Category: Song Writing

RPM Challenge Day 5/28

The honest answer is nothing. Again. The second day in a row.

The squint a little answer is one new song idea. Or at least most of one new song. I woke up at 2:00am with stomach issues and needed to sit up for a little while. While I was riding things out I noodled out a couple of bass lines on my iPhone. Now at that particular moment the calendar date said it was day six. However, it was the middle of the night and I guess you can make an argument that day six actually starts when I get up for the day and that most definitely did not happen for a few more hours.

So is that bad little bass line technically from day six or subjectively from day five? I don’t know. Am I just making shit up to make me feel better about skipping two days in a row? Yeah, probably. Let’s just say that it’s been a tough couple of days for me and move on with our lives.

Here’s hoping for better news in tomorrow’s RPM Challenge recap post. Fingers crossed.

RPM Challenge Day 4/28

Nothing.

I had a really bad day and went to bed early, thinking I would get a good night’s sleep, but then I woke up super early and spoiled the whole plan. Shit.

I did get to wish my step son a Happy Birthday. I think I wished my nephew a Happy Birthday too. I sent him a text, discovered he has a new phone number, got his new phone number, sent another text, he didn’t respond. We called my sister’s phone to wish him a happy but he wasn’t home so we called his phone because my sister said his voicemail was setup but his voicemail wasn’t set up. I speak now directly to my nephew… I really hope you got that text. If not, Happy Birthday!!

That’s my whole day in a nutshell. Birthdays, back pain, stomach pain, first day back to work. Yippee. Today is an in the office day so it’s going to suck on so many levels.

Happy Merry and shit, everyone! WOOHOO!

RPM Challenge Day 3/28

Day three was similar to days one and two. One new song. This time it has bass and drums finished and a guide track for a sax part. It’s looking like it will be instrumental. I had this idea of having the album open with a short instrumental and this could be it. Unless it sucks, of course, or I can’t play the sax anymore, of course. The usual caveats.

RPM Challenge Day 2/28

Day two was mostly spent recovering from travel on day one (day three will be similar, I fear). I did add a second song idea and I worked out a full song form for both day 2’s song and day 1’s. So I now have two songs with full form done, including bass and drums. One of them may have a sax part already too, but it’s just a keyboard as a place holder for now.

RPM Challenge Day 1/28

It is February again so it is time for daily RPM Challenge updates.

Not much yesterday (Day one, Sunday), just one song idea noodled out in GarageBand for iPhone while sitting in a hotel room near Orlando, Florida waiting to check out and fly home. Hopefully I’ll get to a little more than that today.

New/Old Song

A new song from The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project, also known as Quarantine Tunes Volume Eight.

Volume eight is all songs written during the 2020 50/90 Challenge. I think. Volume five was all songs from the 2021 50/90, I think… those songs were better than the 2020 songs and it shows with this one. If this was one of the 50 songs that was good enough to consider re-recording then… we’re definitely scraping the bottom of the artistic barrel.

Oh well. It’s done.

New/Old song mixed and uploaded to alonetone.com.

Guitar Shake to Shuffle

I just finished putting rhythm guitar tracks onto two song demos. Look at me being musically productive!

Also, I used Hipstamatic’s Shake-To-Shuffle on my new iPhone for the first time. Wow!

Finally

Finally… I played guitar today. Just for a little while (and pretty poorly), but I played. I used the new pedal board with the amp sim pedal (TC Combo Deluxe ’65) and for the first time… ever(?) I used a compressor pedal (MXR Dyna Comp mini).

I feel pretty good about the state of the world right now.

DSC_3179

2024 NaSoAlMo Day 28/30

This will be the final NaSoAlMo post this year. The project is complete. Success!

I mixed the last two songs yesterday. I also came up with a final running order and took a cover photo with Hipstamatic. I tried putting text onto the photo but the app I normally use was acting buggy and I just gave up. Not a big deal.

Here’s a link to the final playlist on alonetone.

Here’s my not very imaginative cover pic:

Here are links to the songs, in the order they were finished which also happens to be the order they were started.

An “album” called Sevens and it is made up of seven songs in 7/8 time. The lyrics to all seven songs also deal with the same topic. I’m not going to say what but you can probably guess given current events. I guess this means that this is my first concept album.

I guess that concludes our internet music challenge projects for 2024. Up next will be the 2025 RPM Challenge in February. That’s the big one for me.

Finished

I just finished mixing the seventh and final song for this year’s National Solo Album Month project. I’m done! Not only that, I am done on the 28th day of the month, just like the February RPM Challenge. I might be hardwired to do album-in-a-month projects in 28 days.

Sevens