Category: Recording

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!

Monday Morning, Again

The bad news is, it’s Monday again. The good news is, thanks to Independence Day it’s only a four day work week. Bliss.

I did some car singing today. June Music is done, 50/90 doesn’t start until Saturday. What did I do? The Great Re-Recording Project. Actually, in my mind I still think of it as The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project because that’s what I originally called it. The old name doesn’t quite work anymore.

Anyway, I worked on vocals for two songs. I spent a little more than an hour. When I do album in a month or demo projects like I’ve been doing I don’t mind copying and pasting vocal tracks. If a song has two choruses I sing it once and paste it everywhere else. I don’t want to do that on The Great Re-Recording Project so it takes a lot more time to finish a song. I want each note played by a human to be unique. I did copy and paste the MIDI instruments. Drums I can’t really help because it’s the GarageBand Session drummer. I might do a unique tweak to each section. Bass… I’m really thinking about redoing all of the bass parts so that I don’t copy or paste anything. We’ll see.

Anyway, I did two songs. They both sound a smidge better than the scratch tracks I already had, so it was worth it. It was, however, definitely stressful. There were a lot of people around. No one actually close, but I was most certainly not alone. I pulled into a spot at around 7:30 and there was a “work” crew two sections away. I put work in quotes because they weren’t actually working. They were just hanging out and they were pretty clearly watching me. Could they hear me? Doubtful, but I was belting as loud as my meager voice can get. Maybe? Doubtful. I think they were on the 8:00 shift with the grounds crew and were just early. There were a lot of additional people on the crew wandering around and there were cars and trucks (and a crane?) driving in and out.

A second work crew showed up at 8:00. Three cars, four or five people. They were in the same lot I was in, but on the opposite end. They were much closer than the not-working peanut gallery, but they only stayed outside for a few minutes before moving into the movie theater. Still too close for comfort though. There was probably enough time, battery, and bladder capacity for me to start working on a third song, but I bailed. There were just too many people. When I pulled out of my spot I saw a third cheering section. Two cats in an SUV only two rows behind me. Way too close for singing comfort. They were okay by social distance standards but what the hell guys, there’s a whole string of parking lots. Pick one of your own.

I’m thinking I need a new parking lot for morning singing. Either that or I have to leave the house 60-90 minutes earlier. On the way home I went to another spot to check it out. I drove up to the Tenney Castle grounds. It was mostly quiet (one jogger in the middle of the driveway with headphones on who couldn’t hear my nearly silent Hybrid car until I beeped. It was pretty funny), but I had actually forgotten that there isn’t a parking lot there. The driveway ends in a rotary. Bummer. Maybe early mornings at the library? They have a pretty remote overflow parking lot there. Maybe.

Anything else going on today? UPS? My amp is back in Out for Delivery Status with a date/time of today by 9:00pm. Should I hold my breath? Look at me. I’m totally holding my breath. Wow, I might actually turn blue from all of this holding my breath.

We did some minor furniture rearranging in some of the bed rooms last week. Over the weekend we spent some time planning for future changes as well. Nothing to report yet, but discussions are being had. Maybe the quarantinie life might lead to a slightly rearranged house. Maybe not. We’ll see. We did add a bunch of new smart light bulbs to a lot of the rooms. Most of the house already had some. Now we have more. The Internet of Things and all that. Groovy. Just don’t hack my lights, dude. M’kay?

Welp, it’s 9:00am on a Monday morning. Enough of my yappin’, let’s boogie… and by boogie I mean start the work day.

Talk to you all later.

June Music Project: Complete

11 songs, a shade over 40 minutes. Consider it done.

Back in April I could post a playlist from hearthis.at and it worked. In May it posted all right but only played the first track. Does it work in June?

ADDENDUM: Nope, it only played the first song. If you’re desperate to punish yourself, go here.

Also Ran

I think this one might be good. I think. I’m not sure. I’m really close to it, but I am more excited about this than any song I’ve worked on since RPM in 2019.

Is it good? No… don’t tell me. Let me be excited for a while. Don’t burst my idiot bubble.

June Tracking: Complete

All of the tracking for the 11 June project songs is complete. Today I recorded the last two vocals, the last four lead guitars, and finished one mix.

The Klon KTR into the overdrive side of the Keeley D&M drive really clicked for me for the first time today. Also, the Bonamassa signature Crybaby is really great. The more I use it, the more I like it, and I’ve been using it a lot.

I’ve got five songs to mix and then we start looking forward to the kick off of 50/90 on July 4th. Yikes!

Relating to Sheldon Cooper

Ever watch The Big Bang Theory? You know the character Sheldon Cooper? I found myself relating to him this morning, intensely.

You see this truck?

See it? Parked there in the parking lot like it’s no big thing?

Its in my spot.

I repeat, its in my spot.

Its totally sitting there right on the spot that I go to when I do my morning parking lot vocal recording sessions. Just sitting there like some smug son of a bitch, taking up my god damned spot!

I had to move to the other side of the lot to get the required privacy.

It threw everything out of whack (no it didn’t). It caused me to screw up 10 times more often than usual (no it didn’t, I just sucked a tiny bit more than usual and I’m blaming it on the parking spot). It caused me to even have to change one of the melodies I’d written out ahead of time because the parking lot made my vocal range a couple of steps smaller (no it didn’t, again, I just suck).

I had an audience though, the poor suckers (there were two of them even though you can only see one).

The good news is, I am done with vocals for June music. I only had two more to do and I struggled with both of them, but they are done. I thought about maybe doing a song or two from the re-recording project while I was out on the town, but I decided not too. The mojo was not with me today.

I took a roundabout route home instead so that I could take a picture of the ugly clock.

299/365

For June Music I have five songs already mixed, two more are ready to mix, and four still need lead guitars. I might have this thing finished by the 29th again. That would be cool.