Category: Music

A.I. Album Cover

During a conversation with my wife and my step daughter the other day I heard two phrases that immediately went into the running for this year’s RPM Challenge Album Title.

One potential title is, “Electric Heat is Crazy Expensive.”

The other potential title is, “Groundhogs Wear Top Hats.”

If I go for one of those titles, what would I do for the album cover art? The electric heat one… no clue. The groundhog one though… yeah, let’s ask A.I. to generate an image for us, shall we?

Maybe… maybe not. I don’t know.

RPM Challenge Day 3/28

Day three was similar to days one and two. One new song. This time it has bass and drums finished and a guide track for a sax part. It’s looking like it will be instrumental. I had this idea of having the album open with a short instrumental and this could be it. Unless it sucks, of course, or I can’t play the sax anymore, of course. The usual caveats.

RPM Challenge Day 2/28

Day two was mostly spent recovering from travel on day one (day three will be similar, I fear). I did add a second song idea and I worked out a full song form for both day 2’s song and day 1’s. So I now have two songs with full form done, including bass and drums. One of them may have a sax part already too, but it’s just a keyboard as a place holder for now.

RPM Challenge Day 1/28

It is February again so it is time for daily RPM Challenge updates.

Not much yesterday (Day one, Sunday), just one song idea noodled out in GarageBand for iPhone while sitting in a hotel room near Orlando, Florida waiting to check out and fly home. Hopefully I’ll get to a little more than that today.

Underway

The bags are packed. We are ready to check out of the hotel and go find some breakfast. Our ride to the airport isn’t until around 1:00pm so we will have some time to kill. I think we will explore on of the other resorts a little bit.

On a totally unrelated note, the first song for this year’s RPM Challenge has been started. It’s pretty lame. We are underway once more.

2025 RPM Challenge

It is 12:01am on February 1, 2025. In other words, the RPM Challenge is officially underway once again!

Now that it is time to start writing and recording new music… I am going to bed. I’m totally beat.

Breakfast at another hotel tomorrow. Check out from our hotel. Take a bus to the airport. Fly home. The Challenge for me this year will probably start on February 2nd.

Good luck, everyone!

Saxophone?

Do do do, just whistling past the american graveyard again… still… do do do…

I’ve been listening to King Crimson’s Red album quite a bit over the last few days. Crimson, in their original incarnation, had a sax player. First it was Ian McDonald, then it was Mel Collins. When band leader Robert Fripp shook things up and hired a whole new band with a drastically new sound in 1972 the saxophones went away. For a while, at least. By 1974, when they were recording the Red album, they were down to three band members, Fripp (guitar/mellotron), John Wetton (bass/vocals), and Bill Bruford (drums/percussion). Fripp was the only soloist in the lineup… sort of… the other two guys could have cranked out leads with the best of them (because they pretty much were the best of them) but instead they brought in a bunch of session musicians to help fill in the gaps. Among those session musicians were two sax players; Ian McDonald (alto) and Mel Collins (soprano).

Collins plays on the album’s centerpiece, “Starless” and his playing is wonderful (as always). McDonald also plays on “Starless” as well as “One More Red Nightmare”. His playing is out of the fucking world amazing. He wails, especially on “Starless”.

Listening to this record quite a bit lately has me thinking… is the sax playing inspiring me a little? The RPM Challenge is less than two weeks away and it’s coming up on time for me to start recording some new music. Do I suddenly find myself wanting to play the saxophone again? I haven’t taken my alto sax out of its case since I finished the 2020 RPM Challenge. Five years. Is it time to break it out again? I think it might be. I know I can still play even if I am only about 1% of the sax player I was when I was a music major from 1989-1991 and sax was my primary instrument in school. Guitar was a hobby I played on the side, even though I spent nearly infinitely more time playing guitar than sax… which contributed to me leaving school before I graduated.

So I guess what I am trying to say is, if throughout the month of February you start hearing about me writing songs in the key of E flat or B flat instead of E and A, and you start hearing me complain about severe pain in my lips and jaw (due to not having practiced at all in the last five years), then we can probably go ahead and blame Mel Collins and the late Ian McDonald. Just saying.

New/Old Song

A new song from The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project, also known as Quarantine Tunes Volume Eight.

Volume eight is all songs written during the 2020 50/90 Challenge. I think. Volume five was all songs from the 2021 50/90, I think… those songs were better than the 2020 songs and it shows with this one. If this was one of the 50 songs that was good enough to consider re-recording then… we’re definitely scraping the bottom of the artistic barrel.

Oh well. It’s done.

New/Old song mixed and uploaded to alonetone.com.

Guitar Shake to Shuffle

I just finished putting rhythm guitar tracks onto two song demos. Look at me being musically productive!

Also, I used Hipstamatic’s Shake-To-Shuffle on my new iPhone for the first time. Wow!

We’re Going to Fail Again, Aren’t We

The band practice is on the books for 4:00pm tomorrow. I should be super psyched.

I’m not.

We’re going to get slammed with a snowstorm tomorrow afternoon. Practice is going to get snowed out.

MUTHA PUSS BUCKET!

I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but I swear that mother nature hates my guts. What a bitch!