Tag: Garageband

One More Sham of a Song

This is #6 out of the 7 leftovers from 2007’s failed RPM. I wrote the lyrics and the melody on Tuesday May 28, 2013 at about 7:30am. Just minutes prior I heard a recording of a conversation between Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Alex Lifeson of Rush. Rush has been my absolute musical idols ever since I was 10 years old. In the interview, Alex Lifeson talked about how easy it is for mediocre musicians to use Garageband and make decent sounding records and how that was leading to the watering down of the entire music industry.

Alex didn’t mention me by name, but I know in my heart he was talking about me. Musically speaking, me and all of the songs I’ve writen are just a big fat sham.

Not that that is going to stop me, of course.

Two More Songs

I was hoping there would be three songs to post tonight, but I’m way too tired so you’ll have to settle for two.

These were both started in 2007 when I first tried and failed the RPM challenge. This makes five of those seven songs that have finally been finished. The lyrics to the first one are about nothing, hence the song title. I was trying to make a point in the lyrics to the second song, but I can’t figure out what that point was. Typical.

These two files will eventually be deleted, someday, when I finish recording all of the songs that I consider to be part of my leftover songs project. Once they are all done I’ll move the whole thing over to bandcamp. But I’ll put these here for now.

Three New Songs

I sat in the car, waiting for the kids to get out of karate class, and I mixed three songs.  I am such a dork.

First, Out of Control.  Written in 1997 by me, Mike, and Maria.  Unlike the other songs I’ve taken from the Prime Meridian set lists, this one was actually written for and by Prime Meridian.  We had a number of different singers over our three years together.  One of them used to call this song, Out of Control Like a Tootsie Roll.  It took huge willpower not to sing that line today.

Second, The Monica Song.  More than any other song I’ve posted online, the lyrics to this one make me cringe.  A lot.  This song is me, a not quite 21 year old, musing over a picture from a Sports Illustrated Swim Suit Calendar.  If memory serves it was April ’92.  I lacked the confidence to ever explicitly write a song about a woman, so I wrote this crap as a sort of exercise. It is a little painful to listen to now.  However, I still really dig the way the guitar part grooves.  I believe this is the one song I’ve tinkered with the most of any as far as arrangement is concerned.  When I first wrote it, it was a heavy rocker.  While working at Northeast Broadcasting School a couple of years later I flipped it on its head and made it an acoustic song with just one guitar, one voice, and one saxophone.  This arrangement is meant to be a bit of a hybrid of the two others.  I don’t know if I like it or not.

Thirdly, The Sky.  Speaking of embarrassing, back in ’94 or ’95 Mike and I were playing in a band with a drummer named Dan.  The band never got a name, but we were occasionally very good.  I think that period might have been the best I’ve ever been as a guitar player.  Anyway, we made a 24 track demo at Northeast Broadcasting School.  Three of the four songs we did have been re-recorded by me this month, including this one.  Although at the time it had very different lyrics.  On two of the songs on that demo, Jim the Keyboard Hero contributed freakin’ fantastic keys.  This song was one of them.  Unfortunately, I totally suck on keyboards so I had to seriously dumb down Jim’s awesomeness in order to at least have some organ on the track.  It’s kind of painful to think how much better Jim’s part was.  Still, I always had fun playing this song, even though it’s pretty cheesy.

Early Morning Visit

Look who came out for a visit this morning.

HipstaPrint

The rest of this post is yet another music home demo recording nerd post.

I have three songs in the works right now.  Thanks to the acoustic guitar that suddenly needs a new nut (uh oh) and the leaky, mostly out of tune sax, one of them is ready to be mixed.  A second is missing just a lead guitar.  The third still needs all guitars and vocals.  That one might not get finished until next week.

So I seem to be on a pretty quick pace right now.  I have posted four songs since March 1st, which followed the 14 from February.  My free soundcould account is going to run out of room again.  That means this year’s RPM will get deleted and all of those previous posts that include embeded soundcloud files will lose their audio.  Oh well.  I think I might make a new page for playlists of recent music.  I will use bandcamp to host the playlists, and keep soundcloud for works in progress kinda things.

I’ve also decided that the four songs I have finished this month, and two of the three I’m playing around with now do not belong with the left over songs project.  I started a new playlist for the re-recorded songs.  That is meaningless to everyone on Earth except me, but what are ya gonna do, right?

I will take my lunch break at 1:00.  My MacBook and my Les Paul are ready and waiting to finish tracking another song.  I might be posting two new ones tonight.  We’ll see.

…Where the 80’s Live Forever!

I consider the first “real” band I ever played in to be Tempest Fero.  Horrible name.  Fun band.  It was Mike on bass, Jeff on drums, Jim on keyboards, and some fat doofus on guitar.

We had a number of “songs” that we’d come up with that were just instrumental riffs that were fun to jam on.  Goldfish, Toilet Water from Hell, Guppies from Mars and Beyond.  Yeah, we were 16 and 17 year old nerds.  I remember toward the end of my junior year in high school we had decided to stop looking for a singer and start just doing it ourselves.  Jim was good.  Jeff was better.  I wasn’t so hot.  Mike only sang when it was funny.  I thought that if we were becoming a real band we should probably write lyrics to our instrumental songs.  My first attempt was really bad, but I fudged it into a melody that went over Goldfish.  Time for a Change was born.  It was the first song I’d ever written or cowritten that was really complete.  My simple melody got trashed in favor of a better one that Jim came up with.  They were sort of similar, but Jim’s blew mine out of the water.

All of that happened about 25 years ago.  Now, after all of this time, I give to you, oh internets, a sloppy little GarageBand demo recording of Time for a Change, 2013.  Gasp in wonder at how lame it is…

But wait, there’s more!

I had to dig through a box full of old cassette tapes to find the arrangement and the lyrics, but I eventually found a tape that was in awful shape, with the worst wow and flutter in the history of magnetism.  It also didn’t have Mike playing bass. That made me sad.  Still, there were four other songs on the tape.  One of them was a song that Mike and I wrote in his basement while playing with his 4-track recorder.  This was probably either late ’88 or early ’89.  I really can’t recall.  Jeff took over the melody this time and made my simple, feeble attempt a billion times better.

The lyrics came from two places. I bought a copy of Steve Hackett’s Till We Have Faces album and the opening track was called Duel.  It was based on a Spielberg movie of the same name about a commuter who is stalked by a psycho driving a truck.  That idea, combined with nearly getting in a head on collision while driving home from work late one night made up the basis of what was sadly probably my best lyric effort with Tempest Fero.  Not to imply my lyrics ever got much better, but this was the best I had come up with at the time.  Jeff had started writing lyrics for T.F. too and his squashed mine like the proverbial grape.  Anyway, in the hopes of not making Time for a Change feel all lonely and stuff, I also made a new GarageBand demo of One on One Duel…

Enjoy these two flashbacks to Rob’s early days of writing music, way back in the 80’s!

Musical Flashbacks

The re-recording of old songs continued this weekend.  There was a slight twist on the process though.  This time, the songs date back to…

The 1980’s!

Queue the horror movie music and the gallons of hairspray complete with ozone depleting chlorofluorocarbons.

One of the two songs in progress is actually the first song I ever wrote (co-wrote, actually) that was finished.  I had written, or co-written riffs that were glued together and jammed on without ever getting  a melody or lyrics or any kind of real structure.  This particular song contains my first attempt at lyrics and melody although in the end some one else came up with a better melody.  I have a GarageBand file with drums, bass, and a simple keyboard.  I was going to record the vocals this morning before work, but yeah right.  Maybe tomorrow.  The second song is on my iPad and is just drums and bass parts for the song’s A, B, and C sections without any arrangement.  Still, it’s in process.

What I should be doing is finishing some of those still unfinished ideas that are clogging up my MacBook, but no… I’m time traveling to the 80’s.  You got a problem with that?  You wanna make something of it?

Prime Meridian Revisited

Former Genesis lead guitarist Steve Hackett has twice released albums called Genesis Revisited which include newly recorded versions of old Genesis songs.  I figure if it’s good enough for Steve then it’s good enough for me.

I have two newly recorded Prime Meridian songs that I could use for Prime Meridian Revisited, if I ever wanted to do one of those, you know?

Dead Sheep is my white suburban pretentious college student attempt at analyzing the inner city gang situation of the early 90’s.  I wholeheartedly apologize for my younger self.  Really.

Overexposed was co-written by me and Mike the Bass Player.  The lyrics are about how freakin’ sick we all were of seeing OJ Simpson’s face on the television.  I still wanna puke a little just thinking of all the media coverage.

Maybe I’ll start on a Tempest Fero Revisited too.  That’ll be good for a laugh.

Consolidation

I consolidated every GarageBand file I’ve ever created onto one machine tonight. Some came from my iPad 2, others from my New iPad, a few from my iPhone, many from my Mac mini, and many more from my MacBook Pro. My MacBook Pro now contains a folder for finished songs, including sub folders for the last two RPMs, a folder for songs I would like to finish within the next month or so, and a folder for song ideas that I don’t know what to do with. I was especially looking for two ancient songs that I know I have unfinished recordings of somewhere, but after coming up empty across all of my various Apple devices, I think I know where they are. On SVHS tapes in ADAT format. Yup, definitely going to start those over again. My 8-track days are over.

I am king nerd. Bow before my uber nerdliness.