I believe it was Ringo Starr who said it best when he said, “I GOT BLISTERS ON ME FINGERS!”
At least I think that was Ringo.
Anyway. I’ve always found playing an acoustic guitar is more of a work out for the arms than playing electric, and boy are my arms getting tired. (No actual blisters yet though)
I’ve mentioned that we’re going on a trip to Disney World soon. I’ve also mentioned that my foot has been all screwed up and painful lately. I may have mentioned that I sometimes have a lot of back pain too.
The foot has been okay of late and the back pain hasn’t been much of an issue, but I get sore and tired pretty quickly and there is going to be miles upon miles of Disney walking so… I started going to the gym. I’ve been three times this week.
Now before you get all pissy, this isn’t going to be one of those lets all get healthy kinda posts. Screw that, this is about music.
When I go to the gym I almost always just walk on the treadmill until my foot or my back start complaining. It doesn’t take long. I’ve been shooting for 15 minutes to start with. Hey, screw you and your in-shape-body, stop laughing at me! Bullies. Anyway, I always bring my phone and my air pods (I used to bring ear buds but let’s embrace modern technology!) and I listen to music. I always hope that I can just let myself focus on whatever I’m listening to and not even think about the amount of time I’ve been treadmillin’. It never happens though.
Until today.
Today I put on that stupid Spotify playlist that I added to the side panel over there —-> yesterday. The plan was to put 8-10 songs that I’ve been in the mood for lately onto said playlist and updated it every so often. So much for that, it’s about 20 hours long now. Sorry. My plan is to shuffle it, but that is redundant since I only have a free account and that means anything on my phone is shuffled. Fine by me.
So there I am, walking along, listening to music, not being distracted from the clock slowly ticking upward toward the goal of 15 minutes. Then it happened. The shuffle brought me to “Still Got the Blues” by Gary Moore and I just got lost in it. That song is perfect, that recording is perfect, that guitar playing is perfect, that song is perfect (I think I said that already). I let it take me to where ever it needed to take me and the next thing I knew I had been walking for 20 minutes.
Thanks, Gary. Rest in Peace, Sir. I don’t know if you were playing Peter Green’s ’59 Les Paul standard on that one or not (the guitar that is affectionately known as Greenie and is currently owned by Kirk Hammett of Metalica) but I am choosing to believe you did and that is part of why the tone is just perfect.
Anyway, here are some Spicket River pictures and one from downtown Methuen because it’s Saturday and that’s what I do on Saturday…
As I mentioned in a couple of posts yesterday, we are celebrating my beloved bride’s birthday this weekend. She asked for two things: One, to stay in her PJ’s all weekend, and two, for me to let her work all weekend. I will make it happen! I have a few chores to do this weekend, and I need to go grocery shopping. The rest of the time is (hopefully) going to be spent on RPM (probably not though, let’s be realistic). In fact, I’m going to go spend a few minutes recording some acoustic guitar right now.
Happy Saturday, everyone and thanks again to Gary Moore.
My RPM album project is now officially electric/acoustic.
I added 12-string guitar to song #9. That means the rhythm guitars are done on two songs. Let’s see if I can sneak another one in before work tomorrow.
I just posted this onto the RPM Challenge site:
I’m up to eight songs now. Seven have the song form sketched out and one has rhythm guitars (technically that’s a day five thing as I did it before work this morning).
Three of the songs are going to go with the acoustic guitar/hand percussion arrangement. My initial hope was to have five acoustic and five rawk-power-trio. Not sure how that’s going to shake out though.
The RPM Challenge needs at least 10 songs. FAWM needs 14.5 (it’s a leap year). RPM does not need newly written songs, FAWM, by definition, does. Given that I’m losing the entire last week of the month I have more or less decided to give FAWM a miss this year and shoot for 10 songs. If I can get two more and then get them all recorded quickly I might pull some old ideas into the project.
Last summer I spent a day with my acoustic 12-string, sitting on the patio, noodling chord progressions and strummy riffs. I was thinking of doing the whole acoustic guitar/hand percussion/sax thing then too and I actually started a few decent sounding ideas. I never finished them though. I might revisit some of them. I also did an album-in-a-day project a couple of months ago and there was one song that I might want to re-record.
It all depends on how quick I can get through the songs I’ve already started. We’ll see.
As mentioned, I was able to get a little recording in this morning. I finished all of the rhythm guitar parts for song #1. I double tracked it, as usual, but this time each take was two tracks, for a total of four tracks. I have been wanting to record through two amps at once for ages. I did it a few years ago but the two amps were both direct input into the computer, they weren’t mic’d. Today, they were both mic’d. Today it was… real. I guess.
The signal path was my Les Paul into the Klon KTR overdrive pedal with the gain cranked into a Radial ABY box (one input split into two outputs) into both of my Fender Bassbreakers (the 15 watt version and the 18 watt channel on the 18/30) to two Shure SM57 mics. I’m not sure what the reality of the situation is, but it sounded pretty flippin’ sweet to me!
Last year I made a rule stating I could not copy and paste sections of a song. That means I couldn’t record a verse section of a song once and then use it for three verses, stuff like that. I want to do that again this year, but the song I worked on today was kinda hard. Not really hard, just a little hard. It required a lot of takes to get everything kinda/sorta right. Unfortunately that took a lot of time. It actually took all the time I had available this morning.
Maybe I need to start waking up earlier?
I just posted this to the RPM Challenge website. Just checking in:
It feels like I’m off to a slow start but I don’t know if that’s accurate or not.
I have this vague idea of splitting the album into two, one being my usual three piece rock band kinda thing, and the other being an acoustic guitar/hand percussion/sax/voice thing. The acoustic stuff will probably fall by the wayside but for now it’s still on.
I’ve got two songs sketched out for the rock side and one sort of unfocused idea for the acoustic. The rock things are okay, the acoustic thing is garbage and should really end up in the trash.
That’s it so far. I had a gig on the 1st and I was very pleased with the way I played. Here’s hoping that carries through the month and I nail a few decent guitar parts.
I am hoping to get everything setup in my little corner of the bedroom tonight. Two amps, two mics, and the 8 input USB interface. If I can sneak in some recording too that would be great. We’ll see.
Today is a good day. I got a bonus from work today. That’s good. I got my tax documents from work too. By the time this posts my taxes might even already be filed because my wife is amazing. That’s also good. I just spent my lunch break working on a time sensitive issue and I figured it out with a minimum of stress. That’s good too.
The RPM Challenge starts in less than nine hours. That’s good, but I highly doubt I’ll be awake at midnight to celebrate. We have a gig tomorrow night. That’s good as well. I’m not nearly as stressed as I was for the last gig and that is doubly good.
There are some things that royally suck but I am not letting them bring me down. The triumph of authoritarianism over democracy is progressing in the US Senate right now as the republican party makes a farce out of the constitutionally mandated impeachment process. That royally sucks. I am beginning to think that secession is a viable option. Brexit takes place today. Midnight Brussels time, 11:00PM London time, That’s 6:00PM Boston time, I think. That royally sucks too.
I’m weighing the good against the incredibly bad and choosing to ignore the fact that, in the grand scheme of things, the bad is infinitely more important than the good. Today I am deciding that the good will outweigh the bad even though that is amazingly, shockingly naive. Screw it, I’m going to Disney in a couple of weeks.
For now though, I have to start planning my packing for the gig tomorrow. I need my Les Paul and my SG, my Bassbreaker 18/30 and my Vox MV50 with the 12″ cab, my full pedal board, the handful of new cables I bought (bright orange so you can see them from space), a couple of backup pedals (looking at you, Keeley D&M Drive) and power cables for each one, the microphones, stands, and cables I took home from the rehearsal room recently, the little pick/slide holding microphone stand attachment, and a new glass slide. Then I’ll go to Mike’s house and get the rest of the mics, stands, and cables, my gig bag with all my emergency stuff in it, and the little stand I sit my amp on when we play. Oh yeah, and I have to change the strings on both guitars! Can’t forget about that!
Sunday after the gig I’ll put the amp and the pedal board (and the associated cables) back into my room where they currently sit (see the pic from last night), Setup a mic, stand, and cable on that amp and on the Bassbreaker 15 that is not leaving my room for the gig, then plug those into the 16 channel USB interface that I also took home from the rehearsal room recently. I will plug the USB cable into my MacBook and make sure I can get both mic signals into GarageBand. Once that’s done, I’ll be ready to record guitar parts in stereo. When I record the acoustic guitar or a vocal or a saxophone I can just swing up one of the mic’s that will be on a guitar speaker and use that. I also dug out my little acoustic guitar pickup that I got a few years ago and still haven’t taken out of the package. I can use that to record as well. I’ll keep the laptop and my iPad and my iPhone good and charged so if an idea comes to me I can play it into one version of GarageBand or another. Once that’s all taken care of I just have to… you know… write a shit load of songs. Yikes.
This year is a leap year so we get a whole extra day for the RPM shenanigans. So really it’s no problem at all this year.
Yikes indeed!
But it’s still a good day.
I can’t remember when it was, maybe about two years ago? I was listening to a cover band podcast and one of the hosts was talking about an acoustic duo he played in. One guy played an acoustic guitar and sang, the other was a percussionist/singer who played a cajon. I thought to myself, what the hell is a cajon?
It’s this. It’s a box. There is a pad on one side of it that has wire snares built into it. If you slap the middle of the box you get a thump. If you slap the edge you get a snare drummish snap.
Fast forward to October 2018. I was in Epcot Center, at the cafe outside of Soarin’. I was sitting at a table by my lonesome and I don’t remember why. I wonder… was this Summer 2018 and not October 2018? Maybe. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. I was thinking about a songwriting challenge, either NaSoAlMo or 50/90 and I was trying to think of things that I could do to mix up my usual workflow. I thought about arranging a couple of songs for acoustic 12-string, a cello instead of a bass, and hand percussion instead of a drum kit. I never did it, partly because the strings function in GarageBand for iOS kinda blows, but while looking at GarageBand Percussionists in the Drummer function I found one with a cajon.
This past summer, just before another trip to Disney World, I was working on 50/90 ideas and I came back to that guitar/cello/percussion idea. I scrapped the cello for an upright bass at first, and I declared that all hand percussion would revolve around a cajon… because why the hell not? Then I got a really crazy idea. Why have a bass at all? Why not just go 12-string, percussion, and voice. That would be way out of my comfort zone. Then the kicker came to me. Where I would normally play lead guitar… play saxophone. Oh we’re just one step beyond now!
Of course I never did any of that at all.
Well now we’re three+ days away from the RPM Challenge and I’m looking for ideas again. Due to still another Disney World trip (this is becoming a trend) I am going to be in quite the time crunch. I thought about maybe doing half of the songs as usual, and then half as trippy instrumentals. Last year I did 20 songs, the equivalent of two RPM albums. Maybe this year I stick to 10 songs but make it two separate five song EP’s. Then I thought about that damn cajon again. How about five rock songs, five trippy instrumentals, and five acoustic songs. The rockers would be guitar/bass/drums/voice, the trippy instrumentals would be guitar/keys/bass/drums with shit loads of sound effects, and the acoustics would be 12-string guitar/hand percussion/alto sax/voice and the percussion would center on a cajon. Three EP’s which would let me have a complete RPM project and a complete fawm.org project (which I haven’t even considered shooting for this year). That sounds awesome. Super awesome. Super epic awesome.
Granted there is zero chance of it happening. I’m going to end up with 10 bluesy rock songs in odd time signatures arranged for a bad power trio. Eh, that would be cool too.
Three days, 10 hours until RPM officially kicks off.
Two of the last three nights have been 50/90 progress free. Am I slowing down? Yeah, probably a little. Is it okay? Well, I’ve got 18 songs in the works and there are still 80 days left… so yeah, I think it’s okay.
If there is a hangup, it’s in the demo recording. I don’t want to use any amp sims at all. I want all of the guitar sounds to be my Fender Deluxe Reverb. All or nothing. I’ll probably change my mind on that eventually, but for now I’m sticking to it. That means no recording in the living room while the kids are watching tv. That’s a big deal. We’ll see how far this goes.
Most importantly, I’m still having fun.
I often make a Google Document for keeping notes on my RPM Challenge progress. Start a new idea, add it to the doc. Write some lyrics, add them to the doc. I just sometimes need something to help me keep my thoughts in order. Sometimes I use a Google Spreadsheet to keep track of which guitars I use on each song, or which amplifier patch, or beats per minute, or really anything you can think of.
Today I upped my nerd game. I created a Trello board to keep track of this year’s project. There is a list for songs that are just in the idea phase, songs that are in the recording instruments phase, songs in the vocals/lyrics phase (lyrics and melodies are always the last thing I write), and songs that are in the mixing phase. Each time I start a new idea I will add a card to the idea list. Then as I add to it I can make notes on what I did in each card, and move it between lists as it progresses.
I’m waiving my nerd flag high this year.
Here’s a little reminder to myself.
I own two good pairs of (sort of) noise cancelling headphones. From this point on I must remember to use one of them when recording guitars through my amplifier. This morning I recorded all of the guitar parts for one song, playing my Les Paul through my old Fender amp (just like when I was in the band Prime Meridian, oh the memories). I literally had the volume set to 1, but I was using ear pods to listen to the playback while overdubbing and, well, the amp on 1 is much loader than the ear buds can comfortably drown out.
My ears are still ringing, but I got a couple of decent takes.
There are five songs in progress right now. I’m thinking I want to record 20. I will (probably) finish these five before starting any more. Well, finish not counting re-recording the drum parts with actual drums. I’m still on the fence about wanting to do that. Everything else though, guitars, bass, vocals, will get re-done. Three of the songs have keyboards. Those will probably stay midi, unless I want to bring in someone else to play them for real and they are way too simplistic to insult an actual keyboard player by asking for that.
I will bring the Squire P Bass I loaned to Mike the Bass Player home with me after the next band practice, assuming Mike doesn’t need it for a while, and after all the bass parts and Fender amp parts are done I will bring the Marshall home and re-do all of the guitars again using that amp. In the end I’ll have all of the rhythm parts quadruple tracked using two amps. The Smashing Pumpkins fan in me is drooling at that potential of such a layering of fuzz.
