I was going to do these daily, but naw. One week into the project and here’s where I stand.
12 songs in progress. No mixes yet. One song has all of the tracking done and is ready to mix. One has vocals and is ready for lead guitar. Five have rhythm guitars and lyrics and melody written and are ready for vocals (car music in the morning, maybe?). Five have their song format and the bass and drums finished and are ready for rhythm guitars.
Not bad for the first week. I don’t know how this pace compares to the other two times I finished 50 songs. Who knows.
I have four songs ready for vocals. I should do car music tomorrow! I am working from home and not going to my parents until around dinner time. Tomorrow’s the perfect day!
Except for that whole tropical storm that’s supposed to hit us in the morning.
Yeah, I am not going to do car music in the middle of Elsa the Tropical Storm.
<prepare yourself for Robert your Narrator to make a Dad Joke that I am positive everyone on the Eastern coast of the United States of America has already made. Sorry… can’t resist this one>
Elsa just needs to let it go.
<GET IT??????>
I need mental help. Get me on Prozac, STAT! Is Prozac even still a thing?
So I was working on a little ditty in GarageBand just now and the cat jumped up on my desk and somehow manage, with one swipe of her paw on the trackpad, shuffle around two segments of the song and also paste a couple of new notes into the bass line.
Two vocals, one melody/lyric, and one new song idea started.
Not too bad for a work day.
I made a works in progress playlist on hearthis.at. I know it won’t play from wordpress.com, but I’m posting it anyway because why the hell not. None of this matters anyway so why should I give a flying fuck at a rolling donut?
The naming scheme is year-project-counter-device the file originated on. Look at me being all assembly line efficient and shit. Yippee.
I just came home from my first car music of the 50/90 season. I had three songs to do. I did two of them. The mic was dropping out and distorting and sounding awful again. I had to do everything over and over again because of it. I’m about 95% sure it’s the mic cable. I will test that the next time I do a car music. I am Nana Sitting tonight which means I can’t do it tomorrow. Thursday or Friday maybe? Probably more like Sunday. We’ll see.
There should be car music tomorrow. We will see how I feel in the morning.
How’d we do today? One new song under way for a total of six. All have rhythm guitars and three have lyrics. Not bad for day two.
I usually don’t stress over melodies. These shitty songs are lucky they get any melody at all. Tonight though I found myself trashing something. I was working over a riff that has some really weird syncopation and I was playing a pretty simple melody. Shortly after wrapping up the phrase it started feeling familiar. I eventually placed it… it was a song from this year’s RPM Challenge.
Today was a big opening day for this year’s 50/90 idiocy. At midnight I kicked off the first song idea. Hooray! I don’t know if I’ve ever stayed up until midnight for one of these before but now I have.
As bed time on day one approaches a quick look at the Trello board shows me five songs underway. All have drums and bass and the full song form. Two have rhythm guitars. Crazy! That’s a lot to get done on the first day. It totally helps when day one is a Sunday and you are trapped at your parents’ house and can’t leave and can’t do pretty much anything else.
Day two tomorrow will hopefully give us the rhythm guitar parts for the other three songs and maybe a new song idea or two. And maybe if time allows… a lyric or two? That’s just crazy talk.
I signed up for this year’s 50/90 today. We’ll see how long it takes before I burn out on it. Initial plans are to swap out the Vox amp for one of the Fenders and to keep using the same 3-4 pedals I’ve been using over the last few months. I will start the first day (Sunday the 4th) at my parents’ house. I won’t have much to do outside of Nana Sitting duties so maybe I can get a good jump on things. I have a Trello board setup, but we only get five freebies now so I will probably delete it when I’m done. Whatever. I used to have a Tumblr account that I used for daily check ins on recording projects. I might do that again too. Anything to manufacture some phony BS motivation.
I am up to date on Loki now. Episode four was totally worth the wait. I will be up to date on The Bad Batch in about six minutes when the episode I am watching right now ends. Disney+, I am keeping up with your mad pace.
What else is going on? Right now? Not much. It’s Friday and this weekend is a three day weekend. Glorious. Quitting time is in about nine hours. I can make it that far. Just hold on, fat boy. You can make it that far.
After working on a couple of seriously atrocious song ideas tonight it’s got me wondering about the near future. The 4th of July is right around the corner, and for a musical net nerd like me, the 4th of July means 50/90.
Should I do 50/90? I’ll definitely do Record Every Month, so there’s three songs. Should I try to bang out the other 47 as well?
I’m not sure. I’ll be pulling shifts at my parents house again probably starting next week, so there’s a lot of time where I won’t be recording. I’ve used that time to put initial ideas down, and to mix, but I can’t do guitars or voices.
I guess we will have to just wait and see where my head is a couple of weeks from now.
Allow me to officially declare the 2020 50/90 challenge complete. I finish with 51 songs written and recorded in 88 (I think?) days. Note that the challenge doesn’t include recording songs, it just asks you to write them. Whatever.
I know the playlist I’m including here isn’t going to work but what the hell. You can get the official, legal (hehe) copy here.
I was also trying to make sure I kept my personal little album in a month during quarantine challenge alive for the three months 50/90 covered and I did. 11 songs were written and recorded entirely in July, 12 entirely in August, and 14 entirely in September. The remaining 14 were started in one month and finished in another,
So what next? I’ve actually already started working on the first song for Quarantine Tunes Vol. 2. I’ll try to write more in October too, but I’m not really pushing for 10 new songs the way I did every month since February. I don’t want to stop playing and recording, but I think my song writing brain might need some time off. National Solo Album Month is coming in November, of course.
When I left off last night I had three songs left to work on. They all needed lead guitar parts. Today I decided to nerd it up like a mad man. I used all three of my Gibson guitars, one on each of the three songs. The Les Paul and the ES-335 both have fresh strings but the SG hasn’t been changed since… January? I haven’t played it since at least May… I think. Maybe it was June, but I’m pretty sure it was May. The strings were dead, but I pulled it off.
Here’s to my second ever complete 50/90 challenge. I need a nap.
