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.
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?
The microphone
The connection between the mic and the mic cable
The mic cable
The connection between the mic cable and the USB interface
The USB interface
The connection between the USB interface and the USB cable
The USB cable
The connection between the USB cable and the USB to USB C adapter
The USB to USB C adapter
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.
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.
I am absolutely not guitar shopping. I am, however, suddenly curious about lower end, sort of affordable, fully hollow electric guitars. I own a semi hollow guitar but I’ve never played a fully hollow electric.
After working on a couple of seriously atrocious song ideas tonight it’s got me wondering about the near future. The 4th of July is right around the corner, and for a musical net nerd like me, the 4th of July means 50/90.
Should I do 50/90? I’ll definitely do Record Every Month, so there’s three songs. Should I try to bang out the other 47 as well?
I’m not sure. I’ll be pulling shifts at my parents house again probably starting next week, so there’s a lot of time where I won’t be recording. I’ve used that time to put initial ideas down, and to mix, but I can’t do guitars or voices.
I guess we will have to just wait and see where my head is a couple of weeks from now.
I did it. I snuck in some guitar playing. Dinner is going to be late tonight so I went straight from work to the new Les Paul.
I worked on rhythm parts for two really terrible songs. Les Paul Standard 50s into a Rock Your Repaired Amp The Klone overdrive pedal into a Vox AC15. Life felt good for a few minutes there. Excellent.
Up next is some hamburgers cooked on the grill where life will continue to feel good for a few more minutes.
This video is a commercial but given the subject matter I don’t mind sharing it.
Gibson guitars and Alex Lifeson from Rush once designed a Les Paul model together. It was called the Axcess Les Paul, or Les Paul Axcess, or whatever. Despite Alex being pretty much the guitar god to me, and Les Pauls being my favorite guitars by far, the Axcess didn’t really do it for me. The look was just a little off, and a Les Paul with a Floyd Rose bridge just bothers me on a fundamental level. I watched Alex play them more times than I can count and he always sounded amazing, but that one just wasn’t for me.
He’s working with Epiphone now to make an affordable Axcess model. I’m sure it’s great, but again it’s not for me. This video is a four minute intro to the new guitars where he basically tells his entire history with Gibson. It’s pretty cool. The music playing is pieces of the two new instrumentals on his new website. It’s been kind of a busy week for old Lerxst.
For the record, Gibson did once release a custom shop copy of his ES-355 in a very limited quantity for an absolutely stunning price. I’d kill to get my mitts on one of those, but I’d likely have to sell my body for medial experiments in order to afford it.
The Mesa Boogie California Tweed is probably the only non-Fender amp I am seriously GASing over. It’s crazy expensive, but I hear it’s worth every penny.
It’s way out of my price range, even if we didn’t have two tuitions to pay for. Robbie just likes fantasizing about groovy gear sometimes.
We’ve seen a lot of this before. In this video, Joe Bonamassa is going to get a bunch of different sounds out of a Les Paul without stepping on pedals or messing with his amp.
I know all of this. When I was in high school I had this super loud, solid state Peavey 2×12 with a built in chorus (that I never used). It had a clean channel and a drive channel and a foot switch to swap back and forth. I didn’t use a lot of pedals, apart from a wah wah, and that amp foot switch did all of my clean/dirty work for me.
Then in 1988 or ‘89 or so, we did a gig in a parking lot. I put that huge Peavey into the back of the mini van along with the rest of the band’s gear. The foot switch was plugged into the back of the amp and in the process of squeezing everything in the plug got squashed and was unusable.
I had a ton of switching channels to do, but now I didn’t have a switch to switch with. My work around was to use the drive channel, but set my neck pickup volume way down low so that it sounded nice and clean. Then instead of using the foot switch, I just flipped the pick up switch.
These days I have pedals for all of that so I generally keep all four knobs on the guitar up full. It bothers me a little though when I see people refer to cleaning up with the volume knob as a trick. It’s just the most obvious thing there is, right? Anyone whose messed with an electric guitar through a distorted amp figures out that lowering the volume on the guitar cleans the signal… don’t they? Why does Mr Bonamassa (and countless other YouTube guitar players) make it sound like it’s news to us? I don’t get it.
I have nothing but respect for Joe Bonamassa and I would literally kill to have his chops. I actually have his signature Cry Baby Wah on the band pedal board right now. Someday I’d like to try out his signature Fuzz Face too. Joe may tell us to use the guitar instead of pedals, but I’ll be okay using pedals with his name on them for now.
This post seems to have rambled a smidge. Sorry, I’m really tired.
