Category: Music

What Am I Doing?

What am I doing? I don’t know. I feel like the universe is in a weird place right now (yes, I know that mathematically that sentence does not make sense). I don’t know.

I had the opportunity to play my guitar tonight and I sat on my ass on the couch watching TV. I watched an episode of Torchwood. I’m trying to get back into that. While I was on the AppleTV app formerly known as HBO Max I figured I’d maybe start watching The Leftovers again. I watched the first episode. I’ll go to my grave saying that the second season of that show is television perfection. The first and third seasons are great too. The first season is just so soul crushingly depressing though. It is tough to get through and I suspect that watching one episode is part of the reason why I feel like I am in a screwy state of mind right now.

The point of all of this though is that I could have played guitar tonight and I did not. Ugh.

I had two slices of a small pizza for dinner tonight. The second one came back for another view. Oh yeah, TMI Alert here. Yeah. It went down, but it didn’t stay down. Shit. I ate too much too fast and paid the price.

I’m on the youtubes right now watching a photography channel. It’s a pro photographer telling me I should use Aperture Priority instead of Manual Mode. But what if I want to use Manual Mode? I use Aperture Priority a lot with one of my film cameras. The term Aperture Priority wasn’t invented yet when the camera was built, it’s called Auto on the camera, but it’s the same thing.. I use it because the light meter inside the view finder is often hard to read. I like using Manual though. It makes me feel like I know what I am doing even though I don’t really know what I’m doing. The video also says to keep the aperture away from the extremes. Don’t use f2.0 or f16, use f5.6 or f8. You don’t get the blurry background as much as you do with f2, but you get some which is more than f16 gives. The video says the images will be clearer in the middle ground apertures. I think I had figured that one out on my own and was starting to come around to this way of thinking. Then again… I really dig all that blurry background.

Miss Robin Sparkles says hello.

It’s Monday night, just about bed time. Almost 10:00pm. At this time four days from now we’ll be about seven hours into our road trip to Florida. That’s the main reason why I am in such a weird headspace tonight. I just want to go. I want to leave now. I don’t want to worry about work or anything outside of travel. I just want to go. I have a shit load of stuff to do before we go, but I just want to go.

Ugh… I should just go to bed.

Looking ahead to tomorrow. There is likely going to be an NHL predictions post for the third round. I am hoping the Edmonton Oilers will win their game seven tonight against Vancouver. If that happens there will be exactly one team that I kinda like in the Conference Finals. If they lose, there will be three teams I hate one one team I don’t care about. My heart is officially no longer in the NHL playoffs at all.

Also, expect lots of posts where I talk about how I just want to jump in the car with Jen, my wife, and head out on our trip. I have vacation-itis right now. Big time.

Music Fail

I wrote a post the other day detailing all of the musical stuff I wanted to get done over the weekend. Care to guess how much I accomplished? Go on, guess. Did you guess absolutely nothing? If you did, you guessed correctly. Good work.

Nothing.

There was a facebook messenger chat yesterday where our former singer, who I wasn’t sure if he wanted back into the band or not, started talking about where to book gigs. Does that mean he officially wants back in? Feels that way to me! Here’s hoping our singer search has ended. I’ll let you know.

Anyway, I took pictures this morning in the hopes they will guilt me into playing some guitar tomorrow before work. Cross those fingers, Mr. Red Head.

My pedal board is dusty again.
I switched on the amp for the benefit of the photo, but I didn’t take it out of standby mode and switched it off right away.

Musical Notes for This Week

This is a to do list… read the title… it is a pun, my friends. Get it? I made a pun! It’s punny. It’s puntastic.

Ugh.

The current home recording music project is to take 10 songs from the 2020 Fifty Songs in 90 Days Challenge, edit them, rearrange them, rewrite them, and completely re-record them. When I punched out of work last night I had the 10 songs picked out. One is mixed and finished. Five are completely recorded but still need to be mixed. The other four hadn’t been touched.

Last night while sitting up in bed I took one of them and got as far as finishing the MIDI music bed. Bass, drums, arrangement, song form changes, all done. This morning after I finished today’s errands I cranked out the other three. Now I have four songs ready for rhythm guitars.

Best case scenario is that I track all of the rhythm guitars tomorrow. I work in the office on Monday so nothing is happening then. Tuesday morning before work should be car music where I track all of the vocals. Wednesday is back in the office. Thursday is lead guitars before work. At that point I will have all tracking done for all 10 songs before we leave for Florida.

Yeah. Let’s see if we can pull this off.

Note: It is 99% certain that I will not pull this off. When it comes to the musical planning stage, Robert is not terribly reliable.

Unrelated musical note… one of the reasons my band’s singer quit was because he moved to Maine. He told us yesterday that he’s moved back to the Merrimack Valley. He also mentioned getting “the itch.” Now is that an itch to just have one band practice just for fun, or is it an itch to get back into the band? I don’t know but I am thinking about maybe being hopeful that our singer search could be over. It’s probably not, but if I can’t be optimistic about the Bruins anymore this year, then I’ll be optimistic about this.

Sneaky Guitar

I managed to sneak in some guitar playing today in between my doctors appointment and punching in to work. The recording project I am trying to work through right now had three songs that needed lead guitar tracks. I finished off all three of them. My playing was poor at best, but who cares. Bad playing is better than no playing, right?

Here’s where things get super nerdy. I had three songs that needed work… and I used a different guitar on each song. My only regret is that I didn’t have a forth song to work on so I didn’t get to use all four of my guitars. Oh well. In further nerd news, I took a picture of each guitar with my Nikon Z5 and… well… nerd… I took a selfie with my iPhone of me playing each guitar too. Thanks, camera app on my Apple Watch that has a timer built into it.

DSC_2361
Gibson ES-335 Pro
Nerd playing a Gibson ES-335 Pro
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Gibson Les Paul Standard 50’s
Nerd playing a Gibson Les Paul Standard 50’s
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Gibson Les Paul Custom
Nerd playing a Gibson Les Paul Custom

Not Today, Maybe Tomorrow

No guitar playing today. It’s an office day and I didn’t have time.

Tomorrow though? Maybe? Not at 100 decibels like on Wednesday, but maybe? We’ll see. There’s stuff on the to do list that has to come first, but maybe…

253/365
253/365

Also, unrelated… cats… in silhouette.

Thanks for Nothing, Bruins

6-1? They lost 6-1? On my fucking birthday? Thanks for nothing, Bruins. Way to kick a red head when he’s down. Damn it!

As the hockey world was imploding all over the state of Florida, I tried to ease my pain by mixing a song. I think it sounds okay. It probably doesn’t, but I am trying to be nicer to myself now that I am 53 years old and shit.

This is the first of probably 10 songs that will make up the eighth round of The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project, aka Quarantine Tunes Volume Eight, aka the Best of the 2020 50/90 Challenge (as all 10 songs are from that project, similar to how Quarantine Tunes Volume Five was all songs from the 2021 50/90 Challenge… which was WAY better than 2020).

Friggin’ Bruins ruining my friggin’ birthday. Jerks.

My Ears are Killing Me

I said I was going to celebrate my 53rd birthday with a work-on-music day and that’s just what I’ve done.

I have worked on new recordings of five old songs. Two songs got lead guitar tracks. Two songs got rhythm guitar tracks and vocals. One final song got bass, drums, rhythm guitars, and vocals. I don’t know if the clock is going to cooperate or not, but the three songs that did not get lead guitars today might still get lead guitars today.

I was home alone for all of this guitar playing… so I played through my Fender Deluxe Reverb… the best amp I’ve ever owned… and I played loud. Very loud. The decibel meter on my Apple Watch topped 100 db once. Yeah. My ears are killing me. Oh glorious noise!

251/365

Robin seems pretty sad about the news about Steve Albini but she agrees that playing the guitar at a disturbing volume is as good a way to honor his memory as any.