Over the last two days I threw together a new recording of the first song I wrote for my 2009 finished-way-after-the-deadline RPM Challenge.
Why? Because the old recordings sound like vomit and I can’t tell if the songs themselves are vomit or just the recording. So maybe if I dust some of them off I can make that determination.
Here’s the new recording…
And here is the old recording…
Both of these files are going to be deleted at some point, when I figure out what to do with the new version.
Look who came out for a visit this morning.
The rest of this post is yet another music home demo recording nerd post.
I have three songs in the works right now. Thanks to the acoustic guitar that suddenly needs a new nut (uh oh) and the leaky, mostly out of tune sax, one of them is ready to be mixed. A second is missing just a lead guitar. The third still needs all guitars and vocals. That one might not get finished until next week.
So I seem to be on a pretty quick pace right now. I have posted four songs since March 1st, which followed the 14 from February. My free soundcould account is going to run out of room again. That means this year’s RPM will get deleted and all of those previous posts that include embeded soundcloud files will lose their audio. Oh well. I think I might make a new page for playlists of recent music. I will use bandcamp to host the playlists, and keep soundcloud for works in progress kinda things.
I’ve also decided that the four songs I have finished this month, and two of the three I’m playing around with now do not belong with the left over songs project. I started a new playlist for the re-recorded songs. That is meaningless to everyone on Earth except me, but what are ya gonna do, right?
I will take my lunch break at 1:00. My MacBook and my Les Paul are ready and waiting to finish tracking another song. I might be posting two new ones tonight. We’ll see.
I probably wrote this exact same post last March, but it needs to be stated again.
I have finished the RPM Challenge and FAWM. I’m very proud of my goofy self, despite the fact that the music I made isn’t very good. I wrote and recorded 14 songs in less than 28 days. It feels like a nice accomplishment.
Now what?
Last year I made a list of a big batch of unfinished songs I’d started in 2007 and 2008, as well as a few newer songs that needed to either be re-recorded or re-written and decided that I’d pick them off one at a time over the course of March and April or so in order to keep the happy RPM vibe alive for a while.
I finished recording 2/6 remaining 2007 left overs, and started tracking the other four, which are all at various stages of incompletion. I re-recorded one song, and re-wrote another. In November I started writing two new songs and have finished one of them.
For 2013 I have two little ideas on what to do next. One is to continue picking off the unfinished songs. There are eight of them, including the one from this past November. I also recently found a cd full of random songs I had written and played along with Mike and Maria back in the late 90’s. some of those songs might deserve a long awaited recording. I’ve picked two to start with, maybe three… or four.
So that’s the plan going forward. Finish more of the left overs, record some more ancient artifacts, and once in a while actually write something from scratch.
Lets see how long it takes me to run out of steam this year.
Two days, nine hours, and 54 minutes to go until the start of the 2013 RPM Challenge. I have done nothing to prepare. Here is an off the top of my head to-do list to prepare for my sixth attempt at completing the challenge:
Practice my guitar. I have no calluses on my finger tips. Pain is inevitable.
Decide on the platform I want to focus on. Last year I ended up doing the whole thing on my iPad. I think I want to go back and forth between the iPad and the Mac this time. I expect the bulk of the writing and rhythm section tracking to be done on the iPad, but I also think I want to expand a little in an attempt to make the drum tracks sound a little more adventurous. On the Mac I can move stray notes around so that they sound in time without messing with the quantize settings. I want drum fills that are faster than just 16th notes.
Put the MacMini in the cellar back together. I had moved a lot of computer equipment around a few months ago and the MacMini was taken apart. I plan on using that to record vocals at least. I still want to run my mic through my Mackie board so that I can EQ my crappy voice. I’m not able to do that if I plug directly into the iPad. I went through the board into the iPad last time and it worked, but I would like the added flexibility of working on a full GarageBand for vocals. In Theory at least.
Clean the workspace in the cellar. It’s a mess down there. Really.
Test the lightning cable adapter on my New iPad. Wouldn’t it suck if the adapter didn’t work and I couldn’t plug external sources into the New iPad? Yes, it would suck.
If I plug into the JamUp app, can I record into GarageBand? I’m 99.999% sure I cannot, but it is still worth looking into.
Sign up for FAWM. Really. I signed up for RPM last week, but the FAWM website is not going to open until tomorrow. It’s going through a complete redesign. While I’m on the topic, the website is fawm.org. NOT fawm.com. You don’t want to go to fawm.com. Trust me.
Find some inspiration. I was thinking about using the founders of the towns of Methuen, MA and Salem, NH as characters somehow. I doubt I will though. I’ll probably just write another 10 songs about my cat.
I’m sure I’ll think of 100 things to add to this list between now and the start of February, but for now this is enough. And by enough I mean enough to make me start musically panicking.
Inside the Red Head's Head 