Category: Music

Catching Up

One hour of bad sleep on Saturday and six hours of bad sleep on Sunday. Yeah… it’s catching up with me. I am one sleepy red head right now.

15 minutes to go until I log out of my work computer. I’ve been logged in since about 4:00pm on Saturday and it’s 5:16pm on Monday. Well… I was out for a bit as I rebooted once this morning. I figured the lappy needed it after all the work I made it do this weekend. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

I took tomorrow off to recover from the weekend. What should I do? Besides sleeping of course. Well there was mystery*… no, that’s not right. How about well there is music. I need to do car music. I have eight songs that need singing. Actually, I have 11 songs that need singing. I added two new song ideas to the list yesterday in a very not successful attempt to calm my ass down. There is also one little music memo thing that I added to the song list but it’s not very good so I will probably drop it. So…. eight songs ready for vocal tracks, two songs that still need to have their vocal parts written. Maybe car music in the morning and then more car music in the afternoon? Is that possible?

What else? Well there’s my desk. I have made the (likely temporary) decision to keep my work day desk setup in Harry’s room, but move my MacBook back to the desk in our bedroom. I like it better in our bedroom, but I have also found I really like working elsewhere. It was starting to feel like I never left that room. Now I will definitely be leaving it for 8.5 hours a day, five days per week.

Okay, work time is up. Time to go cook dinner for my love.

*There is a song by Bill Bruford’s fusion band, aptly called Bruford, called Fainting in Coils. It opens up with a quote from Alice and Wonderland where Dr Bruford reads the passage with his voice sent through a harmonizer and lowered an octave or so. There’s some other sauce on there too. Someone else reads some narration and then the good doctor’s voice comes in louder and right up in your face and the first thing he says is, “well, there was mystery.” In my massively sleep deprived state, that’s what I was thinking of as I was typing that paragraph. There. You’re in the know now.**

**Am I the only doofus who puts footnotes into meaningless blog posts? Yeah, I thought so too.

Weekend Work Live Blog

Should I live blog my Saturday evening work experience?

No. No, I shouldn’t.

I logged in and did about an hour and a half worth of prep. I’ve been waiting for the go ahead to actually start for almost two hours, and it’s probably going to be another good chunk of time before I can actually start.

I just watched this week’s episode of What We Do in the Shadows and it was freakin’ hysterical. Now I’ve said before that I am willing to consider the idea of naming Matt Berry the funniest man in the universe. That’s still true. (he was so freakin’ funny on The IT Crowd that it is hard to describe) However, I am starting to think that Colin Robinson is the best character on that show, and maybe on all of television. He’s a vampire but he isn’t a normal vampire. He’s an energy vampire. He doesn’t drink blood like the rest of the gang, he feeds off of other peoples’ life force. Basically he feeds by boring the crap out of everyone. Just watch the show, you’ll understand.

What else, what else, what else……..

I just queued up a bunch of podcasts to listen to on my iPad. I have a couple of songs for 50/90 ready to mix. I didn’t do any car singing today even though I should have. I had a shitty night sleep last night and I just couldn’t get out of my own way when I got up. If things continue as they are right now I will probably be oversleeping tomorrow too. Not sure, of course. Should I try to mix one of those songs while I wait? Should I try to wait until I sign out of work? Oh boy, the questions.

Oh yeah, and I still have to do all 30 minutes of today’s activity app exercise. Yay!

Okay. I am going to post this now. I am not Live Blogging my work night, but I am likely going to get pretty bored while I wait and when I’m bored I tend to blog… or something.

Hooray, babie.

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.

Cookie

Rush did a song on their first record called In the Mood. It was a dumb Little Rock and Roll song that doesn’t fit in stylistically with the band they morphed into a short time later but it’s fun and it became a concert staple that appeared in set lists off and on for most of their career.

The hook includes the brilliant, Geddy Lee penned (ad libbed?), line “hey baby it’s a quarter to eight, I feel I’m in the mood” (fucking epic).

On many bootlegged occasions over the decades the word baby was changed to something that sounded like “cookie.”

Now Alex has an Instagram and he posts this:

Was the line changes to cookie or Chuckie? Did they mess with the line to make it about Al’s wife?

I don’t know, but…. Fucking epic.

Oh, the Crazy

For the last few months, going to work has often seemed like a break from all the rest of the stuff going on in the world. That is kind of the opposite of normal, right? Being away from work is supposed to be the more enjoyable part of your day.

Welp, we’re officially back to normal! Oh, the crazy stress right now. My head is spinning! WHEEEEEEEEE!

Jen just made an appointment with a plumber to come and look at the source of lake asshole. They are coming for the first look tomorrow. Oh happiness! I am so looking forward to a day when I can go into the cellar without getting my feet wet. That’s going to be a good day.

So much music work to do. So little time. When am I going to finish all this stuff off? When, oh when?