It’s 9:00am on Thursday. I am punched into work, starting the day for reals. What did I do before work? Besides my morning exercise, breakfast, a shower, and a kiss for my wife as she left for the office for the day?
I played some guitar. I put rhythm guitars onto two songs and lead guitars onto two other songs. I have a metric ton of stuff left to do by the end of next month, but we’re picking away at it and a little progress was made. Sigh of relief, babie!
I feel like I have made good progress on a couple of fronts today. First, my stomach is still okay. I had a protein bar for lunch and I have some french fries in the air fryer right now. Not the Golden Crispers from the comfort food post from earlier this morning, but a different type of Ore-Ida frozen french fries. Not as good, but close. We’ll see how we feel after eating a little bit of actual food.
The second progress front is guitar! The 50/90 Challenge and all that stuff. I put rhythm guitars onto two songs, and lead guitars onto two different songs. I played my Les Paul. If I get a chance later I will do some more and play my SG. Variety is the spice of life, after all. I’m also hoping to mix a tune or two before the day comes to an end. We’ll see about that. For now, season five episode two of the new Doctor Who series. Hey, check it out! Prince Daemon Targaryen from House of the Dragon is The Doctor and Nebula from Guardians of the Galaxy is the companion. This might end up being my favorite cast.
Guitar pictures!
I failed to record guitars this morning, but I didn’t fail tonight. I know I wrote the wrap up post for last night today, so you’re getting a second wrap up post. Confusing? Maybe. Do I care? Not really.
I mixed a song this morning but you know that because I posted it even though it was crap. Tonight I put both rhythm and lead guitars onto two songs, and then put leads onto two more. Not the most impressive haul, but not bad given the total failure of my original plans.
Photos for fun.
Guess what I didn’t get to this morning before work.
I managed to finish my daily exercise, watch this week’s new episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (excellent!), and finish the Library episode of Doctor Who that I started last night but fell asleep during the second episode.
No music though, so the morning goes down in the books as a failure.
I recorded guitars for a bunch of songs today. The performances suck to the high heavens, but they exist so… yeah.
I did not record direct today. I had a mic on a speaker like the old timers used to do. Direct signals are fine and all, but making actual noise is so much better. Every time.
I spent about two hours recording guitars today. I finished five of the 10 songs that are currently in the fifty-songs-in-90-days-challenge pipeline. Including the song that is in 13/8 time, and the song that is in 15/8 time. First time I have ever knowingly played guitar in either of those time signatures. Milestones, babie!
I used direct input into the USB audio interface for all of the tracks, including using two amps at a time. I took the obligatory pictures, but Flickr is being a dick today and won’t let me upload PNG files, or any files for that matter, on the web. I had to dumb these down to JPGs and share them onto my iPhone and upload them from the Flickr app. I am thusly annoyed.
Today is the last day of June. I haven’t mentioned the June music project lately. How is that going? Are you going to reach your goal of writing and recording ten (bad) songs within the 30 days of June?
Maybe?
I mixed two songs yesterday. That put me at seven songs complete. At the start of the day today I had one song that needed lead guitars and two more that were ready to mix. Well, I just put some really pathetic guitar leads down on that one song, which ironically is song #1 for this month. Why is the first song started going to be the last one finished? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.
Anyway, that one guitar track being finished (poorly) means that tracking for this album in a month challenge is done and I just have to mix three songs. I think I can do that today. We’ll see.
What about the 10 songs from May? I gave myself to the end of the day on July 3rd to finish those 10 songs. I don’t think I am going to make it. I still have one song that doesn’t have rhythm guitars, and six that don’t have lyrics. Yeah, there’s pretty much zero chance of me hitting this new deadline. 50/90 starts on the fourth of July so the May stuff is probably going to be ignored for a few additional months. Oh well. I am not really doing 50/90. Not officially at least. I am going to see what I can do with a faux 50/90. We’ll see.
Okay, time to add a couple of guitar pics and then punch into work on this fine Friday. 8 hours and 45 minutes until the weekend.
I haven’t played any guitar yet today. Yet.
I did take a photo a day challenge picture of a guitar though so we’ve got that going for us.
I wicked overslept today. I wanted to get up before 6:00, do my yogging, play some guitar, have some breakfast, then check in with work. There’s a customer going through a huge project this weekend and there is a chance I could get called in to help out. I wanted a status update to make sure I’m in the clear (I am 99% sure I won’t get called now, things are going well).
Instead I slept until after 7:30. I still did all of that stuff, I just did it hours later than expected. I also changed the litter boxes and filled up the bird feeders and am currently on my second load of laundry. It’s been an active kinda day so far.
Now that all of that is out of the way, I should be able to spend some time mixing some music and writing some lyrics for what I hope will be a huge car music tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed on that one.
Pictures:
I put leads on two songs using my SG and then switched to my Les Paul for the third and final song. I have now run out of songs that are ready for leads. There’s only one song remaining that is ready for rhythm guitar, but I am waiting on that one. I don’t know why, but I am. I am still sticking to the May Music Project plan of only using the new King of Tone pedal. I brought my stay-at-home pedal board out of the closet the other day but I haven’t set it up yet. I will use that once the faux 50/90 starts on the 4th of July. I think. I want to put the King of Tone onto the board too, in place of whatever overdrive is currently following the Klon KTR in the chain. I think it’s the Keeley D&M Drive right now, though I hate to put that one away. I need to see how The King plays with others.
Okay, more music updates later. I think. We’ll see.
Magically, the streak of consecutive days where the guitar was played for at least a couple of minutes has reached 18. I put rhythm guitar tracks onto one of the final two songs from May. Only one more song to go. Last night I wrote lyrics for two of the June songs, and after I finished playing the gitter I wrote lyrics for a third. There will be car music tomorrow, though I am not sure how that schedule will work out.
I used the direct out from the Bassbreaker 15 amplifier. It calls it cabinet emulation, not simulation, but whatever. It sounds… okay. Not great. The little nutube Vox amp probably sounds better. I’ll stick with this for a while and see if it grows on me.
Pics:
As for tomorrow. Here’s the plan. I am going to get up at the ass crack of dawn and do the third Couch to 5k training. I expect I will die during that, but once it’s over I will go inside and eat breakfast and recover. Then after breakfast is done, and the one hour pause after eating before I can drink water again is also done, I’ll jump in the car, drive to a secluded place, and crank out some vocal tracks.
Hopefully. We’ll see if I can stick to that plan or not. Wish me luck.
Inside the Red Head's Head 