Mush

After a second round of guitar playing and a second short round of sax playing I can honestly say I have reduced myself to mush. The tips of my fingers on my left hand are looking a little like ground beef, and my lips and my jaw don’t work anymore and I am kinda drooling everywhere.

So worth it.

When I started my day I had zero songs ready to mix. Now, as I am about to start cooking dinner for the love of my life, I have 12 songs ready to mix.

What a day!

Music Day Continues Continued

WOW! Five years is a LONG TIME.

The saxophone came out of its case and amazingly, miraculously, I can still play it.

Can I play it well? Oh my sweet christmas I CANNOT. I SUCK! I put sax parts onto three songs including the instrumental where the sax plays the melody. It sounds awful, my playing is awful, and the whole thing is just awful and I don’t care because oh my goodness was that fun.

I lasted about 10 minutes before my body started to reject the whole experience. I mentioned calluses in the last post. When you don’t play guitar often you lose your calluses and it hurts. It is a similar thing with wind instruments except it is about muscle strength. There are muscles in your mouth and around your jaw that you don’t use very often that are used A TON when you play a woodwind instrument. I made it about 10 minutes before those muscles decided they were done. I would then play for 20 seconds or so and follow up with a 2-3 minute rest. After about half an hour of that I had to stop. For now at least. I am going to break for lunch and maybe watch a TV show and then see how I feel. It’s entirely possible the 2025 saxophone experiment might be over. We’ll see.

Speaking of lunch, one thing about playing sax that I forgot all about is that it makes you wicked hungry. I think that’s a wind instrument thing in general because I remember everyone in my high school band complaining about how they were starving at the end of each rehearsal. Yeah, I needs me some lunch now.

Saxophone, babie! I can still play!

Music Day Continues

Over the last hour and a half or so I have added lead guitar tracks to five songs. My finger tips are in a state of pure burning agony. That’s what happens when you don’t play enough and your calluses fade away. Ouch town, population me, bro.

I need to give my hands a break. Know what that means? It means it’s time for some saxophone. It’s been five years since I’ve taken my cheap little alto out of it’s case. Can I still play? Let’s find out!

Frozen Solid

I just got home from some car music. I think it was a success. I’m not sure though because I am literally frozen solid and can’t tell if I am even alive or not. It is soooo freaking cold out right now.

I spent about an hour and a half in the car in the (mostly) empty movie theater parking lot, singing my lungs out while trying to keep my extremities safe from frost bite. It is tough to use a laptop while wearing winter gloves, but I sort of made it work. I put vocals onto seven RPM Challenge songs all while the temperature topped out at 19 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s -7.2 or so for our metric, Celsius using friends).

Right now I am sitting in my living room, hoping that the feeling will return to my toes soon. Once it does, I will go down cellar to my music nook and start recording lead guitar tracks. Today is Music Day, boys and girls, and it is off to a cracking good start.

173/365

RPM Challenge Day 19/28

Day 19 (yesterday) was an office day so there wasn’t a lot of time for music. I spent too much of my off-work time stuck in traffic to be super productive.

I added guitars to one song before I left in the morning, and then before bed last night I added lyrics and melodies to two songs.

Today (day 20) is a vacation day for me and I plan to run a couple of errands but otherwise it’s a music day for me. At least on paper. My stomach has been… difficult… over the last 24 hours or so and the start of the day today is more of the same. Yippee.

Bed Time

It’s 10:00pm and I am going to bed.

Tomorrow is a vacation day and I am planning to spend as much time as I can working on the RPM Challenge. Call it a music day. There will be singing, there will be guitar playing, there will be music and lyric writing, and there may even be some saxophone playing. A crazy day is in store.

For now though… I’m dead on my feet. It’s time for bed.

How Do We Fight Back?

I have been thinking about how we can fight back against the current coup. The short answer is that I don’t know.

One thought though, and I am not sure where this came from but I am sure it’s not original to my tiny little brain, is that Democrats in Congress need to round up as many of the people who have been fired by the doge putz and the fascists in the white house and bring them before Congress to tell their stories. We need public hearings… lots of them… where we can show that these people are real Americans and not just some faceless budget slash. I think the most effective examples would be idiots who voted for the orange mess of fascist goo who were immediately screwed over by him. That would be good PR. That would make good TV.

What do you think, Democrats in Congress? What do you think, Democrats in the Senate? I’m sure it would be a useless gesture as the destruction of the US Constitution is probably too far along at this point, but it would make some really good TV that would embarrass that nazi fucker in public. It would be worth it just for that.

Sneaky

I was sneaky this morning and I did something that if I were smart and responsible I probably would not have done. I did not oversleep at all, which is kind of miraculous. That means I was able to get my morning exercise in nice and early. It’s an in-the-office work day today and usually on those days I start packing up and getting ready to go as soon as the exercise is over.

Because I finished early I decided to sneak in a little guitar playing. I put two tracks of acoustic guitar onto one RPM Challenge song. It was the one that I started working on last night. Now it’s on the list of songs that are ready for tomorrow’s expected singing in the car session. Nice. If I had more time I would have tried to sneak in a second song, but that would have been pressing my luck. I smartly didn’t even try.

I did take today’s photo a day picture. Day 172/365, to be exact. It’s a guitar pic, of course.

172/365

This wasn’t the pic I had planned though. The pic I had planned ended up being awful, as you can see here:

DSC_3741

Oh well. Here’s hoping I can write some lyrics and some melodies so that I can have a lot of stuff ready for singing in the car on my vacation day tomorrow. Fingers crossed I can make the time for it tonight.