Tag: iphoneography

Ouch

I put vocals on five songs this morning. Two new ones and three re-recordings. This afternoon I put lead guitars on four of them. I decided a few days ago that I was going to stop using my ES-335 and use my SG instead. The 335 (and the Les Paul) is over 40 years old and best I can tell it’s never had a fret replacement. The SG is two years old. It’s all original. What’s that mean?

The frets on the 335 are old and worn. I’m going to have to have them replaced… soon… as well as all of the wiring and all of the pots. I’ve written about that a few times before. The frets on the SG aren’t worn at all, not even a little bit. What’s that mean?

Ouch, is what it means. Worn frets are lower and closer to the fretboard then non-worn frets. That means they are a lot easier on the fingers when you’re sliding around like a madman. Today, on the non-worn SG’s frets, I was sliding around like a madman for an hour and a half. What I thought were pretty decent sized calluses on my left hand turned out to not be that thick after all. A couple more rounds of me ripping my finger tips to shreds like I did today will fix that.

Ouch.

Car Music

Today was the first November car music day. I accomplished two things.

First, I totally made a fan. This cat stayed there through an entire song worth of three part harmonies.

Second, I played a brutal cut throat game of sabac and somehow won a starship. Crazy.

I’m Not Very Good

I’m not a very good guitar player. If you had any doubts, then there’s me coming right out and admitting it.

All of these songs that I am re-recording… Whenever in the past I wrote them and recorded the original demo, I blew through them like they were simple. Now that I’m doing them again, they are suddenly insanely, brutally, unimaginably difficult. I screw up constantly. Like, oh my god, could you please do something right?

I was trying to play arpeggios on one song and I fat fingered them over and over. I finally got through it and moved on to the next song and… more arpeggios. Bite me, past self. Take after take after take of me fat fingering and I finally threw a temper tantrum and ripped off the ends of my finger nails. It actually helped a little.

Seven out of 10 re-recordings are ready for vocals. Eight out of eight (but hopefully 10, eventually) November songs are ready for lyrics. Maybe some car singing in the morning? We’ll see.

The Hardest Song Ever

Today is Veteran’s day. I am honoring those who served our country by staying home, not contracting/spreading Covid-19, and trying not to bother my wife as she’s stuck working.

I’m using the time to record some guitar. I’ve got two projects underway. The first is NaSoAlMo. I had three songs ready for guitar parts and I cranked them all out. None of them are very good but now that they are done I’m up to eight songs. The rules for the challenge are to have 29 minutes of music. I haven’t timed it out but I think I’ve got enough.

The other music project is round three of re-recordings. I had a couple of songs ready for guitar that will work with the same pedal setup I’m using for the November stuff so I started working on those. The first one is a pretty easy song, but there was one chord that just felt wrong. I had the bass part and a keyboard part already down and they sounded okay, but when I put the guitar on it everything was wrong. I had the whole song down except for two measures with this weird chord I couldn’t figure out. I hadn’t played this song since 2014 and I don’t have any notes and I was stuck.

The previous phrase ended on an F#maj7. The mystery chord? After half an hour of messing with it and getting it wrong? F#min. It sounds pretty cool now.

That’s when the real pain started. I have this song, see… it’s another one that dates back to 2014. At the time I was in the mood to push myself and in this particular song’s case, I ended up with a riff or two that are among the hardest I’ve ever come up with. Yikes. On the 2014 recording, I did one of the sections one measure at a time and then copied and pasted it everywhere. It has a lot of fast picking and skipping strings and jumping around the neck. I was expecting I’d have to do some copying and pasting again, even though my rule for the re-recordings is not to do that.

Well, after 100,000 takes I actually managed to get through the whole eight bars without screwing up. Not only that, but I’ve done it twice! WOOHOO! Unfortunately, by the time I got that far I was toast. My right hand was too tired to play. I still have a chunk of the song to finish but I had to take a break. I ate some lunch, I watched an episode of The Flash. All I have left on that song is to do that one super hard part about six more times. It’s going to take all day, I think.

Okay, break time is over. Bring on the pain.

Well That was Crazy

A seriously nutty thing happened in the neighborhood today. Yikes!

Jen looked out the window and saw this gigantic mother of a crane rising out from a back yard a few houses up the street.

At first I had no clue what was going on, but about an hour later I saw that a wood chipper had been parked in front of that house and they were shredding a tree.

Ah, that’s the ticket. A few minutes later I saw it. They cut down a tree in the back yard, hooked it up to the crane, then carried it over the house and dropped it in the yard.

It’s not even my house, but sweet christmas was that stressful to watch! yikes, I say. Yikes!

As cool as that was it was tempered by three of my neighbors all standing in the street watching. No masks, no distance. I know them all by face and none of them live together. Come on. Why does 2020 have to throw in something bad along with anything good (looking at you, cheeto)?

Oh well. The crane was still cool.