Lyrics inspired by a Facebook conversation about my niece’s first two days of kindergarten. Sort of. I guess.
Musically, this one may have been written in the Trapp Family Lodge*. The Hills are Alive with the Sound of GarageBand for iPad.
*It may have been written the night after we stayed at the Trapp Family Lodge. I can’t remember. It was the first song idea I messed with during our Canadian vacation in July, I know that for sure.
The music for this was written in a hotel room in upstate New York. How rock and roll is that?? The lyrics are the second in a growing group of songs inspired by folk stories I found on a website. Here’s a link to this story. It’s about a guy who was famous for tall tales and cider.
Twangie little ditty inspired by how fast my step kids are growing up. Waaaay too fast.
Tonight’s edition of the 50/90 song post is a little ditty about the annual college student moving day crushing that the city of Boston goes through over Labor Day Weekend.
Happy double parking, moving trucks driving the wrong way on one way streets, red lights are just suggestions weekend, Boston! WOOHOO
Not sure about the mix for this one. My left ear hears much better than my right, and I do all of my work with headphones. Sometimes when I have two doubled tracks split left/right I end up having a hard time keeping them balanced. I over compensate one way or another and then I end up throwing all the other tracks out of whack as well. That might have happened here.
Overall I kinda like this one, but as with the last song I uploaded the cutting and pasting feels really choppy. Bad punches all around. The lyrics are about my 1997 decision to go back to college which, at least for a while, turned into a kind of career for me.
This is the 28th finished song for 50/90. I hope to have #29 posted before I sleep tonight. At that point I’ll be out of mixable songs until I can sneak in some vocal time next week.
Progress, kids.
Here’s the first one…
There’s a lot of weirdness going on here.
First, King’s X has a song on their Dogman album called “Go to Hell”. It’s 30 seconds long and it’s balls to the wall and just when you start to feel the groove it ends. I thought I might try something like that. Fast, loud, and over before it goes anywhere. That didn’t end up happening with this song, but that was one of the ideas.
Second, GarageBand for iOS doesn’t have a lot of options as far as time signatures go. I wanted to do something in an unusual time, but I was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting for my mother’s appointment to end and I didn’t have my MacBook on me. So I just did some math. Eight bars of 6/4 time is the same number of beats as 12 bars in 4/4. So I set the segment to 12 bars of four and just played something that felt like 6. It worked. Hooray. Then I tried to replace the original drums using the OSX GarageBand’s Drummer function. All the fills were in the wrong place. I spent 3 minutes messing with it before deciding to just use the original drums. I did change the sounds though.
Third, as 50/90 approaches the end of the second month, lyrics are getting hard to come by. Even when I do have a subject to write about they are just hard to put together. I had an idea for forcing inspiration. I would look up old New England folklore and write lyrics based on those stories. That song is my first attempt. The story is about a guy who, backed with some zombie muscle, kidnapped his crush from her wedding. Not before killing the groom, of course. It’s a nice family friendly tale.
And now here is the second song…
Last month I did a bad instrumental thing inspired by the quiet little instrumental breaks in the last couple of Pink Floyd records. I don’t like the way it came out, but I did decide right away I’d try something similar again before 50/90 ended.
Well, here it is. Break Time pt2 is also Floydish, only this time I was thinking Obscured by Clouds instead of Division Bell. I like this one better, but it’s still more or less a throw away.
I mixed one song tonight after mixing two last night. 50/90 is now 25/44. I hit the 50% complete point one day after reaching the halfway point. I need to step up the pace a little.
Here’s tonight’s song. I don’t really care for it, although it is in 5/4 and makes the prog fan in me happy.
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Last night I mixed a song that sounds alarmingly similar to a song I mixed the night before. Repetitiveness is a bummer.
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I also mixed this angry little ditty that is sort of maybe about Ferguson, MO although at the time of writing I had very little factual knowledge of the protests. I was just going on tweets from the scene and most of those were more emotional than factual.
I have a total of 33 songs either finished or in progress for 50/90. This one marks 22 as finished. Miles still to go.
I’m not sure about this mix here. If I weren’t 75% asleep I might be able to make a better determination. It’s okay for now at least.
I mixed this one last night but was too tired to take the time to share it. Here it is, better late than yadda yadda…
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This second song was mixed this evening. I usually don’t stick the lovey lyrics with the big dumb rock songs, but it seems happy here.
Inside the Red Head's Head 