Tag: Guitar

More Progress

I started at noon and got interrupted at about 1:45. Guitars, babie. Guitars. I did rhythm and leads on three songs. Well… one song still needs one little eight bar solo, but I’ll get to that after the christmas tree is done. The kids should be here any minute. After that I’ve got two more songs ready for leads and one song that needs rhythm and leads. After that… I don’t know. Maybe add up the total time for the eight songs currently part of the project and if it hits 30 minutes declare myself done, otherwise try to add another one. I still have two days after today, but there is also a lot of mixing to do.

I’m sure I’ll snap a guitar pic or two when I get back to it later tonight. It is GibSunday after all. As for now, the plan is to decorate, maybe watch a TV show for a bit, maybe eat some dinner, and then back to it! I think the Walking Dead spin offs are going to have to wait until tomorrow (it is Sunday, after all).

Now, where did I put that owl ornament?

Broken Promise

Last night, before I went to bed, I promised myself that I was going to spend a lot of time today working on music.

Guess how much work I did.

Go on, guess… I’ll wait…

That’s right. I did exactly zero seconds of work. None. Zilch.

I therefore am going to make the same promise for tomorrow, and hopefully I will actually keep this one.

Car music in the morning. Lots of guitars throughout the day. Maybe add at least one new song. Mix as many songs as I can get finished.

We also will have a visit from the kids so that we can decorate our new christmas tree together. Outside of that… music. You promise breaking twit.

For tonight though, it’s That Pedal Show and Supergirl.

November Music on Life Support

In just a few minutes the calendar will be changing from November 26 to November 27th, and that means only four days left to work on the November music project. I currently have three songs mixed but one of them is too terrible to use. There’s one more ready to mix. After that there is a whole lot of unfinished nothing.

Or at least there was.

I finished the arrangements and wrote lyrics to three. One other song already had lyrics. You know what that means, right? Car music tomorrow! Yup, you guessed it. Four songs ready to sing brings me up to a potential seven. There is an eighth song that should be an instrumental. There are a couple of additional songs in the basic idea stage. If I work my butt off I might be able to get a full National Solo Album Month thing finished.

There is also a Christmas tree to get tomorrow, and another (possibly) three hours of Beatles glory. Then Sunday there is Christmas tree decorating and a little bonus step kids time. Finishing the whole thing is doable, but maybe just barely.

Music tomorrow, my readers and only friends!

Rain is a Douche

Our plans to cut down a christmas tree today are about to be washed away. Forecasts call for heavy rain to start at exactly the time we were planning to leave on our tree hunt. Oh good.

Hey, did you hear about the new Covid-19 variant that’s popping up in South Africa and early data (which could still be off) is suggesting it could be 500 times more contagious than the Delta variant? Oh good.

What else… I don’t know. I want to get some guitar playing in today, and pretty much all weekend. We’re looking into a minor thermostat upgrade that hopefully will be entirely wireless. We have a ton of turkey dinner leftovers and the stuffing is calling me, but for some reason I have a craving for toast right now. What’s up with that? I wish the kids didn’t have to leave today. I want them to stay, but I don’t want to hold them back, you know? Just call me Robert the Conflicted Red Head. Sounds like a band name.

Jam

I just decided that the November music project thing is going to include an instrumental that is just two guitars taking turns soloing over a really simple bass/drum groove and it’s going to be about seven minutes long.

You heard it here first. The bass and drum parts are already down. It’s going to happen and it is going to bore you to tears.

Pointless jamming is life!

My Mind is a Blank

I promise I had something to write about this morning. I forgot what it was when I started talking to Jen about a bunch of Q nut jobs who went to Dallas to welcome JFK back. First, JFK would be over 100 years old. He ain’t coming back. Second. He’s dead. He ain’t coming back. Third, even if he was magically raised from the grave in a non-zombie fashion, why the ever loving fuck would he come back to Dallas? That would literally be the last place he would go. Also, there was a headline I saw yesterday (I can’t seem to find it now) saying something along the lines of if you get the Covid vaccine it will block whatever allows god to let you into heaven, or something like that. Meaning that god is a T-Rex and can’t see you unless you’re moving, or some shit like that. I don’t want to live on this planet any more.

I haven’t played my guitar in nine days. I haven’t done any recording either. My MacBook is currently on a fact finding mission to Guyana. I’m sure it will be fine. Without the MacBook though, there is no GarageBand and there is no November music project. Here’s hoping I can get back to it over the upcoming, glorious long weekend. I should end up with enough music to call it a finished project. It’s just not going to be good at all. Not even a little bit.

The kids are at their father’s house today. They come back here tomorrow afternoon some time. I wonder if there will be a Hawkeye viewing and maybe some hamburgers or something? There are things already on the agenda for tomorrow so I don’t know if we’ll be able to squeeze the first episode in before bed.

Thanksgiving is in two days. The prep work has been coming along for a while now, but it’s going to start ramping up today. Gobble Gobble, boys and girls. Two work days left before the long weekend… and I have so much work to do. Okay, I’m depressed again. Blah.

Do Something

It’s 9:30pm. I’m sitting at my desk on a Windows machine (why?) watching last Friday’s That Pedal Show (finally) and thinking that I should post something without having any clue what to post.

TV? I finished Foundation last night. Two thumbs up, says the guy who never read the Azimov books. I watched both Walking Dead spin offs today. World Beyond was good. Fear wasn’t. At least I don’t think it was. I have to fess up that it was so boring I was barely paying attention to any of it.

That Pedal Show has an old SR&D Rockman headphone amp on the board. I haven’t gotten far enough into the episode for them to use it, but it did send me on a hunt. I used to own a Rockman headphone amp. Which model was it? Ebay and Reverb searches make me think that it was a Soloist. The original Rockmans apparently had a little gain control on the back. Mine didn’t. I know it wasn’t an X100 because my memory seems to think that the X100 was the latest and greatest model when I bought mine and I didn’t want to pay the full price so I bought an older model used. I used to use it to record a direct line into Mike’s Fostex cassette 4-track recorder. Larry had a couple of the rack units. The Sustainer, the Stereo Chorus and the Delay… was it called the Stereo Delay? I can’t remember. I do know the Sustainer was awesome as a direct signal into the 4-track. I would think about buying a Soloist for the nostalgia value, but I don’t want to spend $100. I need them to be cheaper than that.

Okay. So I am going to get into bed and maybe watch a little more That Pedal Show, or maybe go look for a new TV show, or maybe just watch a random Futurama, or maybe just go to sleep. As mentioned in a previous post, I am so freakin’ tired.

Until next time, good night everyone.

Wah Pedals

I search for boutique wah pedals and get link after link telling me I have to get my hands on the wah pedal I dumped into my closet when that frat boy fucker in California went on his idiotic racist rant following the George Floyd protests and implied that people who put more value on a human being’s life than on their neighbor’s windows are both unworthy of his products and incapable of pissing while standing up. Fuck that guy. I’m never using his pedals again, I don’t care how amazing his fucking deluxe wah pedal is.

End rant.

So where do I go? There is Xotic and Jam Pedals. They are both supposed to have excellent wahs. One company that I know nothing about keeps popping up too. Real McCoy Custom, or RMC. they seem to have a ton of models, all with stellar reviews, but only a few are in production. Is that info correct? They are pretty expensive and there aren’t a whole lot of dealers (just one in Massachusetts).

I’m thinking when the time comes, this is probably where I want to go. The RMC10 reviews are all stellar, but I’m only seeing RMC11’s for sale around here.

One of these days.

Sleepy Red Head

Another less than great night of sleep last night. The data my Apple Watch collected actually looked okay, but coming on the heels of the previous night’s bad sleep it has left me feeling pretty sleepy and crummy today. I’m hoping to get to bed early tonight but I am pretty sure it ain’t happening. We’ll see.

I’m in a weird state right now where I have a few projects to work on and I keep letting them get in the way of each other. I start working on project A but my mind wanders to project B so I switch to that but my mind wanders to project C so I switch to that but my mind wanders to project A and so on. The end result is I don’t make progress on any of them. Blah.

Referencing back to the previous post, if you’re wondering about our neighborhood trash pick up, they still haven’t arrived… though I do hear the sound of trucks in the distance. Maybe soon?

Finally, as my lunch break comes to an end, I return to the topic of guitar gear, what with guitar and cats being the two most common topics of this particular page (are they? I should do some research into that… but I won’t), I am starting to think it might be time to start searching the youtubes for a new wah pedal. I’m starting to want to upgrade up from my Crybaby. Hello, rabbit hole. Allow me to fall down you for a while.

Okay, back to work, red head!

New Song

National Solo Album Month needs to come up with a better name because I’m not writing that dumb acronym again. I’m just calling it November Music, m’kay? That works for me.

Three songs down. I don’t have a count in mind as a goal, I just want to hit the challenge mandated minimum of 29 minutes and however many seconds. Eight seconds? I don’t remember. Let’s round it up to 30 minutes. This puts me at 15 minutes, but one of the songs is disgustingly terrible so if I drop it I’m at 11 minutes. The songs tend to be running a little long this month so I am still in good shape.

I want to like this one. I am not sold yet, but I am hoping it turns out to be track one and kind of the signature song for the month… I just don’t know if I pulled it off.

I’ve been listening to a lot of prog lately… it shows.