After recording vocals on five songs this morning, I put leads on three of them tonight. I could have done more, but I decided to quit while I was ahead.
So my thumb… I hurt it weeks ago. I don’t remember how, I just woke up one day and ouch. It wasn’t bad. It was annoying, but nothing to worry about. I figured in a day or two it would be history.
Instead, it’s gotten steadily worse over time. The last couple of days it’s been really bad. Like, bad enough that I’m thinking of breaking lock down to go get an x-ray or something. Clearly there’s a bigger issue than just a boo boo.
Tonight was the first time since it started being a major problem that I tried to play the guitar. How’d it go? Okay. There was some pain, but the motions my left hand needs to do to play are not those that really kick my ass. I feel like I’m lucky, but will it get worse? Who knows.
I used my full pedal board tonight so I’ve been getting goofy with all of the toys. I used a fuzz pedal tonight, and the uni-vibe pedal and a flanger and lots of wah wah. Goofy, but fun. Just feeling good about my hand not sabotaging me. Like, whew, am I right?
I put vocals on five songs today. That is good. What is not good is that I started having gear issues. The signal started cutting out on the last few takes on the last song. Was it the microphone? Was it the microphone cable? Was it the USB interface? Was it the USB cable? Was it the USB 2 to USB C adapter? Was it the computer?
I’m guessing it’s either the USB cable or the adapter, because those are the usual suspects. I was able to get everything down, but it could be a problem in the future. We will have to see how the next car music goes, whenever that may be.
So the 50/90 website has a page that lists all participants. It gives you a few values that you can use to sort the list. One is the amount of progress you’ve made. In other words, the number of songs you’ve posted. the list shows 50 (I think?) names before you have to move on to a second page. My goal is to get my dumb ass onto that first page and keep it there until I’m done.
I just posted my 16th song. I am now the last name on the first page. Kick ass. Too bad I don’t have any more songs close to finishing. I’ll probably get booted back to page two before I even publish this post.
Anyway, I finished four songs since Saturday night. Here are the ones that sucked the least.
Martin Birch has passed away at the age of 71. Click the picture for a story (and also because it’s where I stole the image from).
You may not know who Martin Birch was, but I guarantee that if you listened to a radio at any point from 1970 onward, you have heard his work.
He was an audio engineer and a record producer. He first became well known for producing Deep Purple. Go listen to the Made in Japan album. That is probably the best sounding live album in the history of the universe and he was the engineer. He made that band sound incredible.
He was able to turn Deep Purple into an entire career. I wrote a paper on this once when I was in school. Remember those rock and roll family tree things that were popular for a while? Where it lists the names of all of the members of one band and then traces them all through every band they ever played in? Deep Purple spawned more bands than you could even believe, and every single one of them had 500 (approximate) members. Purple begat Gillan, Rainbow, Whiteshake, 100 bands that Glen Hughes played in, a couple of other things that Jon Lord and Ian Paice played for, and all of those bands had revolving door lineups and all of those people played in 100 bands each. It gets so ridiculous that eventually the Deep Purple family tree absorbs the Black Sabbath family tree. Don Airy played for Rainbow and Purple (and Whitesnake too? Maybe? Probably not) and he also played for Ozzy. Two Deep Purple members were, at different times, lead vocalists for Sabbath, and one Rainbow singer was as well (Ian Gillan, Glen Hughes, and Ronnie Dio, respectively).
This is important because Martin Birch produced pretty much all of them. All of the major ones at least. Rainbow, Whitesnake, Sabbath (during Dio’s tenure), and on and on. The guy was everywhere, and if the entire Deep Purple family tree isn’t enough famous business for you, he also produced Iron Maiden from 1982 (or was it 1981?) through 1992. Basically, all of that ground breaking music was filtered through his ears. The man is a legend and there will never be another like him.
For my money, if Made in Japan was the only record he ever worked on, he would still be a legend. Instead we have about a billion other brilliant sounding albums with his name on them.
I just put lead guitars onto four songs and rhythm guitars onto two. My ears are ringing a little, everything sounds like mush, and by the time I finished my fingers weren’t doing what I told them anymore. I think I’m done for today.
I did a little experiment. I had my first taste of a wet/dry rig. Go look up That Pedal Show on youtube and you’ll find a slew of videos talking about wet/dry. The basics are, you play through two amps and put all of your modulation and timing effects into just one amp. That way you can seriously overuse the effect, but the dry signal coming out of the second amp makes it so the sound doesn’t turn to complete mud. The end result is supposed to be an epically huge, spacious, 3D kind of overall effect.
What I did today was super simple. Of my two amps, only one has a built in tremolo effect. The Vox AC15 has one, but the Fender Bassbreaker 15 does not. So, I put some tremolo on (even though I really never use that effect at all) and gave myself a mini-wet dry. The wet (effected) amp being the Vox, and the dry (no effect) amp being the Fender.
It was really simple. Nothing Earth shattering… but it did sound pretty cool. I put it on a rhythm part for one song, but only for two measures or so, and a little tiny bit on a couple of lead parts. I normally pan the two amps completely separate for rhythm parts (one fully to the left and the other fully to the right) but for leads I usually keep them panned together (both straight down the middle, usually). I think the effect is greatly lessened when the two signals aren’t spread out. We’ll see if I lose it in the mix.
I also tried to use my cheap little pitch shift pedal on one solo. It’s a Donner Harmonic Square. I’m pretty sure it’s just a clone of an Electro Harmonix Pitch Fork. The downside is the printing on the pedal is so incredibly small that I can’t read it, even with my glasses on. I have to take a picture and zoom all the way in. It’s crazy, see?
I wanted to mix the dry signal with a pitch a seventh above, because Trevor Rabin, ya know? Unfortunately, the +/-7 setting actually is a +/-5. There doesn’t seem to be a seventh setting at all, even though the labeling on the pedal says there is. I went with an octave down, because for years and years I always had a DoD Octaplus pedal that was just an octave divider (it let the original signal through, but mixed in another pitch, one octave down). Sadly, that trusty old warrior of a pedal is dead now, but I can get the same effect with this cheap little thing (it actually tracks a little better than the Octaplus did… not to speak ill of the dead or anything). I was a little annoyed though… I wanted me some Owner of a Lonely Heart sounding stuff. Oh well.
So, here’s a picture of all my stuff. Hopefully I’ll get another mix done tonight. Not for a while though, my ears really feel like mush. I think I had my headphones up a tad too loud today.
I don’t think I like this song very much, but it’s the first song since March that doesn’t use a Klon style overdrive pedal at least a little bit. Well, it does in all the solos, but not in the rhythm. I used a Tube Screamer for the rhythm because the ghost of Stevie Ray Vaughn visited me in a dream and told me to (no he didn’t, I totally just made that up).
I was up really late last night. I had a load of laundry running and I didn’t want to fall asleep until it was done. I was also watching an episode of The Watchman and I wasn’t paying attention to the clock when I started it. It finished about 25 minutes after the laundry. Dumbass. Turns out I didn’t get to sleep until about 12:15am. My sleep numbers were pretty good* but there just wasn’t enough of it.
Seemingly unrelated, King Crimson guitarist/band leader Robert Fripp not only helped to invent what we now call Progressive Rock (with the first King Crimson Album, In the Court of the Crimson King in 1969, the point of it being the first prog record is arguable, but the arguments in favor are pretty good. For me, I tend to look at The Beatles Abby Road which came out a few weeks earlier), but he also helped to invent what we now call ambient music as well (with the 1973 release of No Pussyfooting in a collaboration with Brian Eno, under the name Fripp and Eno). He came up with a technique of using a couple of reel to reel tape decks to make loops of sound. He eventually developed a whole electronic style of playing, which he dubbed Frippertronics because he sounds like he’s one of those guys who likes giving funky names to stuff (I don’t know if that’s true or not, it just kinda seems that way. No offense meant, Robert). These days he uses a guitar synthesizer rig and some samplers to do his thing (and recently it’s been really making me want to dabble in synth pedals and loopers).
One unique (I think) aspect of a King Crimson show is that at some point before the people start showing up, Fripp will record a few minutes worth of an improvised ambient piece of music and they will play that through the sound system before the show starts. I think they loop it so it can start playing around the time the doors open, and end when the band takes the stage. Musically speaking they’re not really… ya know… musical. There isn’t a melody, and there really isn’t a harmonic structure to speak of. They are just meant to be background sounds.
So Crimson has been touring for years and years, and every show has it’s own original ambient piece. There must be a mountain of these suckers stored up somewhere. In the spirit of the Covid-19 lock downs being an existential kick in the nuts, Mr Fripp has been releasing one of these ambient pieces each week. Every Friday he puts one out via all the streaming services under the title Music for Quiet Moments. Music for Quiet Moments 15 came out today.
Why am I talking about this?
Because I have a playlist with all 15 pieces and it’s playing through the Sonos speaker in my bedroom/office right now, and as alluded to in paragraph #1, I’m pretty sleepy today.
Is it a mistake to combine these two seemingly unrelated things? Being sleepy and ambient music?
Ummmm… maybe I should switch to something noisier.
*My SleepWatch numbers for the past couple of weeks have included a string of heart rate dip values that were literally unbelievable. I did eight straight days above 20%, then one in the teens, and then six more above 20%. I’ve never had a run like that in the year-plus I’ve been paying attention. Granted, the last two nights have only been 13% each. A month ago I would have been very pleased with that. Now? It’s a let down.
Lots of music progress. I recorded rhythm guitars for (I think) five songs yesterday, wrote lyrics for two, and then today added vocals to five.
I’d like to add the stupid picture I took of the tree next to my car-music parking spot, but wordpress.com’s block editor is being a bit of a dick right now.
Never mind, wordpress.com wasn’t being a dick, I forgot to update a setting in Flickr. My bad.
So currently I have five songs ready for lead guitar, six songs ready for lyrics, and two songs ready for rhythm guitar. The total count is at 24. One shy of halfway.
