Earlier today I put a post on the RPM Challenge website saying that I’d given up on trying to use a real amplifier when recording guitar parts. As is often the case, as soon as I told myself I wasn’t going to do it anymore, I went and did it. I just recorded guitars using my old amp. Granted, it’s a terrible song… but still.
I did some RPM work today, but only on song ideas that have already been started. I’m still stuck on five.
The RPM Challenge has kicked into gear and I have one song complete. Not sure how I feel about this one as the guitar sounds fishy in the chorus and I’m frankly too tired to know if the mix is any good or not. This might get some additional work.
It’s February 1st and The RPM Challenge is officially underway! Good luck to all participants.
I am ready to start as soon as I run a couple of errands. First, we are meeting a friend for breakfast. Second I need to drive home from New York. Nothing major.
I hope to watch the Super Bowl tonight with my guitar in hand and a copy of GarageBand open and running in front of me.
I also wanted to focus on a single guitar this time. If it’s going to be my Les Paul, then I need to get some strings.
…and they’re off!
Here is the Prime Meridian Mega Closer. We called it that because it used to have a great big noisy rock out ending that was just a blast. I always liked this one a lot even though there wasn’t much too it. I had to dumb a lot of it down in order to pull it off in GarageBand, but it’s still fun to play even after all these years.
This song is from my days at Northeast Broadcasting School (as an employee, not a student) and it wasn’t until the other day that I came to the conclusion that it would be physically impossible to play this song live.
I finished up another late 90’s song. This was our creepy, spooky, Halloweenish song.
Here’s another song written with Mike and Maria. I think this one dates back to 1998. If we ever made an album for reals, I would have expected this would be the hit single.
Say hello to the first demo of 2015! RPM starts in just under 13 days so it’s time to start blitzing you all with new demos of old songs. This is a Prime Meridian song. One of the last we wrote. It comes from 1999 (or so) and was more or less forgotten about.
It’s kinda groovy, isn’t it?
I’ve been warming up for RPM by digging out old songs and recording new demos. I have done this the last two years as well. This year most of the focus has been on 1997-2000 when I was in a band called Prime Meridian with Mike and Maria (and John and Dave and Leah and Tracey all at varying times). I’ve got six of those songs ready to mix and I think I might try and crank out two or three more as well. I have three old RPM songs left over from last January, and both last March and April had songs that qualify as well so I’ll use those as well when the time comes to make a playlist out of this stuff.
I’ve also started digitizing old cassette tapes and I’ve found a few decent sounding songs there as well. I started working on two of them today. They were both written and recorded in the MIDI room at Northeast Broadcasting School, probably in 1994 or 95. Those two along with another that was actually used by Prime Meridian (and might have been used by Break Even too if I’d been up for it) were things I’d written on a keyboard and pieced together with other random things to make songs. Kinda like what I do now with RPM. Actually, there were probably 20 such songs before I left that job, but only 3-5 or so are worth listening too. Back then though I wasn’t thinking in terms of actual songs. These were arranged many months after they were recorded in the sequencer. I also had never really been a singer before.
One thing I learned a couple of years ago when I was messing with demoing songs from the band I played in back in high school is that we never took little things like breathing into account. Well, that was still the case in the mid-90s too. I just finished tracking one of those songs and OH MY GOD MY HEAD HURTS! I have been doubling all of my vocal tracks this time (rhythm guitar too) and the vocal lines are so long that they all cram in together without any room for breathe. I’ve been breaking things up so that I sing one line on one track and the next on another, and then I double everything. I don’t know how I ever could have considered putting something like this together as a song. It’s so ridiculously difficult to sing. No one could ever do it live. Ever.
All of the singing has literally given me a headache.
Ouch, babie.
Inside the Red Head's Head 