Tag: 50/90

Guitar Rig

Okay folks, the guitar gear is setup and ready to record some new music.

I put the new Analog Man King of Tone overdrive pedal onto my stay-at-home pedal board and plugged the whole thing in. I have three amps setup. The Fender Deluxe Reverb will be used when I can make oodles of noise and want to record with a microphone. The other two amps are the Fender Bassbreaker 15 and the cute little Vox MV50. They are both connected to the ABY switch so that I can run them both at the same time, and they are also both plugged directly into the USB audio interface so that I can run direct at times when I cannot make any noise.

Now I just have to actually play. Any minute now, right?

309/365

2023 50/90 Challenge Day 2/90

As expected, working in the office meant I was in the car commuting when I normally would be trying to make a little music so there wasn’t a lot of progress made on the current musical challenge.

I did come up with three little eight bar noodles that may be worked into a song somehow. Better that than nothing, right?

2023 50/90 Challenge Day 1/90

One day of the 50 songs in 90 days challenge is down. Well, it will be in about 2.5 hours, but I am definitely done for the day so I’m calling it now.

How did I do on this rainy and dreary 4th of July?

Not bad, if I do say so myself. Three songs underway. No guitars or voices or actual real life musical instruments yet, but all three songs already have all of the changes, the song form, a guide guitar (MIDI only) track, a vocal melody, and complete lyrics.

Like I said, not too bad.

Day two probably won’t have much of anything as it’s a work-from-the-office day, but at least day one went well.

New Music Project

It’s the 4th of July. I think I mentioned that in a post already. That means it’s Independence Day but it also means it’s the first day of the 50/90 music challenge. Write 50 songs in 90 days between July 4th and October 1st. I’ve completed this back breaker a few times in the past (2016, 2020, and 2021, I think). Will I pull it off again this year?

Not likely.

I did, however, kick off song #1 for this year’s challenge. It’s just a rhythm exercise, really. I have never written anything in 13/8 time so I started out with a drum loop in 13/8 and just waited to see what happened. An hour later I am sitting here with the first song of the challenge completely written. It’s short and sweet and not very good and it’s only MIDI tracks in GarageBand at this point, no real live musical instruments are involved yet, but it exists.

Now let’s celebrate with a couple of pictures of Lily being lazy, and then I’ll go to the Apple Store to run an errand for the love of my life.

Happy 4th of July, everyone!

Fifty Songs Time

Today is July 4th. It’s a national holiday even though there is nothing left to celebrate here.

There is that summer music challenge thing that I’ve done the last couple of years. Write fifty songs in ninety days. That one. I am not signing up for this on their website because last year another user pissed me off. So I am doing the 50/90 thing but not officially. I guess I am doing a Faux 50/90.

I have one song under way. It’s just bass and drums, it’s in 7/8 times and it might possibly be a 2:55 rocker. We’ll see. I have no idea when I am going to get to play the guitar again, and my voice has still not really recovered from whatever happened a few weeks ago. I need to seriously hydrate on car music days. Things are different now and I have to learn how to do everything again.

While I am on the subject of music… I think I am going to ask the guys in Lizardfish if they want to get together. I’ll let you know how that goes.

48 Songs Down

I’ve mixed two songs today. Here’s the second one (the first one really sucks… I mean, this one sucks too, but the first one… woah, it sucked).

I have one more song ready to mix and three that need one more guitar track before they are ready to mix. I don’t know if I will finish this shit show tonight or tomorrow or what, but I am nearly willing to place small wagers on being done some time tomorrow.

I am going to take a break from it for now and go do the laundry and clean the cat’s litter box and take out the trash. After that… I don’t know. I’m pretty sick of this whole project now. At least there aren’t any signs of anyone Fucking With My Stuff Without Permission today. I’ll take that as a win.

46 Songs Down

46 songs down, that’s 92% of the way to a complete 50/90. Yippee.

Here’s one of them. If this sounds punky to me, does that imply that this is what punky sounds like to people who don’t understand what punky sounds like?

I have three more songs that are ready to mix. That brings me to 49. After that there are three songs that need lead guitar tracks and then a mix. That will bring me to 52 and most likely to the end of this year’s 50/90 story. After that I will probably just delete my account because one guy Fucked With My Stuff Without Permission and now I just don’t give a shit about the entire site.

Don’t Touch My Stuff

The folks who will be installing our new water heater are here. Work is underway. Please, oh gods of plumbing and water heating, allow this to be Lake Asshole’s (more recently known as Bucket Asshole) final day. Oh please, oh please. Thank you.

I mixed another song while I was waiting for them to get here this morning. Song number 44 of an expected 52.

50/90 is officially not fun anymore. At least the 50/90 website portion of the project. Last night while I slumbered someone commented on the song I posted before I went to bed suggesting that he could remaster it for me and asking if that would be okay. Then without ever getting a response he remastered it and posted a link to it.

Ummmm… No.

I know we’re all amateurs and trying to get better at what we do and all of those good things, but Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, Fuck With My Stuff Without Permission. It’s really that simple. I made all of my song links private so no one can get to them but me. 99.999% of the people I’ve dealt with have been wonderful and supportive and the few comments I get are always great, but one guy had to Fuck With My Stuff Without Permission and just utterly ruined the whole experience for me.

I plan to keep posting songs there as private so that I get the little trophy next to my name, but that’s it. If I play the game again next year I will probably do it alone, without using the website at all.

Song Number 43

43 songs down, seven to go, and nine more are in the pipeline. We’re going to finish this year’s 50/90 Challenge and we’re going to go a couple of songs over the goal. I’m feeling pretty good about it this year. It’s going to take something major to stop me from finishing, though I am positive I just jinxed it so we can all expect to read a headline in tomorrow’s news: Red head struck by lightning in freak indoor thunderstorm.

Guaranteed.

I was thinking about taking a handful of less sucky songs from this year’s batch and making a stand alone album of some kind. Maybe pick 8-10 songs and redo them to make better sounding recordings and package them up as a sort of quarantine tunes spin off thingie. Maybe I could add a song or two from the Record Every Month RPM project too, as technically all of the 50/90 songs qualify for that too.

We’ll see.

Will this song make it? I don’t know. Let’s say it’s on the bubble and leave it at that for now.