Tonight was our first band practice in something like three weeks. We have a gig in a month but rehearsal time has been hard to come by.
The main focus right now is getting a handful of new songs up to speed. Some of them are songs the band played with their old guitar player, so they are only really new to me.
I expected us to be rusty and sloppy and not very good, but we played surprisingly well. It was pretty intense too and my finger tips are burning. My calluses were not as hard as they should be, and the strings were digging in to my skin something fierce. I need to practice at home more than I do.
We have until Saturday October 8th to get our collective shit together again. We will be ready.
Yesterday I saw a trending topic on twitter that threw me for a minute. It was “John McLaughlin”. I immediately thought, oh crap did 2016 take away another of my favorite people?
John McLaughlin was a political commentator who had a famous talk show. He passed away yesterday at the age of 89.
I don’t mean to imply that I was happy about the death of this man. I don’t mean that at all. I will say, however, that I am very happy to learn it was that John McLaughlin, and not another John McLaughlin.
John McLaughlin is an English jazz guitarist. I’m not sure he’s human though because human beings should not really be as amazingly talented as he is. He’s one of those guys who make your favorite rock guitarists feel inadequate the way you feel when you listen to your favorite rock guitarists. Know what I mean? Imagine how good a mortal human being can be on a musical instrument. Then imagine someone who is 100 times better than that. That’s John McLaughlin.
Let’s feed that gear acquisition syndrome by surfing the net for some guitar related things I don’t need but desperately want.
This will be fun (for me, at least)!
JHS MUFFULETTA
I’m torn on this one, but it’s still probably the top of my semi-realistic want list. The Muffuletta is not only a Big Muff fuzz pedal clone, it’s six of them. It clones five of the more noteworthy Muff models and adds an original circuit too. I lust for the original Triangle models. In my listening research they are by far my favorite, but I do love them all. The down side is the company, JHS, has a pretty bad reputation. They allegedly steal other companies designs, and I’ve heard terrible stories (that I don’t know for sure are true) that they’ve had some sort of financial relationship with a pray-away-the-gay organization. If that’s true, then they can rot. On the basis of rumor alone, I would only buy one of these pedals used.
Wren and Cuff Tri-Pie ‘70
Instead of the Muffuletta, I could go with a Tri Pie 70. This is another clone of the original Triangle Big Muff fuzz that I want so bad. The demoes I’ve heard sound amazing. I would love to get my mitts on one of these suckers.
Fulltone Clyde Deluxe Wah
I am a Wah addict going all the way back to my first day wanting to play guitar. I’ve always used Dunlop Cry Baby’s and never wanted anything else. The Clyde Deluxe though sounds like it might be a Cry Baby on steroids. It has features I never realized I wanted until I started reading about Fulltone. Now I know I want them and they will be mine.
Fulltone Deja Vibe 2
I’m not sure they make the model pictured anymore, but there is a Deja Vibe stomp box too that would do fine for me. I’ve had a couple of cheap Uni-Vibe pedals, but this is as close to the real thing as you can get. Being able to adjust the speed on the fly would just be that much more awesome.
You all remember 50/90, right? Write 50 songs in 90 days? July 4 through October 1.
I haven’t done anything in a couple of weeks (at least). I rocketed up to 27 ideas in progress, recorded guitars for 13 of them, and vocals for three. Then I just lost the umph, as it were.
My rule is, a song isn’t complete until there is a full demo. My other rule is that I wanted all the guitars to be recorded with a real amp instead of a sim in GarageBand. Today, though, I decided that if I was going to get any more work done (finishing is kinda out of the question) then I would have to go back to amp sims and headphones instead of making real, actual noise.
So if I get some sleep tonight I might spend my pre-telecommuting morning in the cellar plugged into my computer, listening with headphones, while trying to not wake my step son who will probably sleep really late because he’s a teenager and that’s what teenagers do.
For this year’s RPM Challenge I worked on 23 songs. One was just too awful to keep alive and I dumped it. One other never got further than one or two bass lines on the iPad. Of the remaining 21, 10 made the final cut. Eight were completely finished but I put them on the B list. Three others were pretty far along in the process, but I ran out of time before I could finish them. Those three might have been good enough to make the final submission, but now we’ll never know.
I made a playlist for the left overs, including the three unfinished songs. I will finish them in the coming weeks, but for now they are just rough mixes of instrumental nothings.
I think if you listen to both playlists you will see that dropping the songs on the B list was the right thing to do. At least I hope so. Either way, I got a ton of new tunes.
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.
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).
I liked this one from the very start. It was the second song I started working on this February, and it has stuck with me more than any of the others. It’s kinda… swampy… nice little mid tempo groove. The bass isn’t cutting through the mix enough, and there are a few moments when the vocal intonation is a little… fruity, but otherwise it’s not too bad to me. The lyrics are a kiss off to a flat Earther, and the guitars are all Gibson ES 335 pro.
Inside the Red Head's Head 