I mixed two tonight. One was a mostly instrumental pile of dung that was meant to be Pink Floydish, but was instead down right utterly awful. The other is here for your listening pleasure (assuming having your ears tortured by bad music is pleasure).
The idea was to have one guitar riff for the whole song but use a combination of the melody and the dynamics to differentiate between the verse and the chorus. It sorta worked.
Humidity, temperature, and air pressure all conspired to keep this guy out of tune last night.
It used to go out of tune constantly because the machine heads were crap, but a few years ago Larry replaced them for me. Since then it’s been a dream to tune… Until last night.
Five songs… that’s 10%! I’m 1/10th of the way though 50/90!
This was a last minute kind of thing on Sunday. I had to go out and run an errand, and I had spent quite a bit of time on two ideas that weren’t really doing much for me (but after listening to one of them today it’s better than I thought at the time). I tried to sneak in one more idea before I went out. That idea became this song.
I tagged this on the fiftyninety page as hyperactive. I think this is as close as I will ever come to sounding like The Police. I know the three members of The Police were just insulted mightily, but I mean no offense to them.
I actually kinda like this one.
I didn’t write or record anything new, but I did sneak in a mix.
I don’t want to have everything sound like a power trio, even if I want everything to be arranged for a power trio. Does that make sense? Probably not.
All of the guitar parts here are the ES 335.
Let’s go, pal. Those 50 songs ain’t gonna write themselves.
50/90 and FAWM are the same people. Why then can I host the songs I add to my FAWM account at alonetone, but I cannot for 50/90. I’m a little ticked off right now.
Anyway, the first songs I recorded using GarageBand were all about Hurricane Irene. Wouldn’t you just know that on the day a big writing project starts we get another hurricane? Arthur was just a rain storm by the time it reached us, but it’s still song worthy.
I’m planning on keeping better track of which guitar I use for which parts of which songs. Why? I don’t know, leave me alone. For this one, the rhythm guitar is the Strat and the leads are the Les Paul.
One song finished, forty-nine to go, and 87 days left.
I really do need to get a life…
I’ve got this goofy idea for 50/90. I’ve got these three electric guitars, see? How about I use one guitar per day. I used my ES 335 on everything I worked on on Friday. I used the Strat for everything I did today. I plan on using the Les Paul tomorrow.
But there’s a hang up here. The Strat is just plain hard to play. I recorded three songs worth of leads today. One of them needs to be done again. The other two aren’t great, but they are okay. If I re-record them tomorrow, do I use the Strat, because the song is a Strat-day song, or do I use the Les Paul, because the tracks will be recorded on a Les Paul day. And how do acoustic guitars fit into the plan?
Like I said, I need a life.
A little mini-suite. I had my 10 songs underway for my June album in a month project and like a doofus I threw together an extra song at the last minute, and made it three songs in one. (I then added two more, because I’m dumb).
Mostly this was an excuse to add an acoustic guitar (my Takamine 12-string) and a Gibson electric (ES 335 Pro) to a project that had been 100% Stratocaster to that point.
One night recently my two step kids and I all had a really difficult time falling asleep. That lead to some anxiety among the kids who thought that the inability to sleep was a sign that there was something wrong with them. I reassured them that it happens to all of us once in a while and that they should just relax, and then I wrote a song about not being able to sleep because of nightmares. I am a lyrical hypocrite. Accept it, I have.
———-
Here is the iOS mix.
———-
June Music is now as done as done can be. It’s 11:45pm on July 3rd. 50/90 officially starts in 15 minutes. I, however, will wait until morning because I am exhausted.
G’Night everyone!
Talk about over complicating things!
This was meant as just a little finger picking noodle. I am hopeless as a finger picker and did this more as an exercise than anything else. It’s four tracks of guitar, all with a different picking pattern. I was curious if I could accidentally come up with something along the lines of the awesome stuff Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett used to do in Genesis. I didn’t, but at least it’s finger picked. The chorus is dumbed down. It’s only two tracks. The break part where the drums go away and the cello comes in (yes, I am a prog nerd) used a pick. I can only do so much, you know?
What are the lyrics about? Well, some days completely suck, but other days don’t. If you persist you can get to the non-suck. That’s sort of the point. I spent all of 10 minutes writing them. Gimme a break, okay?
———-
Here is the iOS mix too.
I started a new song tonight, because I’m an idiot. It was really just an exercise. I can’t finger pick to save my life, so I quadruple tracked a little eight bar thing with a different finger picking pattern on each track. I then worked it into a song. 3:15 of song later I had four tracks of rhythm guitar, one track of lead guitar, drums, an upright bass, and a cello. That’s right, kids, a cello.
It wasn’t until it was all done and I listened back and realized the four different finger pick patterns and the chord changes combined to form…
A Led Zeppelin song.
Oh for crying out loud!
Inside the Red Head's Head 