Tag: home demo

RPM Challenge Global Listening Day

Today is a big day for RPM Challenge participants.  Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s community radio station, WSCA, 106.1 FM has declared today as the RPM Global Listening Day.  They are going to play one song from each of the 500 or so albums submitted this year.  They are literally playing music from all across the planet.  You can listen to their audio stream at this link right here.

Check it out.  There will be some great music, some not so great music, some music that lives somewhere in between, but all of it was made by people who felt the need to put the rest of the world on hold for a few weeks and let their own creativity shine for a while.  I applaud everyone who finished, and everyone who gave it a shot but didn’t finish, and everyone who thought about starting but never did (because next year they will own this thing).

Everyone, that is, except me.  My project was crap this year.  If you listen to the stream and you hear this song… then you know it’s me.

Another New New Song

The other complete song from the failed album-in-a-day. I was almost liking this one until I realized the bass line is Mitzi Dupree by Deep Purple. Oh well.

New Song that is Actually New

Here’s a song from the aborted album in a day I tried on the day that the bathroom remodeling project started. I mixed it with ear buds so I’m sure it sounds like dung.

I don’t like the lyrics and I don’t like the melody in the verses. What do you think, is the rest of it worthy of bringing to the band? I’m undecided.

Eight Down, 42 to Go

The first idea I had for 50/90 turned out really heavy. So heavy that I haven’t really felt like coming up with a vocal and finishing it off. In reaction to Mr Heavy Song, the second idea I came up with was this goofy little funk fest.

Even a redhead like me wants to get funky now and then. All of the guitars here are the ES 335.

More Fuzzy Voices

I had high hopes for this goofy 12-bar. I don’t know why. It doesn’t live up to my expectations. The vocals are fuzzy again. I’m mad. It does mark the return of the wah wah pedal. I had half a mind to not use it at all after over using it in February, March, and April. Like most addicts, I just couldn’t stay away.


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Here’s the iPad mix. The drums don’t sound as good on this one, but they might be better. I can’t decide today. I might be able to decide some other day though.


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What do you think? Which version is better?

GarageBand for iPhone: Vindication

Yesterday I posted a song that was recorded entirely on my iPhone and had ugly distorted vocals that I was embarrassed to share with the interwebs. I said that there was one other song from this month that was also recorded entirely on the iPhone. This is that other song.

Vindication, or what?


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Short and sweet with atheist leaning lyrics. 1000 years ago I would have burned at the stake for this tune. I love living in the future!

The drums on the iPhone mix followed the guitar and bass much more closely, especially in the verses. I used the GarageBand Drummer again and while it lost a bit in the verses I think the groove is groovy enough to justify it. I wasn’t gonna, but I did.

No Added Distortion

This is a little better than the last one. No unwanted distortion.

I didn’t use the GarageBand drummer on this one. I kept the iPad drum part but changed the sound. Same with the vocals. The guitars are all the same between the two mixes except for the signal processing. I added a slap back delay onto the lead and toned down the reverb and delay on the two rhythm parts.

The real question though is when did everything this month turn into either 3/4 or 6/8 time? Is this what it’s like to play in a swing band?


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Here’s the iPad mix for comparison. Again, not too different.


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As far as the iOS mixes are concerned, I can call the June Music project successfully complete (under RPM Challenge rules). I have written and recorded 10 songs this month. There are two additional songs that don’t have vocals/lyrics/melodies yet. I don’t believe I will have time this weekend to finish them. I think I’ll do them next week in the first three days in July before 50/90 starts on the 4th. Then I’ll have 12 “June” songs and one left over from May, with two different mixes of each song. That will make a nice bandcamp.com playlist.

As of right now I am in for 50/90. I have not been writing at a fast enough pace to feel confident, but at least I’ve been building up to it. We’ll see how it goes.

There is No Excuse for Clipping

Now I know how Rush must have felt when they got the first mix of Vapor Trails…

It’s a good thing these are just demos and not a real attempt at doing anything… real.

So the vocals… the clipping… the distortion. No excuse. It’s spoiled the entire song for me.

This is the second of two songs that I recorded in their entirety using GarageBand for iPhone. My ability to get a good vocal take on an iOS device is iffy at best, but I was just all over the place with my iPhone today.

Tonight, when I did the iOS mix of this one the vocals sounded bad, but they always sound bad, you know? They were worse than most of the songs I’ve done this month, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

Then I ported the file to the Mac and I could actually see the waveforms. Uh oh. Then I actually played the track. Oh damn, what a mess.

Sorry about that.


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As soon as I heard how distorted the vocal tracks were I listened back to the iOS mix to see how bad it sounded there. Now that I knew what I was looking for, yeah it’s there. It just doesn’t seem quite as insultingly awful on the first mix.


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I suppose I could go back and rerecord, but June ends on Monday and it’s a kid weekend. I don’t have time to do any more vocal recording. I’m stuck with this, unless I want to fix it next month. I won’t want to fix it next month though. The best this can hope for is that I rerecord the entire song from scratch at some future date.

Stolen Melody

Yes, yes I know. The guitar melody sounds a lot like the jazz standard “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” I understand and I’m sorry, but it’s so rare that I come up with an instrumental melody that I just have to run with it when I get one.

The vocals… what happened. This was the first time I recorded vocals into a GarageBand file using an iPad in over two years. I think I have now figured out why it’s so thin and awful, but it’s too late to fix it now. It shouldn’t happen on any of the vocals I record from now on, but there might be one or two already in the can that have the same issue.

The lyrics are about feeling old and useless. Nothing major.

I used the GarageBand Drummer on the Mac Mix, but I don’t think it deviated that much from the iPad version.


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And here is the iPad version.

Hyperactive Drums

First off, the inspiration for the lyric was my MacBook Pro being unable to connect to my wireless mouse. I kid you not, that’s where it started. It sort of evolved into a fictional account of one of my customer’s network about to crash. I am an uber nerd and I am proud of it.

When I originally worked this out on my iPad I had it set for ¾ time. I should have set it for 6/8. I wanted an eighth note pulse. Instead of fixing things properly, I kept it on ¾ and drastically increased the tempo. Close enough.

Then I ported the file over to my Mac and tried to replace my shitty drums with GarageBand’s Drummer.

Oh yeah… that ridiculously fast tempo. Somehow though… I like the hyperactive drums. Let’s keep it! Rawk!


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And for comparison sake, here is the iPad version.