bar or what. I’ll find out when I get there. I’ll bring my point and shoot camera because the guitar player has been known to play some seriously cool gear and I am a guitar gear junkie. I might be easily impressed by such things. That’s okay.
So the point of this rambling run-on-sentence of a post is… one more day in the office and then I can work from home again, and to celebrate I am going to see a fantastic live band that I’ve never seen before despite always really wanting to. It should be a good day. Wish me luck.
I was expecting that day 53 would be another day with no musical progress made at all. I ended up being wrong, but only just barely. Last night at about 10:00pm I was sitting up in bed with my iPad and I had an idea for a sort of drone-esque bass riff. I brought up GarageBand and failed miserably in my attempt to translate the idea into reality, but I did end up with a new song for the 50 songs in 90 days project. It’s just fake MIDI bass and fake MIDI drums with a fake MIDI guitar to act as a guide for when I record the real thing, but the full song structure was worked out. It exists even if it doesn’t really sound like what I was shooting for. That’s fine.
That’s it for day number 53. I filed the song idea as number 48… and there are still 37 days to go. I can’t believe how far along I am at this point. I won’t say I’m almost done (I have finished 37 songs and there is still a long way to go before I finish 50) but I’ve done a ton more than I usually do by day 53. I’m feeling pretty good about the state of things.
Yesterday was a light day progress wise. I put rhythm guitars onto two songs. Songs number 46 and 47 to be exact. They both already had lyrics so they are now in the ready for vocals bucket.
37 songs complete, one ready to mix, six ready for vocals, and three ready for lyrics and melodies. That’s 47 songs in total… and still over a month to go. It is lucky that I am so far ahead of things right now because I am probably going to get shut out today (day 53). Its looking likely at least.
I was hoping to have a lot of time to work on music, specifically vocals, on day 51 but I was also pretty sure I would not have time for anything. Turns out I didn’t have time for much. No vocalizing for me yesterday.
I did add two new songs to the list. No real instruments yet, but all of the music has been worked out including the melodies and lyrics. They are songs 46 and 47. I also managed to mix one song. Yet another song with really crappy vocals. Hooray.
I’m not sure how the time is going to work out this week. I have three days in the office coming up and there will be one late night when I will check seeing a band off of my I-have-to-see-them-before-I-(or-they-or-we)-die bucket list. I’ll try to get short bursts of musical work in whenever I can.
Inside the Red Head's Head 