Category: Music

Day Off Tomorrow

I’m off work tomorrow. I don’t have anything planned, I just needed to take a day off to get my accrued PTO below a certain number to stop the accrual from maxing out. It’s a long story.

I booked it a few weeks ago without knowing that it would end up being a bad day to be out. I might stealthily pop in and make sure everything is okay. Maybe.

What else should I do? Car music in the morning is a given. Mixing a tune or two is also pretty much guaranteed. What else? There aren’t any tv shows that I’m not caught up on. At least I don’t think there are… are there?

I might play some hockey on the PS4. Maybe find a first person shooter with lots of cheat codes? Something like that?

Who knows. Maybe I’ll just rewatch Loki or season two of The Mandalorian.

The nerdy possibilities are endless.

Neil Young is The Man

I’ve always liked Neil Young, but I never really dove into his music the way some people do. I know people whose obsession with Neil Young rivals my obsession with Rush*. I never dug that deep. Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush and Harvest and Deja Vu are friggin masterpieces. I can’t really tell you what they are musically because Neil Young is such his own thing that it defies categorization, but I can tell you that they are pretty much perfect. After that my knowledge of his career is kind of spotty.

Yesterday though, Neil proved that he is indisputably The Man. He sent a letter to his management and his label telling them to remove his music from Spotify in protest of Spotify hosting Joe Rogan’s podcast. Rogan spews Covid disinformation and puts Spotify customers at risk. Neil Young’s letter says that Spotify can have him or they can have Rogan but they can’t have both.

Kick ass. Neil Young: The Man. If I were wearing a cap right now I would 100% be tipping it to him.

In a world of schmucks like Eric Clapton, be Neil Young.

*Rush did a Neil Young song on their covers EP. Buffalo Springfield’s Mr Soul. That really doesn’t mean anything at all, I just feel happy that it happened. They actually did two Buffalo Springfield songs on that EP but the other was a Stephen Stills song. They covered For What it’s Worth. I don’t know if Neil Young (or Stephen Stills for that matter) ever heard the covers, but I hope he (they) did and I hope he (they) dug them. I guess I just like the idea of knowing that artists I admire also admire each other. I think that’s a happy thought.

Music Nerd Meets Stats Nerd

Okay, this post is going to be dumb. Just making that claim ahead of time. Transparency, right?

Right.

The Great 2015 Re-recording project was meant to take songs from older music projects and update/upgrade them. Last night I was wondering, which old projects contributed the most songs? In other words, out of all the crap I’ve done, which ones had the best songs?

So I made a spreadsheet because I am a fricken nerd.

There are six Quarantine Tunes projects. Number five is all from this year’s 50/90 so it really doesn’t count. For the other five projects there are a total of 47 songs, which is WAY more than I was originally planning.

Here’s the breakdown of where they all came from:

Original ProjectNumber of Songs
2007 RPM Challenge2
2008 Song Fight1
2009 RPM Challenge2
2010 RPM Challenge3
2011 Test Drive GarageBand for Mac2
2011 RPM Challenge2
2013 NaSoAlMo1
2013 RPM Challenge2
2014 50/905
2014 April Music2
2014 June Music3
2014 RPM Challenge3
2015 RPM Challenge2
2016 50/901
2016 RPM Challenge6
2017 RPM Challenge1
2018 RPM Challenge1
2019 Album in a Day1
2019 RPM Challenge1
2020 50/901
2020 June Music1
2020 RPM Challenge2
2021 RPM Challenge1
2012 RPM Challenge*1

There you have it. The 2016 RPM Challenge has contributed six songs for the win. The 2014 50/90 is a close second with five. Good work, folks! Now I have all the facts. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle**.

*Yes… when I was typing all of that garbage out I missed an entry. Sadly, the wordpress.com editor’s table function doesn’t let me insert a row, so I stuck it on the end. Yeah… I suck.

**Go Joe!

Discord Doesn’t Like Me

I don’t like Discord. I know that makes me sound old, but it’s just an AOL chat room so it’s not that I am old, it’s that I’ve been there and done that and don’t want to do it again.

The RPM Challenge forums no longer exist as they have been replaced by a Discord server. Okay. I’ll play along.

There I was, typing in a post to the random chat board, and either the app on my machine crashed or the server went down. Like… right in the middle of typing!

Okay, we have established that I don’t like Discord. Now it seems that Discord doesn’t like me either. Well screw you, Chuck!

On an unrelated note, Bellana and her roommate posted another video. They went to Belgium. Just a spur of the moment trip to Brussels. How cool is that? How cool is the EU?

Maybe I’ll share the video one of these days.

On another unrelated note, why is the last post I made last night displaying in a box? Is this post going to display in a box? Did I accidentally click a put-your-post-in-a-box button? I don’t know. Let’s publish this puppy and see what happens!

ADDENDUM: I didn’t click a put-your-post-in-a-box button, but I did post the previous update while I was about 95% asleep and I did accidentally click a stick-this-to-the-top-of-your-page checkbox. It should be fixed now.

Goodnight

The Bruins lost tonight. I didn’t get any music done. I’m not planning on car music tomorrow. I got a chunk of my work project done but not enough to feel comfortable.

I’m going to bed. I can’t keep my eyes open.

Good night, universe. Talk to you tomorrow.

Another RPM Gimmick Idea

I pretty much always use the same time effects on all of my tracks when I mix a song. I like a super short slap back echo on vocal tracks, a dotted eighth note delay on lead guitars, and a short room style reverb on everything. I don’t want my mixes to sound dry, but I do like them to sound almost dry. I want the mixes to sound like they could be a band playing in a small club or a rehearsal room. For as long as I’ve been doing this stuff, that’s been my go-to goal.

I was listening to some Rush the other day. Moving Pictures. I was kinda taken by the reverb. There is a lot of reverb on those tracks. It’s never overpowering or in your face, but it’s there. Maybe this years RPM will include a little experimenting with different reverb types and lengths.

Maybe.

Two Fun Monday Things

I just want to add a quick post to mention two things that just happened because they are funny and weird and worth mentioning on a pointless blog like this.

I’ve mentioned before that I like to listen to podcasts while I work. I play them through the Apple HomePod Minis in the bedroom. Today when I tried to connect to them via Airplay they weren’t available. I asked Siri to tell me the weather and it came back saying it wasn’t connected to the internet. Our HomePods are setup through Jen’s Home app so I told her and when she gets a chance she’ll look at it.

A few minutes later, I am sitting at my desk working and suddenly, seemingly at random, Deep Purple’s Space Truckin’ comes roaring out of the HomePods. Oh yeah, it does! Come on, let’s go space truckin’ babie!

I know why it happened, but it’s just really funny that it did. Once the song was over it started playing some horrid Aerosmith song and I couldn’t get that bastard shut off fast enough. The Purple song though, that was a treat.

A few minutes after that I decided to water the plants. Literally, that’s not a urination reference. I literally watered the plants. I have a candle burning on the same table the plants sit on. As I was watering one particular plant I smelled smoke. I then saw smoke. Huh? Oh, it’s just my arm. It was over the candle and my arm hairs were singeing off. That’s all. Nothing major. No damage done… except to a few arm hairs. I can still sort of smell it though.

All of this before 10:00am

Lazy Sunday

It’s Sunday and Jen and I are just hanging out in the office. We’re in the midst of a grande experiment to improve one facet of our existence. It’s something incredibly important that everyone deals with every day……..

Pillows.

We’re trying to up our pillow game, big time. Jen ordered some pillows the other day and we used them last night. They were very firm. Much firmer than we’ve ever used before. Jen didn’t like them. I haven’t really decided yet. Too firm? Maybe. Too firm to use? I don’t know. We are trying another set of pillows next that are a little squishier. I expect they will be Goldilox: just right.

What else is going on? I am going to have a painful week at work this week, so I’m enjoying the calm today. I’ll pay for it later. I have another day off this week too. Wednesday. That’s three consecutive Wednesdays I’ve been out of work. The other two had actual reasons. This week is just because I had to burn eight hours of vacation time in order to avoid maxing out at the end of the month. I will likely have to do a couple of days in February too, but at least I can use the RPM Challenge as my excuse.

I am a little sad today. A few weeks ago I ordered a pile of new clothes. Two t-shirts didn’t come quickly, but they finally came at the end of last week. The two shirts came from the Rush Backstage store. Yup. I’m wearing my fav band on a t-shirt. Unfortunately, the first of the two that I’ve tried on is really small. It has made me sad. I guess I am going to have to go through a weight loss surgery process in order to get smaller so the shirt will fit. I’m guessing the second band shirt is going to be small too, but I haven’t tried it on yet.

I can’t think of anything else to write about. Jen picked up a copy of NHL ’22 and I started playing it yesterday. Maybe I’ll sneak in another game tonight. I’m playing through the Spengler Cup. I have no idea how that tournament works, but I haven’t lost a game yet. I have it on the lowest difficulty level though, so if I lose a game it means I royally suck.

Okay. Ms Patches just came into the room and she’s meowing for attention. I think I’ll post this and go pet her. Bye for now.

Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel

Right, so I did four rounds of re-recording old songs, then a round of re-recording recent songs, and now one more round of old songs. I am absolutely scraping the bottom of the barrel here, and the barrel isn’t exactly what you’d call deep.

This one comes from the failed 2010 RPM Challenge, which wasn’t finished until late summer 2011, along with the failed 2011 RPM Challenge. It’s slow, it’s dumb, and it’s ridiculously simple, but it’s got a lot of fuzz on it so it’s okay in my book.

Guitar Playing is Fun

I chased this morning’s car vocals with some guitar playing. Bad guitar playing, but better than my usual crap. Well… maybe not that much better. Whatever.

I put leads on three songs. Volume six of the Great 2015 Re-Recording Project now has four songs ready to mix and only two more in the pipeline that aren’t ready to mix. Maybe I’ll mix a song tonight. That’d be fun, wouldn’t it?

Pictures!