One Plus One is Two Songs!

A song from back in 2010 that probably wasn’t any good then and still isn’t now but it’s fun to play so I brought it back to life.

Two Quarantine Tunes complete! It’s a miracle, babie!

Re-Recording Mix #1!!

It took six years, but The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project finally has a finished song! I never thought this day would come!

It Works

Still pretty shocked that it all works.

New Amp Stuff

The new (used) Vox AC15 has made it onto The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project! How’d it go?

Weirdly.

It’s different. I was having a struggle across the board. The guitar, the strings, the tone, the amp, everything seemed off tonight. My playing was less than stellar. I may end up redoing both of the songs I finished tonight.

Oh yeah, did I mention that I finished the tracking on two of the re-recording project songs? We’ll see if I am still happy tomorrow. Also, I want to mess with the drums on both of them and maybe redo the bass on both of them too. We’ll see.

The important point right now is that the new (used) AC15 is here and it has been recorded! WOOHOO

Car Music: Day Three

All eight songs planned for volume 1 of The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project have vocals! Are the newly recorded vocals better than the scratch vocals I recorded years ago so that I could just have them as a guide? No. They sound pretty much exactly the same. In fact, one of the goals of this project was to improve the performance over the original RPM/50-90/NaSoAlMo demos. Did I do that? No. The end result is going to sound exactly the same as all the other garbage I record.

I don’t care.

I did three songs today. I saved the easiest song for last. Mistake. The last time I sang that particular song was when I recorded a quick and dirty scratch take back when this whole thing started in 2015. I did the lead and the harmony. Today I cranked out the lead like I’d been practicing it for years (I haven’t. I literally just said I hadn’t sung the song since 2015). The harmony though….

It’s been five years. Was the highest note just a hair out of my range five years ago? It probably was. I probably had to squeak to get the scratch track down. Nothing in the intervening half-decade changed to make me be able to hit that one high note without hurting myself. If anything, my range is a touch smaller now and it’s even harder.

What is the moral of the story?

If you’re a musician………..

PRACTICE!

Here’s a picture of the clock from downtown, for no reason at all other than I drove past it 15 minutes ago.

Two Amps

None of it is actually hooked up yet, but once 50/90 starts up my demos will once again include a two amplifier rig. I did this for RPM back in February and it was sweet. This time it’s two 15 watt amps. I’m looking forward to working with this set up.

More Car Music

I’ve got this window of time after finishing June’s music but before 50/90 starts and I’m filling it with The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project. This morning before work, for the second day in a row I did car vocals.

I went to the same strip mall but parked in a different spot. I was closer to the road and closer to the building, but much further away from all of yesterday’s distractions.

As was alluded to in the previous post, I tried to work out which of the remaining six songs I wanted to work on today. I was gunning for two but secretly hoping for three (he says secretly… as if there was some James Bond secret agent shit going on here instead of a dumb fat ass yelling at a microphone. Could he BE any douchier?). I picked my two and headed out.

When I parked the car I took out my computer, plugged in some headphones, plugged in the mic interface, opened up the GarageBand file, added a mic track, opened up the notepad to see the lyrics and… the lyrics weren’t there. What the ever loving unprepared ef?

For a second I thought about listening to the scratch vocal tracks and typing them out. Then I thought, screw that and moved on to the next song. I blew through it pretty quick and then picked another song. The melody was easy, but it’s very shouty. Much shoutier than I usually do. I finished it reasonably quickly and then figured I’d pack up.

But….

I still had time. I still had laptop battery charge. Most importantly, I still had room in my bladder (more often than not car vocal sessions end due to having to pee. Welcome to the magic factory, kids). What the hell, I could do one more. Is there something left that doesn’t have a lot of harmony tracks or overlapping goofiness? There’s one… it’s really shouty though. Maybe the shoutiest song I’ve ever come up with. Can I do it? I’m already pretty tired from the last one.

My mind thought back to The Beatles recording their first album, Please Please Me. They saved Twist and Shout for last because John Lennon wasn’t feeling well and they knew if he screamed his way though that song he’d have nothing left for anything else.

Screw it! I’m doing it!

I got three songs worth of vocals done today. That makes five in total. Quarantine Tunes Volume 1 will have eight songs. Only three more to go.

What to Do

I’m up, showered, ready to go. The dinner dishes are in the new dishwasher, the trash barrels are out on the street ready for today’s pickup, the bed is made.

Time for some car music. Which songs should I work on today (he said rhetorically because no one else knows which songs are in the pipeline and even if they did, not a soul on Earth would give the slightest fuck).

To the strip mall parking lot I go!