Tag: guitar playing

Finished

Finished.

Done.

Complete.

…and with a little over an hour to spare!

This makes five years in a row for me. Feels like quite a milestone. I had 18 songs and dropped eight of them for the final album. Are the 10 that I kept the best songs? I think so, but I feel way too close to this right now so I can’t say for sure.

I zipped up all of my mp3 files and a jpeg with the cover art and shared it with RPM via dropbox. Hopefully that works and they get it. My profile has been updated with the 2016 submission, but I’m way too tired to deal with any more than that tonight.

For now, here’s a soundcloud playlist with my 10 goofy songs. Hope they don’t suck too bad.

Dazed

When I left work on Friday I think I had six songs mixed, two songs ready to mix, and a whole pile that were a guitar part away from being ready to mix.

Here we are on Sunday afternoon and I have 15 songs mixed. My head is spinning. I’m not done though. I have to stop for tonight so I can go to band practice and then eat dinner with the love of my life and watch The Walking Dead (priorities, right?).

I still have to mix one more song tomorrow night, and like a moron I actually added a song last night at about 10pm, and then added another one this morning at about 7am. I only need to add vocals to those two and then they’ll be ready to mix too. Vocal tracking will happen tomorrow before work in a great bonanza of get-it-in-one-or-don’t-get-it-at-all.

Beyond that, there are still four more unfinished songs that will have to wait for another day. One or two of them are just awful and were abandoned by choice. At least one of the others was working for me before, but I just ran out of time.

So I expect to have 18 songs available for the finished product tomorrow. I’ll probably drop at least four of them, maybe more. I really want to try and trim the fat for the album I submit this year. Not to imply there’s greatness here or anything like that. I just want it to be less crappy than some of my previous submissions (looking at you, 2015).

Caution: Bad Guitar Playing

There are three new devices that need to go on my pedal board.  There will eventually be a fourth, but for now it’s three.  Here’s a video of me noodling with the new toys.

 

A Joyo Ultimate Drive (which is a clone of a Fulltone OCD)
A Seymour Duncan Vapor Trail analog delay
And for the first time ever, a DC power source for the pedals!  It’s an MXR DC Brick.  No more 9-volt batteries for me!*

 

*well… I think I have more pedals than the brick can handle, so maybe a few more 9-volt batteries.

Band Practice

This weekend’s band practice was pretty good.  I didn’t play terribly well.  I felt like I couldn’t get out of my own way.  It was weird.  We did a bunch of songs that we’ve been neglecting, and a couple of songs we added last week.  Not too shabby.

The interesting thing for me personally is the lack of pain.  Last week’s practice was completely pain free.  This week I had one song where things tightened up and ouch, but otherwise it was fine.  I’m not sure what I did different, but I hope I keep it up!

Here are a few songs.  I haven’t listened through these all the way yet so if there’s a major screw up I don’t know about I’ll edit things out of the playlist.

Enjoy(ish)

New Song that is Actually New

Here’s a song from the aborted album in a day I tried on the day that the bathroom remodeling project started. I mixed it with ear buds so I’m sure it sounds like dung.

I don’t like the lyrics and I don’t like the melody in the verses. What do you think, is the rest of it worthy of bringing to the band? I’m undecided.

I’m not a Good Guitar Player

The band had a rehearsal last night.  I recorded the whole thing again.  Know something?  I am not a good guitar player.  I listened back and it was just painful.  There were times when I sucked worse than I did on the first day I picked up the instrument.  I’m actually in the process of drafting formal letters of apology to the artists who wrote the songs that I demolished last night.  The first one goes to Greg Kihn.  There were two Aerosmith songs that were especially molested too, but I really hate that band so they don’t get letters.  Yeah, screw them.

That stupid Greg Kihn song is going to haunt me forever.  The Breakup Song.  Ridiculously simple.  It has a little arpeggiated phrase that opens up the song and then pops in and out over time.  When I first decided to join the band it was on the list of songs they wanted me to do.  I’d never played it before, but in one listen I knew it was Amin -> Fmaj ->Gmaj and the picking pattern and fingering was pretty straightforward.  I ran through it once or twice, then played it at my first band practice and all was well.  Fast forward a month or two and I decided I could maybe play it a little cleaner.  I went online to find some guitar tabs (music cheat sheets for guitarists who can’t read music.  I can read music, I’m just lazy so I cheat and use tabs).  I found a couple and set out to learn one of them.  It made the song 10000000000000 times harder.  I stuck with it for about a week and then canned it and went back to my old fingerings… and now I can’t f#$%^&g play my old fingerings either.  Argh!  I hate it when I suck up an easy song!  Damn it!

NaSoAlMo Song #2

Here is the second of 10 (probably) songs written and recorded for NaSoAlMo. As has often been the case lately I am 90% asleep right now, so I have no idea if the mix I just finished is listenable or not. I’d consider it a big bonus if it sounds okay.

The First Mac Mix

Duck and cover kids, here come the Mac Mixes.

This that song that I couldn’t play the riff for, yet again. While working on the Mac I reserve the right to change the drum sounds and the bass sounds, and to change all the signal processing on the guitars and vocals. Also, I reserve the right to replace the drum parts with the GarageBand Drummer function, although I didn’t do that on this song.

I did change the drum sound and the bass sound, although I just ended up using the Mac version of the same bass sound I used on the iPad. They are close to the same, but the Mac version just sounded a little fatter. The only change I made to the guitar was to swap the panning. The rhythm guitar is doubled with each one panned most of the way to either left or right. One of the tracks used the neck pick up on the Strat, the other used the middle pick up. On the iPad version the neck pick up was to the left. On the Mac version it is to the right. For the vocals I changed the preset and the EQ. I also added compression to the drums, the bass, and both vocal tracks, and to the full mix. Just a little on the mix.

Here is the new mix…

———————-

For comparison, here is the iPad mix (again)…

New (Old) Song

I finished another song today. This one was written in 1991. I can’t say for sure, but it might have been the first song I ever wrote from top to bottom all by my lonesome. At least I can’t remember anything older. There were actually two others that were written at about the same time that might have been my first solo effort. It doesn’t matter.

I think it was 1994 or 1995 that Mike, Dan, and I went into Northeast Broadcasting School’s 24 track studio after hours and recorded four songs. This was one of them. The other three have all been redone in GarageBand too. At first I wanted to record this one, and then make a playlist with all four. Then I thought I’d record the other three too. Then I thought I’d add a few new songs onto the end, just for fun. Then I thought I’d keep the three finished recordings and still add the new songs.

As of this moment, I’m going back to the original plan. Just the four old songs, using the already finished recordings. Yippee.

There is one cool thing about this demo, from my goofy point of view at least. Ever since I started playing the home recording game back in 2007, every song I’ve done (with one exception) has either used a headphone amp, or some kind of software amplifier simulator for all of the electric guitars. Not this one. This one is my actual, real life, physically there Marshall amp. Somehow that little fact made this one seem 100 times more fun.

Here it is:
http://alonetone.com/robertjames1971/tracks/drift-away.mp3%20