I was working on some lead guitar parts tonight and realized that I once again wrote the same song twice. Insert frustrated sigh here. The structure of song #48 is almost exactly the same as the structure of song #51. I mean the actual chord changes are similar but not too similar. It’s the idea that is the same. I keep doing it. I think I have to use some of the same lyrics and make it a two part song. Lame.
Gear nerd put the Black Lives Matter pedal back onto the big pedal board. The whole reason I bought it was to pair it with the KTR which is the best overdrive pedal on Earth.
Dusty stuff
Also, Klon is about to start shipping a slightly redesigned KTR and I might have to get one because Klon.
I’m sharing this one because I’m 90% sure I have written it at least once in the past. Possibly in the not so distant past. Also, because I threw it together very quickly and now that it’s done I have like 10 ideas for changes to it and if it weren’t part of a song writing challenge in the final days I might have just started over but nope, here it is, crap and all.
One other 50/90 note… I put rhythm guitars onto two songs tonight… I now have rhythm guitars on 50 songs. Two weeks left and I have enough songs with significant progress made and I am dangerously close to finishing this puppy. Now watch me blow it somehow.
Work has been insane this week. Since Friday, really. In:Sane.
I took a minute to check on the Lake Asshole Bucket. It was maybe 15% full. I put the wet vac’s hose into the bucket and sucked all of that shit right up. Bucket:Empty. That worked much better than trying to get the blender out from under the pipe without spilling anything (which was impossible).
The dehumidifier is still cranking away. I had to empty it once. The floor is pretty much dry. Oh happy day.
Two weeks (approximately) until they come to replace the water heater. Two weeks of Lake Asshole monitoring.
Now I will have time to have dinner with the love of my life, watch What If with the love of my life and possibly with my step son (via a watch party), and then add lead guitars to the four songs that are currently ready for them. The finished 50/90 song count is currently sitting at 38. Four more are ready for leads, six are ready for vocals (car music in the morning?), and two barely exist.
Hopefully going to make a push over the next couple of days… assuming work lets me. Have I mentioned work has been insane this week? In:Sane.
Between singing in the car this morning, writing lyrics this afternoon, and playing guitar tonight, I have honestly lost track of everything I’ve done today.
It was cool though, I had an audience while I was tracking guitars. I was down cellar because I was too lazy to set up the bedroom rig that I partially cannibalized for the cellar rig and as I was playing along I noticed this big honkin’ spider hanging out at the base of the stairs, just grooving along.
It was not, as far as I could tell, from Mars.*
*If you don’t get that reference… well I don’t even know what to tell you.
I don’t like the guitar sound in the solo at the end. Everything else is okay. I guess the melody is kinda bad too. All three stanzas of the lyrics are haikus, so I guess I score points for nerdy poetry and cultural appropriation? Okay, I’ll shut up now.
I don’t get it. I was in so much pain yesterday. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t think straight. It was awful.
Today? It’s a little tender. A little sore. Not bad at all. I’m not even limping or anything. What the hell happened? Stupid foot. Stupid, stupid foot.
Anyway, 24 hours from now I expect my little quarantinie fun time to be over and history and a memory buried so deep I am not even sure it’s real. Covid-19 test at 8:09am. Freedom to roam the house without a mask approximately 15 minutes later. Kick ass, dude.
I have so much music to do in the next three weeks that I’m starting to freak out a little. Just warning you all that there might be a lot (I mean, a lot) of 50/90 music posts coming in the immediate future. Just so’s ya know. I mean, I just came up with terrible lyrics for song #40. I have three songs ready to sing. I can’t do car music until Saturday and I want to have 5-10 ready for vocal tracking by then. Yikes!
Okay, I need to fill up the cat’s food bowl, grab myself a caffeinated diet soda, and start my work day. The laundry is running already and the puddle formerly known as Lake Asshole has been cleaned up, including emptying the wet vac and the dehumidifier.
I did some playing tonight, which seems to be the routine during my little quarantine adventure. Strangely, with 45 songs in progress I currently don’t have any songs waiting on guitar parts. All 45 songs have rhythm guitars complete, and the songs that don’t have leads yet also don’t have vocals yet, and I don’t like recording leads before vocals so… I currently am not waiting on any guitars.
That is so weird.
On a gear front, Prior to our little quarantine adventure I had not been using the pedal board I use with the band, so I have not been able to try the Wampler Plexi Drive Mini at 18 volts. I like to use the Plexi Mini for noisy, distorted, rawk sounds, and I like to use some form of a Klon style pedal for boosting cleanish sounds. I also like to run the Klonish (in the bedroom recording board it’s a Ryra The Klone pedal, and on the band board it’s a Klon KTR) first so that it pushes the holy hell out of the noisier pedal that follows it. Unfortunately, when I put the Plexi Mini after the Klon or the Klon Klone and then into a low (15 watt) wattage amp I end up with a sloppy, awful, over compressed, squashed mess. In the bedroom setup I am only able to run pedals at 9 volts. On the band board I have a couple of 18 volt options and I thought that running the Plexi Mini at 18 volts* would give me enough headroom to clean things up. It worked. Mostly. The Plexi Drive at 18 volts after the signal output avalanche that is the Klon sounded a million times better than at 9 volts, but it was still a little squishy. Hmmmm… will running into a higher wattage amp fix what’s left of the problem? I bet it might. Where is my Fender Deluxe Reverb when I need it?**
*There are not many pedals that will work at 18 volts. Most are designed to run on nine volts (as in a nine volt battery) and if you give them 18 volts the circuitry will fry. The Plexi Mini works at 18. My Malaise Forever Black Lives Matter can run at 18 volts. The two overdrive pedals I own by the racist frat boy prick in California that the Black Lives Matter is based on can run at 18 volts. That’s it. Any of the rest of the crap load of pedals I own or have owned would melt down (figuratively… and literally?) if I plugged it into an 18 volt power source.
**My Fender Deluxe Reverb has been at Mike the Bass Player’s house since February of 2020. It’s still there. Waiting for me.
Inside the Red Head's Head 