Category: Music

Patience is a Virtue or Something

The 50/90 challenge starts in about a week. It’s probably not the best idea to try and force out a song this close to the starting point. A song that had it waited a week would have been one of the (hopefully) 50 but now cannot be. You know.

Maybe a little patience is warranted on the musical front right now?

Screw that, I need this.

I took out my new guitar again and told myself that the first thing I play is going to be worked into a song. Welp, here we are a little while later and there aren’t any lyrics and there isn’t a melody, but the song structure is there and the rhythm guitars, bass, and drum parts are all down.

Good boy.

I need to come up with lyrics for this one and the one from the other day so that I can do some car music in the morning. Tomorrow is my last chance this month… I think. Schedules are screwy, you know?

Want some unrelated good news?

Harry’s paying us a visit tonight. WOOHOO! Harry time!

June Song Again

I wrote last night that my hearthis.at account had run out of upload space and that I would get around to creating a second account. I don’t remember doing this, but it turns out I already made a second account. Did I time travel back from the future and do it so that it would be there when I needed it? Am I Marty McFly? Am I one of The Avengers?

No and no.

Here’s the crappy song.

New Song for June

I think I had a little too much caffeine this afternoon. It’s late but I’m not really tired at all. The Vegas Knights and Montreal Canadiens are going to overtime in game six. Vegas has to win. Vegas. Must. Win.

So in my non-sleepiness I mixed a song. The Record Every Month Challenge thingie will have an entry from me for June.

No Change for Me (Part 1)

Note how the link to the song is a link and not a little embedded audio player. Why is that? Well, kids, I found out the hard way that hearthis.at has an upload limit for free accounts and I’ve reached it. I’ll make a second free account and somehow link them together, but not tonight. Tonight I am not up for that challenge. Tonight we’ll just settle for a link to alonetone.

Whaling Stories

I went down a YouTube rabbit hole a little and ended up here. A live recording of Procol Harum playing Whaling Stories not long before Robin Trower left the band and stopped playing Gibson guitars.

I’ve never heard this recording before, but the song is from a record called Home and I knew that album like the back of my hand. So did everyone in my house and most of my neighbors. Not only did I play it a lot, but I played my guitar along with it a lot too. Loudly.

I could fake my way through most of the songs, and even learned a couple of them (poorly) on piano. This one was a favorite to play along with. Those double bends Trower did… damn.

Noisy Birds

The weather is spectacular today. Clear, sunny, mild temps in the mid-70’s. Perfect. Everything you want from June in New England.

I have the windows open and the AC off so it should be super quiet. It’s not though. The birds, man. The birds are being crazy loud. It’s like Bird Coachella or something. It feels like any minute now Roger McGuinn and David Crosby are going to tear into Eight Miles High*.

*Get it??? Noisy birds??? The Byrds??? Get it???

How Many Guitars Do You Need

Interesting guitar question. How many do you actually need?

The video doesn’t really answer the question realistically. You need one, yes. But there are other answers too.

I only need one, but I need to keep looking and trying different guitars until I find THE ONE. Specifically, the one that makes me not want any others.

x = n + 1 where x is the number you need and n is the number you have.

For me, I need two. Two of everything. I play bars in a cover band. I don’t have a tech sitting off stage who can fix things if my equipment should fail. I need to get to the set break. If a guitar (or amp, or cable, or mic, or pedal) should fail I need to swap it for something that’s working immediately. I can tinker with stuff all I want in between sets, but while the band is on stage I need to be up and playing right now.

In the video he talks about needing different types of instruments for different situations. This song needs a strat sound, that song needs a Les Paul. I am guilty of that all the time. In fact, when I think about trading in my strat I think about picking up another guitar with single coil pick ups. The strat is the only single coil guitar I own, so I should get another instrument that fills that role even though that logic is bullshit. No one is ever going to call me up for a gig that requires single coils. That’s absurd. If they want me, then they’ll be perfectly fine with double coils, all day long.

So maybe the answer is just that your needs aren’t as important as your wants. Who knows.

Rewrite Or Two Parter

I put lead guitars onto the song that got the vocals during car music this morning. All tracking is done on one song so barring any catastrophic failures I’ll have a song to send into RPM this month.

Before recording that lead track though I recorded the first thing to pop into my head when I picked up my new guitar tonight and wrote a whole song form around it.

You’d think that was a good thing, right? It would be if the first thing that popped into my head hadn’t been 95% the same as the chorus of the car music song. It’s 34 bpm slower, and the turn around in bars four and eight is different, though still similar. Otherwise it’s the same thing.

So what to do with it? Is it a rewrite? No… it’s part two of a two song suite. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Let’s go with that.

Car Music Fail

I knew this was going to happen eventually, and today kinda became the day.

If you go back to all the car music posts from the last year or so, at some point I start talking about having signal flow problems. There are signal drop outs and extraneous noises and things that make takes unusable. Eventually the system I use for my personal Rolling Truck Stones Thing was going to fail. Today I only had two songs to work on and I spent a full hour on one of them, just trying to get the signal to hold together for eight or nine bars. It was so painful.

The frustration comes from not knowing where the breakdown is happening. What could it be?

  1. The microphone
  2. The connection between the mic and the mic cable
  3. The mic cable
  4. The connection between the mic cable and the USB interface
  5. The USB interface
  6. The connection between the USB interface and the USB cable
  7. The USB cable
  8. The connection between the USB cable and the USB to USB C adapter
  9. The USB to USB C adapter
  10. The connection between the USB to USB C adapter and the USB C port on the computer

Today’s issues happened in more than one USB C port, so I know it wasn’t the port. I also know it isn’t the sound card or GarageBand itself because both of those work perfectly when I’m at home and using a different USB interface. That rules out the tail end of the chain, but every other device or connection could be the culprit.

The next time I do this I am going to take a different mic, a different mic cable, a different USB cable, and a different USB adapter. If it still happens then I know the interface itself is the problem.

The upside is that I actually did get that one song finished. It probably sounds like dung, but it’s finished. So the trip was a success as far as the goal to record one song per month is concerned. It was a frustrating, painful fail as far as everything else was concerned.

Pencil In Car Music for Tomorrow

I have four songs underway this month. They all blow chunks. I thought two of them were useable and two were disasters. I wrote lyrics for one of the better ones today and then tried writing for the second better one, only to realize it was garbage. I then listened to one of the disasters and decided it was awful but not too awful so I wrote lyrics for that one. The other disaster is still a disaster but it’s better than I thought. I tried putting lyrics to that one too but I’m kinda burned out.

So car music tomorrow should happen, even though there are only two songs ready to work on. That should be enough for now.

On a totally unrelated note, I just head that two members of the cast of the show Batwoman posted spoilers today that kinda make me want to catch up on season two. I am so easily lead. Baaaaah, babie. Baaaaaah.