Category: Music

Two Notes

Two notes as I get ready for bed on a Saturday night.

First, game three of the Red Sox/Rays ALDS series is tomorrow at 4:00. I really thought Tampa Bay was going to sweep us, but last night the offense and the bullpen pulled out an impressive win. We need more of that tomorrow. We have a chance to close out the series without leaving Fenway. Sounds good to me.

Second, one of my neighbors is having a party with insanely loud music that is making my skin crawl. Where is Lizardfish when we need some massive volume to drown out the lame noise?

Pep Band

We found out yesterday that Harry has joined the UVM pep band that plays at hockey games.

I also found out that the athletic director responsible for my boycotting UMass Lowell athletics is no longer the athletic director.

I’m going to have to drill Harry on attendance and social distance policies and Covid safety at UVM games because of this:

I would LOVE to go and hear Harry play, even if I am secretly rooting for the other team.

Thursday Morning Hype

Game one of the Red Sox/Rays Division Series is tonight at 8:00ish. Are we psyched? Are we hyped? You know it. The Rays were the best team in the American League this year and the chances of us taking them out are slim to none. No negativity from me though, if any team can take those Floridians out it’s us. The whole team has already had Covid, so we don’t even have to worry about them waging biological warfare or anything crazy like that. I mean, we know how much Florida loves spreading the Covid, right*?

I did a little music today before work. Are you proud of me? I didn’t actually play guitar, I just redid some midi tracks on a GarageBand file for the re-recording thing. I redid all of the drums and bass tracks for one song from the summer. I now have three of those songs patiently waiting for new guitar tracks, and one new song patiently waiting as well. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe this weekend. Someday. Soon.

Okay, folks. Back to work with all of you. Stop surfing around the internet reading boring old people’s brain droolings.

11 hours to game time! Go Red Sox!

*This is sarcasm. The Red Sox’s Covid outbreak recently was awful and dangerous and nothing to laugh at. Also, the Florida state government’s insulting response to Covid is nothing to laugh about. The governor of Florida seems to think the best way to drum up support for a run for president in 2024 is to let as many of his constituents die of an easily preventable disease as possible.

Ancient Pedal

I added some pedals to the little “board” in my bedroom recording nook. Pardon the dust in the photos:

The little blue Blooze Maker has been in and out of this signal chain. I like using it to push the Ryra, but not when the Ryra is pushing anyone else. The little gold guy is a very cheap Chinese copy of an MXR Phase 90 that I bought years ago when I wanted to have the cheapest possible stay at home setup. That only lasted as long as it took me to start upgrading stuff on the band board. Then I had higher end stuff staying at home and this little guy went into a box in the cellar. I could have pulled the actual Phase 90 off the band board, which is in the cellar waiting for the band to start playing again, but I decided I didn’t want to mess with that setup right now so I put the cheap copy into the chain.

What’s that little black pedal there though… that’s one we probably haven’t ever seen.

That, my friends is the first delay pedal I ever purchased. I can’t for the life of me remember when I purchased it, but I’m pretty sure it was in the early 90’s. It was very late in 1990 when everything I had was stolen so it had to have been after that. I think it might have been almost immediately after that. I’m just not sure. I don’t know if it works or not. When I plugged it in and switched it on the little red light lit up, so it’s gotten that far. I haven’t played through it yet. We’ll have to see what happens.

Now I just need to actually play. Not sure if that is going to happen tonight. If not, then hopefully tomorrow. We’ll see.

Yes – The Quest, Partial Review

I’m listening to the new Yes record, The Quest. The first Yes record made without Chris Squire.

Track one is good. Everything else… sigh. It’s better than the last record, Heaven and Earth. That album was just boring. I couldn’t listen to it in one sitting. It was just lifeless dull nothing all the way through. (Oddly, that record is no longer on Apple Music or Spotify)

This one is better, but not by much. It opens well but steadily becomes more pointless as the cuts roll past. It’s just a wash of dull.

It’s not a total loss, which is nice, but it’s yet another collection that does nothing but gouge away at the band’s legacy. My advice is to just stop. Please, let it end mercifully. Just stop.

October 1st

At least in September you can pretend it’s still summer. The calendar says so for most of the month even though the air is getting colder and the plants are starting to die and it’s clearly not summer-like out there. If the calendar says it’s summer then you can still pretend it’s actually summer.

Not so in October. The fight is just over and we lost. Fall is here. Autumn. What the hell is so great about Fall that it gets two names? What a pompous ass. Oh well. New England winter is here. Let’s just get it over with. Only about eight months to go before New England spring finally arrives sometime in late May.

Wanna hear something funny? Last night I published a post that mentioned Jen is joining me on my Facebook crusade. Not long after that post went live she told me that she had just posted to Facebook. Hehe. Spartacus, I ain’t. It’s okay. She posted something really positive that even the vilest of nazi puke can’t touch. Also, who am I kidding. I said I’d try it for seven days. Come 2:00pm on Monday I am going to be posting pics of my guitars to 100 different guitar playing groups just like nothing ever happened. Because… well… in the grand scheme of things… nothing has happened. Nothing is happening. I’m just being a snooty nerd. Who you calling a pompous ass, you pompous ass?

Look at my cat.

I worked on another song last night. Another summer song to be redone. Now that it’s October I need to write something too. The Record Every Month Challenge is still a thing. Get to work, you pompous ass.

No, literally. Get to work. It’s 8:54am. Go punch in and be productive.

Happy Friday, everyone. Eight hours and 36 minutes until the weekend. The glorious first October weekend.

New Music Project?

I’ve been thinking about a new music project, but the idea is pretty lame and I am waffling back and forth on whether to do it or not.

It is unofficially called Quarantine Tunes Volume 50/90. The idea is to make some mostly minor changes to some of the better songs from the summer and work them into what passes for an album for me. In other words, slightly better sounding demoes that don’t involve any cutting and pasting.

I picked ten songs. Four of them are pretty decent, the others are okay I guess. Last night I listened through them all and took notes on what little changes I want to try. Today I started messing with the first of the ten. I used the same GarageBand file I used back in July but I replaced the drummer and the bass tracks with brand new takes. The bass part is free of all cut and paste. I will eventually redo every guitar and vocal track as well and then do a whole new mix.

The question that remains is this: How long is this idea going to hold my interest. I suspect not for long.

iPad Multitask

I just used the iPad’s multitask function for the first time. I was taking notes on songs I might want to re-record. Chrome was open on the left half of my screen, playing tracks from alonetone.com, while Trello was open on the right so I could add a comment to each song’s card.

It was so cool it literally changed my life.*

* #sarcasm

One Day Down

The Facebook bookfayce exile has lasted more than 24 hours. One day down, six(?) to go. I reached for the phone to check for notifications two or three times and just put it straight down. Nope. No bookfayce there.

I say six days to go, but do I mean it? As in… is it six days or one eternity? I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. I am classifying this as a temporary experiment, but if I feel okay at the end of a week I will just continue to stay away.

Forever though… can I do it forever? Probably not. When the band starts up again we are going to be communicating through Facebook messenger. At least we always have in the past and I don’t think I can Spartacus all four of us into a revolution. I think I am at least going to be using Messenger. After that, what about gigs? I am going to have to play the promotional game. Not that promoting the band on Facebook ever had any real results in the past. You just do it because it’s there, right?

All of this talk is making me want to get the band together. Nope. Not until (at the very least) my house has it’s booster shot. Even that is probably not enough to lighten the Covid-19 lockdown rules. We’ll have to see. We are taking it seriously here. Still. Very serious. Still.

Speaking of guitar… when the new Klon KTR circuits hit the stores, I am getting one. I just want to state that publicly. My Ryra The Klone pedal is awesome, but when the new KTR comes out I am going to replace it with the new redesigned KTR. You heard it here first, babie.

Feeling Lost

I feel so weird right now. I feel lost, somehow. At home, I had a huge music project that I was completely wrapped up in and now it’s done. At work I got flattened by a runaway train that is now back on the tracks.

Now what?

Those two things have kept the CPU in my head running at close to 100% capacity for most of the last month. Now that I’ve moved on from both things my CPU is down to a much more normal operating level and that is all kinds of good, but the rest of my brain is less occupied than it was and doesn’t know what to do with itself.

I had an idea to take the 10 least awful songs from the last three months and redo them in the hopes of improving them. I listened through everything and picked the songs I want to try, but I’m already losing interest.

What should I do? Part of me wants to just spend a few weeks watching TV, but I should do better than that, shouldn’t I?

I just don’t know what to do with myself.

I found a bag of Hershey’s Kisses in the junk food closet. I just ate a bunch of them and now I feel sick. I guess I ate too much. Somehow that is symbolic of my mental state. Blah, barf.