Routine: Interrupted

I overslept a little this morning. Instead of being down cellar doing my daily exercise at about 5:20am, I kicked things off at about 6:30. Not the end of the world by any stretch of the imagination, but still… not what I wanted. I have become a creature of routine in a kind of negative way since my weight loss surgery. When I get off of the normal workflow I get bitchy. Sorry about that.

I started my silly running in place thing (pronounced “yogging” with a soft “j”, thank you Ron Burgundy) which should last about 48 minutes. I had to pause the proceedings three times. Two of them were not a big deal and I could easily get over them, but one was just dumb. At the risk of too much information, I had to use the bathroom. Oh come on, Robert. You couldn’t have taken care of that before you started? You couldn’t have held it until after? Ugh. Dumb ass. Instant bitchy.

I was able to get everything I needed to do before work done. I also snuck in some guitar playing. I put rhythm guitars onto the two song ideas I started yesterday. I wanted to add a lead track to a song or two as well, but that was where the time cut needed to happen. Next time. I hope.

Why do I let little scheduling hiccups like having to use the bathroom at a random time get under my skin this way. Grrrrr. I don’t know.

Here’s a couple of guitar pictures, just because. I snapped them while listening to playbacks of the new tracks. Multitasking, as it were.

2024 50/90 Challenge Day 12/90

Not much happened on day 12, but I did hit an important, albeit meaningless and silly, project milestone.

I added two new song ideas. Just MIDI bass and drums and a full song form. Both are under three minutes. One in 4/4 time and one in 7/8 time.

That meaningless milestone? 50 songs in 90 days is roughly equivalent to 50 songs in three months. If I am to keep up and stay on pace to finish on time, how many songs do I have to work on per month? 50/3 = 16 2/3 songs per month.

The two songs I added yesterday were idea numbers 16 and 17… and we still have half of the first month left to go. I am officially on pace.

Fun.

2024 50/90 Challenge Day 11/90

Day 11 was a good day. I put vocals onto five songs, lead guitars (poorly) onto four songs, and mixed one song.

At this point I have six songs that are ready for lead guitars, four that are ready to mix, and five that are ready for lyrics. I don’t have anything waiting on rhythm guitars and I don’t have anything ready to sing.

Today (day 12) is an office day for me so finding time to work on music is going to be tough. I hope I’ll be able to sneak something in before the day is out. Wish me luck.

One Down, 49 to Go

Here comes the pain, folks. I am going to share one of my super lame songs. This is the first song finished for the 2024 50 songs in 90 days challenge. One down and 49 to go. I’ll do something nice to make this worth your while though, I promise.

First, here’s my shitty new song. It’s okay, I guess. The guitar playing is bad, especially the leads. The vocals are pretty terrible too. Oh well. It’s just supposed to be a demo, right?

Now to sweeten the pot, as it were. Cats. Two of them. I won’t be able to do this every time I finish a new song, but I’ll see what I can do.

Leads

Now that I have a bunch of songs with vocal tracks, it’s time to start adding lead guitar tracks.

I worked on four songs and boy are my finger tips killing me! The more you play, the less it hurts… so what does that tell you about how often I play?

Another Day, Another Car Music

For the second day in a row I packed my laptop, a microphone, some headphones, and a little USB audio interface into the car, drove off to a mostly empty parking lot in a not-yet-opened-for-the-day movie theater and sang my brains out.

Now… if only I didn’t suck so badly as a singer. Oh well.

I had five songs ready for vocals tracking and I picked them all off. I now have 10 songs with vocals complete. Only 40 more to go. Thanks to the 50 songs in 90 days challenge, of course. What a mess.

Here is the view from my state of the art recording studio. Fascinating.

And here is the almost but not quite obligatory photo of the clock downtown.

Again, fascinating.

2024 50/90 Challenge Day 10/90

I had big plans for day 10, and I did make some important progress, but I failed to do half of what I wanted to do.

When I woke up I had seven songs ready for vocals. I recorded five of them. That’s a pretty big deal for me as anything related to the vocals tends to be a big of a hang up for me. I wanted to put lead guitars onto those five songs but I didn’t get the chance.

Just before bed I managed to write lyrics and melodies for three more songs, so once again I have five that are ready for vocals. I am hoping that stating that is actually foreshadowing for tomorrow’s update post. We will see.

First Time in Ages

When was the last time I drove to an empty parking lot to record myself singing for one of my dumb songwriting project demos? February? Maybe?

Well, we’re back. I did it this morning. I had an annoying interruption, but I still managed to record very bad, terrible even, vocals onto five songs.

I started here:

Oh, did I mention it was pouring rain? As I was finishing up the first song a truck pulled up near me. It looked like a landscaper. Then a security truck pulled up. Then another car. Everyone got out and just stood around looking at each other. Then another car. Then another car. What the hell?

I moved. I just drove to the other side of the parking lot.

From there I finished up four more songs. I could have maybe done one or two more (the battery on my MacBook Pro is legendary) but I had to pee so incredibly bad that I had to drive home. Oh well. Hopefully we’ll be able to do some more tomorrow.

2024 50/90 Challenge Day 9/90

Another decent day’s worth of progress, but probably not as much as I had hoped. I worked on four songs in total. First, I put rhythm guitars onto the only two songs I had left that didn’t have rhythm guitars. Those were songs number 12 and 13. Next I added two new songs, numbers 14 and 15, which have MIDI bass and drums and now also have rhythm guitars.

That’s it. Not a bad day’s worth of work, but I had to spend a lot of time running errands, and my wife and I decided to go for a drive in the evening so there wasn’t time for anything more.

Round Two

I went out and got my hair cut, I got an inspection sticker for the Kia, and I stopped at the sugar free bakery to get a treat for myself to celebrate my 20th work-aversary. Then I went home, made myself some lunch, noodled out a couple of new song ideas, and played my guitar again. Technically it was a different guitar, but it is still mine so I guess saying “I played again” still counts.