Morning Photos and Car Music

I pulled double duty this morning and it might throw off my whole day.

I went out early for car music, but on my way there I stopped downtown for some film photos. I took my Nikon and Dad’s zoom lens and finished the roll that was in the camera. I went to the dam and our little downtown shopping area and took a few pictures. I did not bring my mirrorless camera, but I did bring my point and shoot, just so I could have something to post here.

The sunlight was really nice for a change. It was a good day to go out.

After a short trip downtown I went to the movie theater parking lot and put vocals on three songs. I could have done two more but my voice was starting to get tired and I wanted to get home for some breakfast and a shower before work.

The one thing I failed to do this morning was my 30 minutes of exercise. I am going to have to get that in a piece at a time throughout the day. I failed to close my exercise ring on Saturday, and I failed to close my move ring (calorie counter) on both Saturday and Sunday. That ends today. No more missing rings, even if I do have a day where I am feeling sick. August starts tomorrow and I want another perfect month.

Until then, here’s the obligatory clock pic.

Morning Car Music

I was able to get out to the movie theater parking lot to do some singing in the car. Success. Well, success-ish.

I had five songs ready to record. I was hoping to get to all of them, but I only had a little more than an hour and that probably isn’t enough time for five songs, even when I work with my super low standards. I got through three of the songs and then had to go home. I had time remaining, and I still had some voice left. I wasn’t tired, I could have kept going. Unfortunately, one of the roadblocks you encounter when you’re mentally defective and can’t sing when other people are around and therefore have to go to an empty parking lot to sing in the car when you have voice parts to record is that if you need to go to the bathroom, you need to go home.

Too much information?

The view from my recording studio this morning!

Drizzly Morning Car Music

I had four songs ready for me to record vocals and I just got home from recording in the car. I picked off all four songs. Sweet.

Now I have four songs ready to mix, four ready for lead guitars, eight ready for lyrics, and one still waiting on rhythm guitars. How much of that pile of stuff will I get to today? Hopefully a good chunk of it all. It’s a music kinda day today, I think.

Sunday Car Music

I over slept by quite a bit this morning, but I still managed to sneak out for some singing in the car. I had two songs ready to go, both from May. I was thinking of writing the melody and lyrics for a June song while on mic, the way I always used to do it back in the old days, but when the time came I just decided to go home.

Here’s the view from my “mobile studio” today. Same as yesterday. Literally. I was in the same parking spot.

Also, a couple of random pics from the drive home.

Car Music

Car music was sort of successful. I put vocals on three songs. All of them are June songs. I’m prioritizing June songs over May songs because reasons, or something. I probably could have done a forth song but my voice got tired quickly, my water bottle was almost empty, and my bladder was beginning to ask for attention.

My goal today is to clean the kitchen, catch that friggin’ mouse, record some more guitars, write some more lyrics, and get myself ready for more car music tomorrow.

Here’s my studio view:

That laptop on the lap thing there? I couldn’t do that before the gastric bypass surgery. Crazy new world, eh?

Car Music

The April entry for the Record Every Month Challenge lives! I hopped in the car this morning, drove to an empty parking lot, and recorded vocals for two songs. One song is abysmal. The other is okay, I guess.

I was able to stick to this month’s gimmick of doing all of the work on my iPad. I tested out my little mic interface before I left the house, just to make sure it would work. It did.

Instead of the usual pictures, I decided to test to see if iMovie still was a thing and I took a bunch of fake super 8 clips and then stitched them all together into a nearly five minute long snore fest. Don’t worry, the downtown clock is there, it’s just at the very end.

Car Music for March

Musical progress, folks! The Record Every Month Challenge is still happening for March 2023! I went to my favorite singing-in-the-car parking lot this morning and put really terrible vocal tracks onto two songs. The challenge is to record a song each month. I am upping the ante to recording two songs every month because I am insane.

The view out my “studio” window, complete with my rubber duck assistant audio engineer:

Weight loss surgery has changed a lot for me in terms of singing. My lung capacity is WAY down, which seems odd but maybe not that surprising. There is a new finding that I just came across today. Car music workflow had me putting the laptop on the passenger seat and leaning over to read the lyrics off of the notepad. Today it occurred to me that without my huge stomach I can do this instead:

Finally, in closing, I drove through the center of town. I actually brought Dad’s film camera with me, fully intending to stop somewhere and snap a few pics. When the time came though, I just drove home… like I always do. I did almost get hit by a guy running a stop sign, and then get hit again when he decided to change lanes without looking while I was literally right next to him. 9:00am and already driving drunk. Dude’s gonna have a banger of a day, methinks.

Record Every Month

I have three songs underway for this month’s Record Every Month challenge. As of this evening two of them are ready for vocals. There may be car music tomorrow.

It’s supposed to be nice and sunny tomorrow morning too so photos are a possibility. It’s going to be cold though. No ocean, but maybe around town? Can I do car music and golden hour pics in the same morning? Maybe we will find out. I have about 18-20 shots left in the roll that’s in Dad’s camera. I’d like to finish that off before I start using the fresh roll that’s in my camera. If I go out with a camera it will be Dad’s with the 50mm lens.

We will have to see what time I get up tomorrow. I’ll let you know.

Crappy Weather and Crappy Singing

We got a couple of inches of snow yesterday followed by some rain and a drop in temperature which turned the snow to ice. I went out after work and shoveled and it was like shoveling bricks. It was not fun. I was happy that the driveway and both cars and the path to the garbage barrels and the area around the fire hydrant were all cleared.

Then later, around bed time, it started snowing again. Not much, but it quickly turned to rain again and immediately froze. When I got up this morning everything I had shoveled yesterday had been magically transformed into an ice skating rink. Yippee. I was also ran out of ice melt last night. Oh goodie.

I did not let it stop me though. I hacked the layer of ice off of one of the cars and proceeded to drive to a not-so-empty parking lot for some car music! I say not so empty because there were two humongous trucks trying to plow the layer of ice off of the lot. You can probably hear them on the vocal tracks. Yippee, again.

I got through four songs and oh my goodness do they suck. That brings me up to seven songs with vocals, with eight more to go. Only two of those eight have lyrics though, so I need to do a lot of work tonight. There must be another car music in the morning. Fortunately tomorrow is Saturday so I can spare a little more time, and if needed I can go out more than once. I can do the same on Sunday. Assuming I can get all of the lyrics written (and one song still needs rhythm guitars as well) then I will have all of the vocals down with a couple of days to spare. Then it’s just lead guitar and mixing, which will likely take a lot of time to get through. I’m already sort of sorting things into two buckets: Songs that might be useable for the final album, and songs that most likely will not be useable. There are two on the later list. Drop candidates, as it were, and one on the bubble. The rest of them are bad, but not so bad as to throw away… maybe. We’ll see how I feel when they are mixed.

My studio view today is thusly:

Also, a pic of half of my audience for the day:

And now for a few shots of the scenic drive to the not-so-empty parking lot:

So the musical plan for later tonight is record some leads, record one song’s rhythm guitars, mix a song or two, and write a shit ton of lyrics and melodies.

Yeah… I can do that. Some of it at least.

Car Music: 2023 Edition

I did it today. I went out and recorded some vocal tracks. Three songs. I got out of bed around 5:40, did my exercise for the day from 6:00-6:40, jumped into the car a few minutes before 7:00, drove to the movie theater parking lot, and recorded vocals for three songs. I was hoping to get to more, but I wanted to get home in time to shower and have breakfast before work.

I did song #’s 1, 2, and 4. I skipped #3 because I hate it more than all of the others and therefore have not written lyrics or melody yet. I still have four songs that are ready to sing, so there should be another car music tomorrow.

There was a new gear hiccup. Isn’t there always? I started getting lag. Where the hell did that come from? I’ve been doing this process for YEARS now and I have never once had an issue with lag. It started mid-way through the first song. I saved everything, killed off the Garageband session, restarted it, and everything was fine. It happened on the second song too and the same steps cleared it. It didn’t happen again. It’s yet another thing that can go wrong these days that never went wrong before. Annoying, but not debilitating.

Want to see my studio? How’s it look…

Nice, huh?

So tomorrow I hope to do more car music. Wednesday I won’t be able to because Wednesday is a work-from-the-office day and I won’t have time. Thursday and Friday… one of those two days I need to go to Lowell General Hospital and get some labs done. They open at 5:00am, so maybe I can do that and then do car music for an hour, and then do my exercise after work? The faux jogging (“yogging”) is currently taking about 40 minutes. I think I can hack that after work once.

I am up to 12 songs now. Remember when I used to do FAWM and my goal was 14 songs? Maybe my goal is once again to get to 14 songs. I know there’s one I want to drop before I submit the project to the RPM Challenge folks, 14 songs just gives me more options. Adding two more songs will also give me more guitar playing that can act as a warm up before I start recording leads… now that I have three songs that are ready for leads.

We’ll see how it goes. Shit loads of work left to do and only eight days to do it. I’m not panicking yet, but I am gettin’ there.

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