Tag: iphoneography

Song #3

First, a picture from last night that has nothing to do with anything you will hear on the audio file…
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Right, now that that’s out of the way…

 

Now to the song.  Allow me to quote the description I used on alonetone, though I’ve written about all of this before…

Long story…
or, What the hell is a cajon anyway?

I listen to a podcast about cover bands. One of the hosts is a drummer and he plays in an acoustic group. He said he played his cajon at the acoustic gigs. I thought, what the hell is a cajon?

Google informed me that it’s this box thing that you sit on and smack with your hands. There is a hole in it somewhere and even some snares and depending on where you whack it you get a bass drum-ish sound or a snare drum-ish sound. It’s kinda neat.

Fast forward a few months and I’m sitting alone in Epcot center, just outside of Soarin’ (true story) and I was tapping away on GarageBand on my iPhone trying to come up with something different from my usual power trio arrangements. Turns out one of the percussion settings in the drummer function had a cajon. I started thinking like a hippie in a coffee house and thought, cajon, acoustic guitar, and cello. Well, GarageBand’s string sounds are crap and the cello was scratched in it’s place I thought maybe I could dust off my alto sax and use that as the soloist. I hadn’t played my sax since 2013 (I think) and it was time.

Nothing ever became of that Epcot Center song idea, but when RPM 2020 came around I came back to that idea. I decided to make half of my album the usual rock band stuff, and the other half this goofy coffee shoppe thing. If time permits I am going to do a rock band mix of the coffee shoppe songs too, but we’ll see.

This song is about how the US Senate gave the fascist in the white house legal permission to rig elections.

Isn’t that a great story?  I’ve still never seen a cajon in the flesh.

Mother Nature Hates Me

I just don’t get it.  Why does Mother Nature hate me so much?

I only telecommute one day each week, and I need the time between Jen and Harry leaving for work and school and me needing to punch into work to work on vocal tracks for RPM.  I seriously bank on that time to get through a lot of what I need to get done.  It’s really important.

Last week was the first Thursday in February and it snowed.  Harry had a snow day.  No singing on mic for me.  Today is the second Thursday in February and guess what… it snowed again.  We didn’t get a whole lot but it was enough for him to get a two hour delay.

What the actual….

It’s Mother Nature screwing with me, isn’t it.  This is all about me.  Two Thursdays, two snow storms.  I hate snow!  I really need my Thursday mornings, damn it.  Knock it off!

At least today I was able to get a little recording in during lunch.  Two more songs done, both of which had been started earlier in the week.  I’ve got that going for me at least.

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Sax Continued

Okay so tonight’s recording-in-my-bedroom session has answered two important questions.

  1. Can I still play the saxophone?
    The answer to this question is yes.  I can still play the saxophone.
  2. Can I still play the saxophone well?
    The answer to this question is an emphatic, hilarious, no.  I cannot still play the saxophone well.

I can still improvise on a blues scale in C though.  It’s like riding a bike.  Totally second nature.  It took a little more time to get acclimated to improvising on a blues scale in F, but I blundered my way through that one as well.

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I think I may have answered another question too. I mentioned in a previous post today that my computer fell off my desk this morning. I had no idea how that could have happened. Then when I came back to the office after my little recording-in-my-bedroom session tonight I saw this:

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Ms Patches sitting pretty, shamelessly right in the middle of the laptop stand. I think Scotland Yard has itself a chief suspect in this case. Elementary, my dear Patches.

Remote Control

Check it out, I have been using the Logic Remote iPad app as a… ya know… remote.  I’ve only ever used it as a midi controller to add midi instruments to GarageBand files, but over the last few days I’ve been using it as a remote control while recording guitar parts.

When I put together my workspace I put the computer on one side of the room and the pedal board on the other.  I picked up an extension chord for my headphones, which allowed me to step on pedals while the tape was rolling, but it was the remote that let me stand by the pedals the whole time I’ve been working.

Well, most of it.  I can’t select regions from the remote (can’t I?) and I can’t set up loops (can’t I?) but it does everything else I need to do.  The best part??  It actually works!  The midi controller functionality is a mess (though it’s infinitely better than it used to be) but the remote control works!

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I picked off a vocal this morning, wrote a new song and recorded guitars for it tonight, and recorded the guitars for the only remaining pre-existing song too. I’m up to 14 songs, all with rhythm guitars done (the new song from tonight still needs a bass guitar part though, don’t forget!), and two of them have vocals too.

I have to have all the tracking done before vacation. Will I pull it off??

I think so but I’m starting to feel the crunch. The vocals are the logjam, I have to keep plugging away at them. Two down, 12 to go!

Oh yeah… and saxophone.  Argh!

More #RPM2020 Goodness

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This puppy hurts my arms.

I put the acoustic guitar onto the last two songs that need acoustic guitar, assuming I don’t come up with another one.  They are both strummy and loud and boy are my arms tired.  My arms are so tired you’d think I just flew in from the coast, har har hardy har har.

I’ve got one more song that needs electric rhythm guitar.  That’ll bring the count up to 13.  I want to add one more electric song too.  Then there’s the Blind Chaos thing.

This is taken from a post on the RPM Challenge Forum:

For the uninitiated, blind chaos was a thing that was started in 2009 and ran, I think, pretty much every year until the forums/site was rebooted. The basic premise is record roughly 36 minutes of something and someone mixes it all together into an RPM Album.

I’ve never done one of these before. This, or something similar, has gone on more or less every year that I’ve been paying attention.  If I decide to submit a contribution I would just plug in my guitar, hit record, and make noises for 36 minutes.  Those noises can be musical or not, or some combination of both.  When I first read that forum post a couple of weeks ago I was pretty intrigued by the idea.  What would I do?  Noodle?  Crank the amp and get as much glorious feedback as possible?  Kick on a delay pedal and make as much glorious self oscillation noise as possible?  Some combination thereof?

I don’t know what I’d do if I even did it, and I don’t know if I want to do it or not.  Maybe if I finish absolutely everything on the musical agenda before we leave for Florida.  Not likely, but maybe.