Somebody, stop me! The pedal hoarding is out of control. At least now I have some filthy fuzz both at home and at the band’s rehearsal space. Once again, I’m sorry for buying something with such a disgustingly sexist name. It’s just… It sounds so freakin’ awesome!
First we get a tv series about the trial and the murders.
Now today they are saying we finally have the murder weapon?
WHY CAN’T THE OJ SIMPSON TRIAL JUST LEAVE US ALONE????
Some doucher cop has had a knife that was buried in OJ’s yard since the late 90’s and he never turned it in? Are you effin’ kidding me, LAPD? I mean we’ve had a good idea of your institutional incompetence even before the OJ case (Rodney King, anyone?) but this?
What the…
I can’t even…
WHAT?????
I’m trying to bring my first MacBook back to life, but she’s putting up a fight. Stay out of the light, MacBook! Nurse, get the defibrillator! CLEAR!!!!
The RPM submission is now up on bandcamp. As always, do not pay for it! Listen all you want, or go to alonetone and get it from there, just don’t pay for it. It’s not worth the money.
I put the playlist onto the My Music page, and I’m putting it here too because I’m the boss of this blog and I can do whatever I want.
The annual “now what do I do?” post-RPM Challenge post.
Now what do I do?
Last year I started a mini-project to re-record some older songs. I think I will pick that up again. Actually, I think I’ll start over. Well, I think I’ll keep the drum tracks and scrap everything else.
I want to put together a mini version of my pedal board to keep at the house. Please excuse me for the ugly sexism of the product name, but I want to have a stay at home Big Muff Pi fuzz box to go along with my cry baby. I think that will be enough to get by with, at least for a while. I’ve been browsing ebay. We’ll see.
I also want another little Apple audio input. An iMic or something like that. My Lexicon Alpha and the old MacBook that I forgot we had down cellar will move semi-permanently to the Lizardfish rehearsal space. That way I won’t have to truck it all back and forth, and I can still record at home and at rehearsal. I’ll just move the GarageBand files around with a thumb drive. There’s also a question I’ve been asking myself of whether I could video record rehearsals and sync the video to the GarageBand recordings. Then we could have something different to post on Lizardfishmusic.com.
Before all of that happens though, I want to finish those three unfinished RPM songs. I think I can work on some lyrics and vocals before work tomorrow.
I have to do something to fill the hole in my creative life now that it’s March.
For this year’s RPM Challenge I worked on 23 songs. One was just too awful to keep alive and I dumped it. One other never got further than one or two bass lines on the iPad. Of the remaining 21, 10 made the final cut. Eight were completely finished but I put them on the B list. Three others were pretty far along in the process, but I ran out of time before I could finish them. Those three might have been good enough to make the final submission, but now we’ll never know.
I made a playlist for the left overs, including the three unfinished songs. I will finish them in the coming weeks, but for now they are just rough mixes of instrumental nothings.
I think if you listen to both playlists you will see that dropping the songs on the B list was the right thing to do. At least I hope so. Either way, I got a ton of new tunes.
Finished.
Done.
Complete.
…and with a little over an hour to spare!
This makes five years in a row for me. Feels like quite a milestone. I had 18 songs and dropped eight of them for the final album. Are the 10 that I kept the best songs? I think so, but I feel way too close to this right now so I can’t say for sure.
I zipped up all of my mp3 files and a jpeg with the cover art and shared it with RPM via dropbox. Hopefully that works and they get it. My profile has been updated with the 2016 submission, but I’m way too tired to deal with any more than that tonight.
For now, here’s a soundcloud playlist with my 10 goofy songs. Hope they don’t suck too bad.
Look at me, just finishing the mix of the 18th and final February song. RPM is almost done!
When I left work on Friday I think I had six songs mixed, two songs ready to mix, and a whole pile that were a guitar part away from being ready to mix.
Here we are on Sunday afternoon and I have 15 songs mixed. My head is spinning. I’m not done though. I have to stop for tonight so I can go to band practice and then eat dinner with the love of my life and watch The Walking Dead (priorities, right?).
I still have to mix one more song tomorrow night, and like a moron I actually added a song last night at about 10pm, and then added another one this morning at about 7am. I only need to add vocals to those two and then they’ll be ready to mix too. Vocal tracking will happen tomorrow before work in a great bonanza of get-it-in-one-or-don’t-get-it-at-all.
Beyond that, there are still four more unfinished songs that will have to wait for another day. One or two of them are just awful and were abandoned by choice. At least one of the others was working for me before, but I just ran out of time.
So I expect to have 18 songs available for the finished product tomorrow. I’ll probably drop at least four of them, maybe more. I really want to try and trim the fat for the album I submit this year. Not to imply there’s greatness here or anything like that. I just want it to be less crappy than some of my previous submissions (looking at you, 2015).
Inside the Red Head's Head 