Tag: Guitar

Close but Not Quite

10 minutes before I was supposed to leave for the first full band practice in 3.5 years our singer let us know he was going to be stuck at work and had to back out.

Damn it.

The rest of us still got together. It was loud and fun, the way it should be. I’m not sure when we will be able to try for all four of us again but hopefully it will be soon.

My playing was terrible but most of the songs we played came back to me… eventually. It was good to see Kevin and Mike, and it was fun to play music with other people.

Until next time….

Packed Up and Ready

I have an amp and a pedal board at Mike the Bass Player’s house already. Pretty sure there are a bunch of mic stands too. I packed the bare minimum. A mic and a cable. Two guitar cables and an over drive pedal. One electric guitar. One pack of emergency strings.

Assuming my amp works… I’m ready to play.

Now I just have to finish the work day and drive to Mike’s house. I’m ready, kids!

2023 50/90 Challenge Day 7 & 8/90

The recap of day seven is simple. I didn’t do anything. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

Day eight is a little more interesting. I’ve already written about most of it. I put vocals on five songs this morning while Jen was out of the house. The performances are all pretty crappy. Almost as bad as the lyrics and the melodies. The only other thing I accomplished today was coming up with the 12th new song idea. Super simple, but it has the complete song form.

Tomorrow is a work from the office day so there isn’t much chance of making any progress before work, unless I can manage to get out of bed ridiculously early. I won’t have much time after work either. I may be shut out on day nine the same way I was on day seven.

2023 50/90 Challenge Day 6/90

I got a lot done today. Not nearly as much as I was hoping to get done, but still a pretty good haul.

I put rhythm guitars onto five songs. I wrote lyrics and melody for the only two of those five songs that didn’t have them already. Then I came up with lyrics and melody for two additional songs. Finally, I came up with a new idea from scratch that includes (you guessed it) lyrics and melody. This last one is in a time signature I’ve never used before. It’s in 9/4.

There are two song writing ideas that I am trying to include this year. One is to use time signatures I’ve never played in before. The other is to try and write pre choruses. I usually just go verse/chorus repeated forever. Sometimes I sneak a bridge in or something. This time I am trying to consistently bridge between the verses and choruses. In other words, a pre chorus. I think. Sounds like a challenge, right?

I haven’t made a works-in-progress playlist yet. Not sure if I am going to, but maybe I will. If I do, I’ll post it here. Probably.

Guitar Tracks

I spent about two hours recording guitars today. I finished five of the 10 songs that are currently in the fifty-songs-in-90-days-challenge pipeline. Including the song that is in 13/8 time, and the song that is in 15/8 time. First time I have ever knowingly played guitar in either of those time signatures. Milestones, babie!

I used direct input into the USB audio interface for all of the tracks, including using two amps at a time. I took the obligatory pictures, but Flickr is being a dick today and won’t let me upload PNG files, or any files for that matter, on the web. I had to dumb these down to JPGs and share them onto my iPhone and upload them from the Flickr app. I am thusly annoyed.

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Guitar Rig

Okay folks, the guitar gear is setup and ready to record some new music.

I put the new Analog Man King of Tone overdrive pedal onto my stay-at-home pedal board and plugged the whole thing in. I have three amps setup. The Fender Deluxe Reverb will be used when I can make oodles of noise and want to record with a microphone. The other two amps are the Fender Bassbreaker 15 and the cute little Vox MV50. They are both connected to the ABY switch so that I can run them both at the same time, and they are also both plugged directly into the USB audio interface so that I can run direct at times when I cannot make any noise.

Now I just have to actually play. Any minute now, right?

309/365

June is Ending

Today is the last day of June. I haven’t mentioned the June music project lately. How is that going? Are you going to reach your goal of writing and recording ten (bad) songs within the 30 days of June?

Maybe?

I mixed two songs yesterday. That put me at seven songs complete. At the start of the day today I had one song that needed lead guitars and two more that were ready to mix. Well, I just put some really pathetic guitar leads down on that one song, which ironically is song #1 for this month. Why is the first song started going to be the last one finished? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.

Anyway, that one guitar track being finished (poorly) means that tracking for this album in a month challenge is done and I just have to mix three songs. I think I can do that today. We’ll see.

What about the 10 songs from May? I gave myself to the end of the day on July 3rd to finish those 10 songs. I don’t think I am going to make it. I still have one song that doesn’t have rhythm guitars, and six that don’t have lyrics. Yeah, there’s pretty much zero chance of me hitting this new deadline. 50/90 starts on the fourth of July so the May stuff is probably going to be ignored for a few additional months. Oh well. I am not really doing 50/90. Not officially at least. I am going to see what I can do with a faux 50/90. We’ll see.

Okay, time to add a couple of guitar pics and then punch into work on this fine Friday. 8 hours and 45 minutes until the weekend.

303/365
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Gear Acquisition Syndrome, Again

Figures. I finally cave in to recording my guitar direct through some sort of amplifier simulation and almost immediately a pedal company releases a new line of amplifier simulation pedals. TC Electronics is the culprit. I doubt that these new pedals are going to be in the same league as the one Strymon makes, or Universal Audio’s line, but the TC stuff will be a whole lot less expensive, I can pretty much guarantee that.

I am not going to buy one of these… yet… I am going to think about buying one often. Very often. Even if I did pony up the cash, I would never like it as much as my actual Deluxe Reverb. You know, the actual amp this thing simulates? Yeah, real is always going to be better. It’s just that the sim is less likely to wake up your sleeping wife when you play through it at 5:00am.

The Streak is Over and What About Tomorrow?

My guitar playing streak is over. I lost count of how many days in a row I played for at least a few minutes. It was almost three weeks, I think. I failed to get any playing in yesterday. Oh well.

This morning before leaving for the doctors appointment I was able to get some work done though. Jen is in the office today so I had some quiet time in the house alone and I used it to record some vocals. I put them onto the 10th and final June song and two more May songs. I think I have six May songs still waiting for lyrics and vocals. I have decided to extend the deadline for the May songs to July 3rd. I am not extending the deadline for the June songs. Those need to be wrapped up by Friday. I only have one guitar part to add and then mix the final five and that’s it. No problem, he said with false confidence that probably wasn’t really that false.

I thought I was going to get back onto the photography bus today. Film, to be specific. As I was getting my shit together to go to the doctors appointment I looked out the window and saw sun gleaming into the back yard. Right. I grabbed Dad’s camera. I didn’t know where I was going to go after the appointment, but I was going somewhere. Then when I actually got outside and got in the car, the sky was clouded over and ugly and sad. Oh well. The day is coming. It’s summer now. Film photography. Digital photography. All over the place in Eastern Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire and maybe even more places than that. I want Boston. I want light houses. I want to go shootin’. Ideally I want to go shootin’ with other folks, but if I have to do it alone at the crack of dawn then that’s what I am going to do. You heard it here first, folks.

What should I do tomorrow? Tomorrow is my work from the office day. I will start the day in Foxborough, which is about a million and a half miles away from my house. I will need to be on the road by 7:30am.

Should I try to get my couch to 5k training in? Tomorrow is the day that it should happen, as I am trying to do this every other day, but I was planning on pushing it off until the day after. If I get up at 5:00am and get right the hell out the door and start, then I should be done by 5:30. That would give me more than enough time to do everything I want to do, including recover from the exercise and watch episode two of Marvel’s Secret Invasion.

I am undecided. If I am out of bed by, let’s say, 5:05am then I will do it. Tomorrow’s plan is to switch from walk for three minutes and run for one minute, repeating eight times to walk for two minutes and run for one minute, repeated eight times. I fully expect my legs to fall off. It’s going to be freakin’ brutal, but it should also take less time than yesterday did. We’ll see.

Okay. That’s enough for now. Back to work, Robert.