I did vocals for two songs first thing this morning, and now I put leads on those songs too. Tracking is done for both. I’m trying to make myself love the Blues Breaker clone pedal. I used it as a boost yesterday and as a light drive pushing a huge Klon Klone boost today. I like it. It’s just not… I don’t know. It’s not love. It makes me sad, though why? It’s just a friggin’ guitar pedal, right? Stupid red head.
The 50/90 challenge starts in about a week. It’s probably not the best idea to try and force out a song this close to the starting point. A song that had it waited a week would have been one of the (hopefully) 50 but now cannot be. You know.
Maybe a little patience is warranted on the musical front right now?
Screw that, I need this.
I took out my new guitar again and told myself that the first thing I play is going to be worked into a song. Welp, here we are a little while later and there aren’t any lyrics and there isn’t a melody, but the song structure is there and the rhythm guitars, bass, and drum parts are all down.
Good boy.
I need to come up with lyrics for this one and the one from the other day so that I can do some car music in the morning. Tomorrow is my last chance this month… I think. Schedules are screwy, you know?
Want some unrelated good news?
Harry’s paying us a visit tonight. WOOHOO! Harry time!
Just under four hours left in the work week. The weekend is almost here.
I’m not sure what the plan is. I want to get an eye exam. I haven’t had a chance to try and book anything yet so it probably isn’t going to happen. Our passports are going to expire soon and we need to get new pictures done so we can send them in with the renewal application. Good thing I got my hair cut, huh?
Guitar, guitar center, trade in the strat, all that stuff. I’m Nana Sitting again on Sunday night but we can get a lot of stuff done between the time I get home tonight and the time I come back on Sunday. Granted, we could also get a lot of flaking and resting and relaxing in too.
So many options, you know?
I think I had a little too much caffeine this afternoon. It’s late but I’m not really tired at all. The Vegas Knights and Montreal Canadiens are going to overtime in game six. Vegas has to win. Vegas. Must. Win.
So in my non-sleepiness I mixed a song. The Record Every Month Challenge thingie will have an entry from me for June.
Note how the link to the song is a link and not a little embedded audio player. Why is that? Well, kids, I found out the hard way that hearthis.at has an upload limit for free accounts and I’ve reached it. I’ll make a second free account and somehow link them together, but not tonight. Tonight I am not up for that challenge. Tonight we’ll just settle for a link to alonetone.
I went down a YouTube rabbit hole a little and ended up here. A live recording of Procol Harum playing Whaling Stories not long before Robin Trower left the band and stopped playing Gibson guitars.
I’ve never heard this recording before, but the song is from a record called Home and I knew that album like the back of my hand. So did everyone in my house and most of my neighbors. Not only did I play it a lot, but I played my guitar along with it a lot too. Loudly.
I could fake my way through most of the songs, and even learned a couple of them (poorly) on piano. This one was a favorite to play along with. Those double bends Trower did… damn.
Interesting guitar question. How many do you actually need?
The video doesn’t really answer the question realistically. You need one, yes. But there are other answers too.
I only need one, but I need to keep looking and trying different guitars until I find THE ONE. Specifically, the one that makes me not want any others.
x = n + 1 where x is the number you need and n is the number you have.
For me, I need two. Two of everything. I play bars in a cover band. I don’t have a tech sitting off stage who can fix things if my equipment should fail. I need to get to the set break. If a guitar (or amp, or cable, or mic, or pedal) should fail I need to swap it for something that’s working immediately. I can tinker with stuff all I want in between sets, but while the band is on stage I need to be up and playing right now.
In the video he talks about needing different types of instruments for different situations. This song needs a strat sound, that song needs a Les Paul. I am guilty of that all the time. In fact, when I think about trading in my strat I think about picking up another guitar with single coil pick ups. The strat is the only single coil guitar I own, so I should get another instrument that fills that role even though that logic is bullshit. No one is ever going to call me up for a gig that requires single coils. That’s absurd. If they want me, then they’ll be perfectly fine with double coils, all day long.
So maybe the answer is just that your needs aren’t as important as your wants. Who knows.
I took a guitar pic yesterday that I didn’t post. I’m posting it now to symbolize the fact that I should have played tonight but didn’t. Or something like that.
I put lead guitars onto the song that got the vocals during car music this morning. All tracking is done on one song so barring any catastrophic failures I’ll have a song to send into RPM this month.
Before recording that lead track though I recorded the first thing to pop into my head when I picked up my new guitar tonight and wrote a whole song form around it.
You’d think that was a good thing, right? It would be if the first thing that popped into my head hadn’t been 95% the same as the chorus of the car music song. It’s 34 bpm slower, and the turn around in bars four and eight is different, though still similar. Otherwise it’s the same thing.
So what to do with it? Is it a rewrite? No… it’s part two of a two song suite. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Let’s go with that.
I am absolutely not guitar shopping. I am, however, suddenly curious about lower end, sort of affordable, fully hollow electric guitars. I own a semi hollow guitar but I’ve never played a fully hollow electric.
It’s all just curiosity.
After working on a couple of seriously atrocious song ideas tonight it’s got me wondering about the near future. The 4th of July is right around the corner, and for a musical net nerd like me, the 4th of July means 50/90.
Should I do 50/90? I’ll definitely do Record Every Month, so there’s three songs. Should I try to bang out the other 47 as well?
I’m not sure. I’ll be pulling shifts at my parents house again probably starting next week, so there’s a lot of time where I won’t be recording. I’ve used that time to put initial ideas down, and to mix, but I can’t do guitars or voices.
I guess we will have to just wait and see where my head is a couple of weeks from now.
Inside the Red Head's Head 