Tag: Guitar

RPM Challenge Day 2/28

Day two was mostly spent recovering from travel on day one (day three will be similar, I fear). I did add a second song idea and I worked out a full song form for both day 2’s song and day 1’s. So I now have two songs with full form done, including bass and drums. One of them may have a sax part already too, but it’s just a keyboard as a place holder for now.

RPM Challenge Day 1/28

It is February again so it is time for daily RPM Challenge updates.

Not much yesterday (Day one, Sunday), just one song idea noodled out in GarageBand for iPhone while sitting in a hotel room near Orlando, Florida waiting to check out and fly home. Hopefully I’ll get to a little more than that today.

Oxblood

Question: What is the most expensive Gibson Les Paul on Earth?

Answer: Jeff Beck’s super modified 1954 Les Paul Standard, commonly known as the Oxblood Les Paul.

Question: How much did the Oxblood sell for?

Answer: It is commonly believed that Beck bought the guitar for about $300 in 1972, but two days ago it sold at auction for $1,315,708.

Beck’s wife put up his gear collection for auction and the results were pretty staggering. While the hope was the guitars would be bought by people who would actually play them, I think it’s safe to say that most of the big tickets are going to museums and private collections where they will likely be on display and never actually touched again. That’s sad, but at these prices what can you do?

There were a couple of guitars that I would have bid on if money were no object. The Oxblood and the Yardburst being the two big ones, but there were supposed to be some signature models and prototypes of signature models (of the Oxblood, at least) that I would have liked to get my greedy mitts on.

Still… I think I would rather we still had Jeff Beck playing all of this stuff rather than having to live in a world without him. That would be way better than this world.

New/Old Song

A new song from The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project, also known as Quarantine Tunes Volume Eight.

Volume eight is all songs written during the 2020 50/90 Challenge. I think. Volume five was all songs from the 2021 50/90, I think… those songs were better than the 2020 songs and it shows with this one. If this was one of the 50 songs that was good enough to consider re-recording then… we’re definitely scraping the bottom of the artistic barrel.

Oh well. It’s done.

New/Old song mixed and uploaded to alonetone.com.

Guitar Shake to Shuffle

I just finished putting rhythm guitar tracks onto two song demos. Look at me being musically productive!

Also, I used Hipstamatic’s Shake-To-Shuffle on my new iPhone for the first time. Wow!

Still Looks Good

It still looks like Sunday will have a band practice. The first one in ages.

I need to put new strings on my Les Paul Standard. I also need to not get too excited because statistically speaking it’s probably safe to assume something will take the plans and cock them up.

Ugh. I want to be in a band again! AARRGGHH!!!

Fingers Crossed

4:00pm on Sunday?

We’re trying to setup a time for the band to get together this weekend. I think everyone is in. At least we’re all in as of this moment. I need this. I so need this. I don’t even know when the last time all four of us got together to play was. It’s been way too long. So long that I was pretty convinced it would never happen again. Pessimistically I am still pretty convinced that it is never going to happen again but I am choosing to look on the bright side right now, like the ray of fucking sunshine that I am.

My fingers are crossed. Band practice on Sunday. Make it so.

Friday

It’s Friday. One week from today I am going to be writing about how I only have an eight hour work day standing between me and a full week’s vacation. I am already hyper focusing on it. Crazy.

I just watched the season two finale of Silo. It was very good. I sort of screwed things up though. The show is based on a series of books. A few weeks ago I got tired of waiting to see what was going to happen on the show so I started reading. I’m going to finish the third and final book probably this weekend. When the super confusing twist happened in today’s episode I knew what it was and I knew it was coming. I spoiled myself. I don’t care though because the books are good, the show is good, and the books and the show are just different enough that I can still feel engaged with both.

This week I also watched the season (series?) finale of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew and I am down to the second season (series?) finale of The Alienist which I am enjoying a lot even though it’s creepy as hell. Fortunately season two of Severance came out today. I’ll watch that tonight before bed, I think. Silo is over, but I still have a Friday show to watch out for. That’s nice.

Last night I watched a video on the youtubes. Five Watt World’s Short History of the Les Paul Deluxe. My first “real” guitar was a Les Paul Deluxe. I didn’t learn how to figure out the date on a Les Paul until years later so I have no idea what year it was made. I think it was very late 70’s or very early 80’s. I bought it in 1988 at Russo’s Music in Lowell, MA. All of the knobs had cracked off of it and I never replaced them. I was a kid. I didn’t have the money or even the know how of how to get replacements that would fit. It also had a nasty gash in one of the frets, and I seem to remember that one of the inlays was coming unglued. I didn’t care. I loved that guitar. I adored that guitar.

On a Sunday night/Monday morning in November or December (pretty sure it was December) of 1990 it was stolen out of my car. That was pretty much the end of the world for me. I have never really recovered from the violation of it all. I bought my Les Paul Custom a short time later and that is still my number one guitar… but some days I really find myself missing that Deluxe. I would have loved to have taken it to a good shop and had all of the negatives fixed up. It would have been epic, mini-humbuckers and all.

Watching this video made me feel all the feels. Steve Hackett, Pete Townsend, and me. All of us, Les Paul Deluxe veterans.

Okay. Time to stop farting around and get ready for work. Happy Friday, everyone. The weekend awaits.