Tag: iphoneography

Ol’ Man Spicket

Pictures of the Spicket River mean I went to Weight Watchers (or WW for the cool kids).  I didn’t want to go.  I thought my weigh in was going to be bad with a capital Bad.

Nope.  I was down.  A bunch.  I am kind of in a cycle where one week is up a fraction of a pound and the next week is down a lot.  I’m not doing anything different, it’s just working out that way.

Whatever, I’m on vacation.

 175/365

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Burned

I stuck around the house this morning so that I could do a little more recording.  I didn’t get to everything I wanted to get to but I’m almost done with the tracking.  Tomorrow I will wrap it all up.

I was able to stay home later than usual because it is Massachusetts school vacation week, which means greatly reduced traffic, and it’s Friday which also means greatly reduced traffic.  I was watching Waze as I worked and my expected travel time never topped 40 minutes.

At least it didn’t until I was actually on the road.  With Waze listing my estimated time of arrival at 9:00 on the dot it suddenly recalculated my route and asked me to get the hell off of route 93 South like pronto.  Uh oh.  The arrival time jumped up to 9:12 and the traffic in front of me stopped dead.  There was an accident between Dascomb Road and Route 125 somewhere.  I was able to get off at Dascomb, but the traffic in Andover was awful and I limped back to the highway one exit further down.  I ended up being 15 minutes late.  Damn it.  I got stuck in some traffic on 128 South too because of an accident on 128 North.  Rubberneckers are jerks, am I right?

Change of subject, I am still putzing along on my Flickr Photo a Day Challenge.  I took yet another picture of a guitar after I wrapped up my “session” (heh heh) this morning.  That puts me at 174 days.  I thought my previous best was 174 too so I was thinking of writing something goofy tomorrow when I broke my record.  I looked back at the blog post where I sketched out all of my previous failures and it turns out my previous record was 154, not 174.  Dumb ass.  So, yippee.  New World Record.  174/365.

174/365

Lots of Progress – #RPM2020

I did a musical ton today, including writing and recording two entirely new songs.  Why the hell did I do that?

I did a ton of guitar before work this morning.
173/365

I did vocals for the two new songs during lunch.
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I also did more guitars at lunch. I was burning through stuff really fast, which probably means it’s all crap.
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After work I mixed a song. It’s one of the songs that I am doing two versions of, so it isn’t “new” as far as the project is concerned, but it’s new in that it didn’t exist a couple of hours ago.

Plans are for Wimps

I said I was going to record more sax tonight. I even wrote a 50 page essay on it in the previous post.

Guess what I did…

I said I wasn’t going to add guitar to the acoustic songs until everything else was done. Guess what I did…

Two of the four electric songs that needed lead guitar now have lead guitar. Three of the acoustic song that only had sax now have lead guitar too.

My finger tips hurt.

Oh What a Relief – #RPM2020

This morning I packed my computer, a microphone, a pair of headphones, and a USB interface into the car and drove off to a parking spot behind The Loop in Methuen and recorded four songs worth of vocals.  I had the lyrics and melodies written already so it wasn’t too painful an experience.

When I was done (meaning, when the battery on my MacBook was approaching death and I had to go pee so bad I could taste it) I went home and started working on lyrics and melodies for the last four songs.  The first of the two were kind of interesting and one of them I purposely made pretty difficult as a bit of a challenge.  After those two I was really getting tired so I threw the last two together pretty quickly and they are just as bad as that sounds.

After that I hung out with my step son for a while, and made some late lunch/early dinner for the love of my life, and then (after double checking that the MacBook’s battery was back to 100%) I went back to The Loop (a different section of the lot behind the building this time) and cranked out the last four.  I got a little over confident for a bit and a couple of the songs have THREE part harmonies instead of my usual two.  Sick.

So where does RPM stand now… Four songs mixed, three songs ready to mix, three songs needing saxophone, and four needing lead guitar.  Once the full boat is mixed I am going to go back to six of the acoustic songs and add bass guitar, drums, and lead guitar and then remix them.  If I don’t finish that by March 1st I won’t worry about it, I just need to make sure I get a complete mix of each song before I start messing with alternates.  Well, more alternates.  I already have two different mixes of one of the acoustic songs.

I need to have all of the remaining guitar and saxophone finished before we leave for Disney World.  I will have my MacBook with me on the trip so I can sneak in a mix before bed each night, and if I am out of my mind crazy I might even sneak a couple in on the plane.  Then I will take full advantage of the leap year day and mix anything that’s left over once we’re home again.

Is any of this stuff good?  Well, no.  That’s not the point though.  The point of RPM, as always, is that it didn’t used to exist but now it does exist.

There’s still the issue of the half-a-song left for FAWM.  FAWM is 14 songs in 28 days, so for the leap year they say it’s 14.5 songs in 29 days.  Does that mean I have to sneak in one more?  If I do it’s either going to be simple, or 36 minutes of noodling and noise for the Blind Chaos thing I mentioned a few days ago.

I wouldn’t say I’m almost done, but I’m past the one humongous hurdle with time to spare.  I feel happy.

In closing, here is the view from this evening’s “studio.”

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