Category: Music

I Don’t Know… I Don’t Want It

Beat…

Adrian Belew and Tony Levin were in King Crimson (the first time) from 1981 through 1984. The two of them have recruited two world class musicians to play the music from that time period once again. On drums they have Danny Carey from Tool. I am not terribly well versed in Tool’s catalog, but what I do know is good and he seems like a good choice to cover for the legendary Bill Bruford. The other new guy… I don’t know.

I should be absolutely stoked for this new band. Adrian Belew is a fantastic guitar player. He’s one of the most innovative, original musicians ever. He’s a giant. Tony Levin is literally as good as a human being can get. Whether it’s on the bass guitar or the Chapman Stick, or any other chunk of wood with strings on it, he’s as good as it gets. He’s one of, possibly THE, most talented musicians on the planet Earth at this time. I’ve seen him live twice, once just before the pandemic hit when he was playing in the last version of King Crimson, and once back in 1988 (or was it 1989?) with Yes spinoff Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe. I really wanted to see him with Peter Gabriel back in September but we went to Disney World and caught Covid-19 instead.

Belew, Levin, Carey… all people I should be salivating over the chance of seeing them live on stage together. It’s that fourth guy though…

Is Steve Vai one of the most talented guitarists in the history of wood and strings? Yes, that’s a fair statement. Is Steve Vai a musical genius? Yeah, probably. I just… I just don’t really care for his music, that’s all. To me, he’s sort of in the same boat as Joe Satriani. I heard once that he actually took lessons from Joe Satriani at one point. I saw Satriani live once. He opened for Deep Purple. There was no denying his talent. No denying he is an astonishing guitar player. Having said that though, two songs into his set I was completely bored. Enormous talent. Staggering technique. But no actual interesting music. None.

Vai played with David Lee Roth and Whitesnake back in the 80’s. His ability was jaw dropping. His actual music? I’m sorry but it was just boring. It was style over substance in the worst way. That 1981-84 period of King Crimson is very important to me. I am positive that Steve Vai is going to do amazing things with it. I am also sure that I will be bored to tears by all of it.

I honestly feel terrible that I feel this way. I should be giddy with glee over this new band. I’m not. I just can’t. It makes me sad, it really does. My sincere apologies to Misters Belew, Levin, and Carey. And to Mister Vai too. I just can’t get over my preconceptions. I am really sorry.

Something to Play Along With

Just saving this for later, as this blog sometimes serves as a browser/machine independent collection of bookmarks for me…

That’s a playlist of my band rehearsing each of the songs currently on our new-singer-audition-to-do-list. I haven’t listened to any of it yet so I don’t even know if the takes are complete or not, and I don’t know if they sound good enough to actually make anything out, and I don’t know if we made any colossal screw ups or anything.

In other words, this playlist might be a waste of time, but I did it during my lunch break so it is morally on the up and up.

I have a wordpress.com blog for the old band too. Maybe I’ll post it there for funzies.

Which Guitar?

I have two musical goals for tonight after work.

First: Put together a playlist of the songs on our potential-singer-audition-songs list so that I can start practicing the holy hell out of them.

Second: Decide which guitar I want to use for the band’s come back work. As of right now I am leaning toward the birthday Les Paul that my wife bought me for my 50th birthday almost three years ago. I’ve been playing the two 70’s Gibsons that I had all of the repair work done on since November or so, but I think I want to start the return-to-the-band process with my newest guitar.

Whatever guitar I decide to use for the band’s comeback (which is scheduled to start this coming Sunday) is going to need new strings. I have a couple of boxes here, but I might need to order some more from the Amazonians today. We’ll see.

It’s time to start focusing on getting the band running again. I’m mentally ready for it, but not quite ready from a guitar playing ability standpoint. I have a lot of rust to shake off.

These are pictures I took for today’s photo a day challenge, but they are not the guitar I am talking about. Oh well.

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215/365
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Plans for Tomorrow

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. We have one plan for the day but I have a few additional things I want to get to.

  1. Wake up and do my daily exercise
  2. Eat breakfast
  3. Grab my laptop, a microphone, a USB audio interface, and a pair of headphones and jump into the car, drive someplace quiet, and record vocals for my two songs for this month’s Record Every Month Challenge
  4. Come home and take a shower and shave
  5. Put lead guitars onto the same two songs
  6. Make lunch for me and my beloved wife
  7. Mix one of those two songs
  8. Go to my father’s for Easter Dinner. Maybe watch a couple of innings of the Red Sox game
  9. Go home, spend some quality time hanging out with my beloved wife
  10. Mix the other song
  11. Sleep

I think I can manage that.

Until then, I am worried about one of the cats. Lilly. About half an hour ago she made a ton of noise. She was running around like crazy, crashing into things and skidding all over the tiled floor. She somehow got wrapped up in a plastic bag and was absolutely freaking out trying to get untangled. She ran into the bed room where I was sitting up in bed and watching something on my laptop. She then dashed out again and went into hiding. I can’t find her anywhere. I’m worried that she might have hurt herself in her struggles. I’m worried that she might have wrapped the plastic bag around her neck. She hid herself so well though that I can’t seem to find her anywhere. I’m sure she’s okay, but I would like to find her to know for sure.

Poor kitty.

Musically Good

I was sitting in the living room working on melodies and lyrics for the two Record Every Month songs when my band’s drummer threw out a list of songs he thinks we should use for singer auditions.

I was going to kick off the discussion over the weekend if one of the other guys didn’t do it sooner. I am really glad someone did it sooner. I was starting to be nervous that maybe I was the only one of us still invested. I’m not. Hear me breathing that huge sigh of relief.

The list of songs he suggested is good. Most of what I was going to suggest is on it. A couple I wanted were not, but I can let the other guys talk me out of them. It’s all good.

Progress is a good thing.

Happy Dishwasher Day

We had a new dishwasher installed today. I am in the office so I have only seen pictures so far. I want to take it for a spin when I get home. I’ll dirty up some dishes if I need to.

I was in the office yesterday. I’ll be in the office tomorrow. Then I am at home on Friday, which is good because a plumber is coming on Friday. It never ends, kids. It never ends. Totally worth it though.

Change of subject: I watched 3 Body Problem on Netflix. I enjoyed it. I was warned that episode five was a mind blower and sure enough it was. I wonder if people who read the original books enjoyed it too. It read somewhere that it was considered to be an un-adaptable book and the fear was that people who read the book would hate the show. I wonder if that’s true. I wonder how moving much of the focus away from China would affect people’s opinions. I don’t know that I am curious enough to try and read the book, but maybe. I feel the same way about Foundation on AppleTV+. I enjoyed the show, but did I enjoy it enough to give the Azimov books a go? I don’t know.

Change of subject: This coming Sunday is Easter. Easter doesn’t have any real meaning for me anymore. Sorry, not sorry. We’ll have dinner with my father. The rest of my focus this weekend will hopefully be music. I have two songs for the March edition of Record Every Month to finish and there is a lot left to do on both of them. Here’s hoping I’ll get everything done. I won’t be distracted by the start of the Red Sox season though. Some moron decided to have Boston start the season on the West coast with all of the games being night games. That means the first handful of games this season won’t start until 10pm for Red Sox fans. Screw that.

Okay, here’s today’s bad photo a day challenge picture. No reason, just cause.

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209/365

I’ll be in the office tomorrow too so expect number 210 of 365 to be another thoughtless picture of whatever I happen to see in the cellar while doing my daily exercise at 5:00am.

We Need a Plan – Follow Up

On Sunday I wrote a post about trying to form a plan for moving forward with my band. I wrote out what I thought we might do to find a new singer and hold auditions and all of that fun stuff. I said I was going to send it to the other two guys in the band and that I would probably do it some time on Monday… then I immediately sent them what I had written. It wasn’t the next day, it was the next minute.

Both Mike the Bass Player and Kevin the Drummer agreed with all of it. The first of our singer-audition-preparation-practice will be a week from Sunday. One week after Easter. Over the intervening week and a half I’ll get the conversation started regarding which songs we should work on. I want at least five and at most 10. Enough to give potential new singers something to work with, but not enough to overwhelm us as we try to shake the rust off. We should try and be diverse in singing styles but I am thinking we should stay away from Bon Scott. Something about Greg the Former Singer allowed him to handle Bon Scott era AC/DC while most normal humans probably couldn’t deal with that high pitched screechiness. Greg didn’t sound like Bon Scott at all, yet somehow he could do it. Let’s not ask any potential new singers to go there. Okay… maybe we brush up one song just in case someone is feeling ambitious.

We also need to figure out the P.A. situation. We had a little one that was barely powerful enough to get a voice loud enough to be heard over the drums. That little dinky P.A. thing was replaced by something Greg bought. We don’t have that anymore because… ya know… it is Greg’s, not ours. Hopefully the little dinky thing still works.

So the ball will start rolling again in 12 days. I’ll likely share every single thought the three of us have as we work toward the next step. You know how it is for oversharing nerds like me.

How About a New Mix

Hey, I mixed one of the songs that I put the vocals onto yesterday and the lead guitars onto today. It’s a song from the RPM Challenge a few years ago that is now part of The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project, aka Quarantine Tunes Volume Seven.

I’m not sold on the mix, but when am I ever sold on something I’ve mixed?

More Recording

I finished recording all of the guitar tracks I wanted to do yesterday but didn’t end up having time for. Hooray!

I played through a speaker again, but unlike yesterday I had to lower the volume to a tolerable level. I had the house to myself yesterday so I could approach ear-bleeding volume. Today my wife, the love of my life Jen, is home so I had to tone it down a lot. That’s okay. It’s still more fun playing through a speaker than playing direct into the computer.

I put rhythm guitars onto one song for the Record Every Month Challenge, and lead guitars onto three songs for my re-recording old songs project, aka The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project, or also aka Quarantine Tunes.

My leads weren’t good, but they were better than most of the stuff I’ve recorded of late.

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Dig the blurry light on the amplifier!
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We Need a Plan

I need to fix what’s left of my band. I don’t know how. I think we need to come up with a plan. Something we can work through that will result in getting everything moving again.

We need a singer. I tried craigslist and got a surprising number of responses, but we weren’t organized enough to act on any of it. Here’s what I am going to suggest to the other two guys…

  • The three of us pick a handful of songs. Maybe 5-10. They will be our singer-audition songs.
  • The three of us start practicing again. Once a week. We rehearse the holy hell out of those 5-10 songs for a month or so, maybe a little longer. We get them to where we can play them in our sleep.
  • We put up another craigslist add. This one will have the responses forwarded to all three of us. If anyone answers the add we immediately schedule an audition. We give them the list of songs and give them a week, two weeks tops, to work on them and then we all get together.
  • Eventually we offer the job to one of two people and then we’re off and running.

I am going to send this list to Mike the Bass Player and Kevin the Drummer, probably tomorrow at some point. Hopefully they’ll be up for it and we can get things moving in the right direction again.