Over the last few days I’ve been dropping the RPM Challenge ball in a huge way. I have 10 songs but none are even remotely close to being done.
Tonight I did what we are supposed to do when we run out of gas. I forced myself to do something. It resulted in two new songs. I should try to push things a little more but I’m exhausted from the long day.
I’m going to bed, but I plan to keep forcing the issue tomorrow.
Progress, babie.
I just kicked off song number 10 for RPM. I made it the simplest, easiest thing imaginable. Rhythm guitars, bass, and drums are all done. I made it simple because I had a gimmick. A sick, doofus, goofy gimmick.
The guitars are backwards in every other measure. It’s not clean. I recorded the whole song in a couple of sections and then edited the track so I could swap the direction of every other bar. In almost every measure I came in a teeny tiny bit early so there’s just barely the sound of the pick touching the low E string that gets moved from the end of each bar to the beginning, so there’s noise at the start of each backward bar where it should be quiet.
I don’t care. It’s a gimmick and it was fun to do.
More importantly, it let me make some progress today without actually having to write any lyrics.
I started the day with eight songs, only three of which had guitar parts recorded. I am now up to nine songs, all of which have guitar parts recorded. I have literally (temporarily) run out of songs! I guess it’s time to both add more songs and write some lyrics. Yikes!
I did the two different guitars thing on the first few songs today, but got tired of switching so I just stuck with the Les Paul for the last few.
I picked off two songs and then had to break for lunch. So I figure I’ll throw out a couple of pics. It is #GibSunday over on Instagram after all.
My 18 year old self laughs at me when I say that we slept late today and got up at 8:00am. However, we slept late and got up at 8:00am. I slept okay after my second fully caffeine free day. I woke up a few times but my numbers looked good. The heart rate dip was really good and the restful sleep percentage was the same as the first day. I feel okay today.
Not a lot on the agenda today. Hopefully lots of guitar playing. Jen’s working on a project so I want to stay out of her way. I have five songs that need rhythm guitars. I should see if I can add to that list too. I would like to get to it, but I find myself distracted by a video on YouTube where Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick shows off some highlights from his massively gigantic guitar collection. It’s only an hour and eighteen minutes. I wonder if they’ll do a video like this with Steve Howe.
One of my gimmicky ideas for this year’s RPM Challenge is to double the rhythm guitar tracks with two different guitars. I thought of that a few weeks ago but figured I probably wouldn’t go through with it. Tonight? The first time I sat down to record guitars? I did it. One guitar part panned hard left, another panned hard right. I always do that. This time, instead of using the same guitar on both tracks…
You’ll hear the Les Paul coming out of your left speaker:
and the SG coming out of your right speaker:
Fun, huh? I only got through three songs, but that’s a good start.
Two days in and I’m up to six songs now. All just bass and drums (MIDI track) but I’ve got weird time signatures and tempo changes everywhere. It’s just madness!!
Here we go again.
Welcome to February and the annual onslaught of RPM Challenge posts. Hurray for bad music! Well, a lot of the people who play the RPM game make excellent music. I just don’t feel you’re reading a post from one of those people right now.
The Trello board has been created and the first card has been added! The working title being “RPM 22 01 iPad” because it’s 2022, it’s the first idea, and the file was originally created on my iPad (only because the Logic Remote app isn’t playing nicely this morning, otherwise it would have been started on the Mac).
Does song number one contain a tempo change? Why yes, yes it does. Look at me being all musically thematic and shit.
Have fun, folks!
Tomorrow is February 1st. That means my 15th RPM Challenge will be underway and you, my poor unfortunate reader, will be blitzed with endless posts about a bad musician making bad music. I mean, you get that crap on a regular basis from me, but in February it’s out of control.
I don’t have any plans. I was thinking of using two different guitars, but I am not sure I want to bother with that. We’ll see. The Les Paul needs new strings before I record anything, and if I use the SG as well then that desperately needs new strings. I was thinking of going for a wetter sound over all. Maybe just longer reverbs and some more delays, maybe? My latest gimmicky idea is to use more tempo changes. I used a slight tempo change in one of the last batch of re-recordings and I kinda like how it came out. Maybe more of that.
Beyond those gimmicks, I don’t have any plans. Just 10 songs. 10 faux bluesy, faux proggy rock and roll songs. Dad rock. Stuff like that.
The RPM Challenge started in 2006 but it was just a local thing in Portsmouth, NH. In 2007 they went international, meaning they just put it on the web. I first heard of it late in the month so I missed out. I did one on my own using old songs the following month, then the month after that I tried doing it again with new songs and failed miserably. 2008 was the first time I did it for real and I failed miserably. 2009-2011 were also failures. 2012 was my first success and it made me very happy. 2013-2021 have all been successes too. Well… successes in that I met the recording requirements. Some were more successful than others in terms of the quality, but they are all kinda crappy. I don’t care. I just enjoy it, even if it is really dumb.
Tomorrow is the day. One your marks… get set……. wait for it!……
I’ve done a lot of musically nerdy things in my life. I’m a Rush fanatic so I sort of goes without saying.
Years ago I made a playlist on Alonetone that held songs I wanted to re-record. Before I started actually finishing songs I just kept adding songs to the playlist. When I started finishing songs I added those to the playlist and matched them up with the originals. Now that it’s done there are 114 songs on the playlist.
Through all of this time I kept the playlist private. Today I made it public. Good lord what a nerd I am.
Inside the Red Head's Head 