Tag: Music

One Day Down

The Facebook bookfayce exile has lasted more than 24 hours. One day down, six(?) to go. I reached for the phone to check for notifications two or three times and just put it straight down. Nope. No bookfayce there.

I say six days to go, but do I mean it? As in… is it six days or one eternity? I haven’t thought that far ahead yet. I am classifying this as a temporary experiment, but if I feel okay at the end of a week I will just continue to stay away.

Forever though… can I do it forever? Probably not. When the band starts up again we are going to be communicating through Facebook messenger. At least we always have in the past and I don’t think I can Spartacus all four of us into a revolution. I think I am at least going to be using Messenger. After that, what about gigs? I am going to have to play the promotional game. Not that promoting the band on Facebook ever had any real results in the past. You just do it because it’s there, right?

All of this talk is making me want to get the band together. Nope. Not until (at the very least) my house has it’s booster shot. Even that is probably not enough to lighten the Covid-19 lockdown rules. We’ll have to see. We are taking it seriously here. Still. Very serious. Still.

Speaking of guitar… when the new Klon KTR circuits hit the stores, I am getting one. I just want to state that publicly. My Ryra The Klone pedal is awesome, but when the new KTR comes out I am going to replace it with the new redesigned KTR. You heard it here first, babie.

Feeling Lost

I feel so weird right now. I feel lost, somehow. At home, I had a huge music project that I was completely wrapped up in and now it’s done. At work I got flattened by a runaway train that is now back on the tracks.

Now what?

Those two things have kept the CPU in my head running at close to 100% capacity for most of the last month. Now that I’ve moved on from both things my CPU is down to a much more normal operating level and that is all kinds of good, but the rest of my brain is less occupied than it was and doesn’t know what to do with itself.

I had an idea to take the 10 least awful songs from the last three months and redo them in the hopes of improving them. I listened through everything and picked the songs I want to try, but I’m already losing interest.

What should I do? Part of me wants to just spend a few weeks watching TV, but I should do better than that, shouldn’t I?

I just don’t know what to do with myself.

I found a bag of Hershey’s Kisses in the junk food closet. I just ate a bunch of them and now I feel sick. I guess I ate too much. Somehow that is symbolic of my mental state. Blah, barf.

Done… more

I posted yesterday that the 50/90 shit was done. That was sort of true. I hit the 50 song goal and, as mentioned earlier, deleted my account. I’m done with that site. I wasn’t really done with the project though. I still had two songs to mix. I mixed them tonight. Now I’m finished, finished. If you catch my drift.

I made at least an attempt at 50/90 every year since 2013. I finished in 2014 with 50 songs. I didn’t finish again until Covid let me finish it in 2020 when I had 51 songs. Now this year I have finished for a third time with 52 songs. Setting the bar incrementally higher, or some nonsense.

Now it’s back to the Record Every Month thing from the RPM Challenge site. I haven’t been submitting songs over the last few months, but I have still been participating. I have at least one song written and recorded in it’s entirety for every month since March. I need to put together a playlist on Alonetone that acts as an official list, and then use a second playlist for all the extra stuff I did each month. Yeah, that’s a plan.

So we’re back at it on October 1st. See you then!

Booster

I am not yet quite qualified to get a Covid-19 vaccine booster shot. I have to wait a couple of weeks, I think.

I really want it. I really want it.

I want my band to get back together. The whole writing/recording demoes thing is starting to get old. I need to play loud with three friends who are playing along at a similarly loud volume.

I need a shave. I need to play live music. I need a booster shot. I need to delete Facebook. I just decided a few minutes ago that I am going to experiment with a full week away from the bookfayce. I am going to delete it from my iPhone and my iPad and close the tabs on my computers that I keep open. Hold on, give me a second… Okay, it’s off my phone and my iPad and it’s no longer open on this computer. Let’s give it seven days and see how disconnected and awful I feel. Conversely, I could say to give it seven days and see how less depressing life seems. Seven days without nazis. Well… I’m not deleting Twitter yet, so there are still nazis to piss me off.

When did this booster shot post turn into an anti-facebook post? I don’t know, but I still want the booster so… there’s that.

Okay, back to work.

48 Songs Down

I’ve mixed two songs today. Here’s the second one (the first one really sucks… I mean, this one sucks too, but the first one… woah, it sucked).

I have one more song ready to mix and three that need one more guitar track before they are ready to mix. I don’t know if I will finish this shit show tonight or tomorrow or what, but I am nearly willing to place small wagers on being done some time tomorrow.

I am going to take a break from it for now and go do the laundry and clean the cat’s litter box and take out the trash. After that… I don’t know. I’m pretty sick of this whole project now. At least there aren’t any signs of anyone Fucking With My Stuff Without Permission today. I’ll take that as a win.

46 Songs Down

46 songs down, that’s 92% of the way to a complete 50/90. Yippee.

Here’s one of them. If this sounds punky to me, does that imply that this is what punky sounds like to people who don’t understand what punky sounds like?

I have three more songs that are ready to mix. That brings me to 49. After that there are three songs that need lead guitar tracks and then a mix. That will bring me to 52 and most likely to the end of this year’s 50/90 story. After that I will probably just delete my account because one guy Fucked With My Stuff Without Permission and now I just don’t give a shit about the entire site.

Don’t Touch My Stuff

The folks who will be installing our new water heater are here. Work is underway. Please, oh gods of plumbing and water heating, allow this to be Lake Asshole’s (more recently known as Bucket Asshole) final day. Oh please, oh please. Thank you.

I mixed another song while I was waiting for them to get here this morning. Song number 44 of an expected 52.

50/90 is officially not fun anymore. At least the 50/90 website portion of the project. Last night while I slumbered someone commented on the song I posted before I went to bed suggesting that he could remaster it for me and asking if that would be okay. Then without ever getting a response he remastered it and posted a link to it.

Ummmm… No.

I know we’re all amateurs and trying to get better at what we do and all of those good things, but Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, Fuck With My Stuff Without Permission. It’s really that simple. I made all of my song links private so no one can get to them but me. 99.999% of the people I’ve dealt with have been wonderful and supportive and the few comments I get are always great, but one guy had to Fuck With My Stuff Without Permission and just utterly ruined the whole experience for me.

I plan to keep posting songs there as private so that I get the little trophy next to my name, but that’s it. If I play the game again next year I will probably do it alone, without using the website at all.

Song Number 43

43 songs down, seven to go, and nine more are in the pipeline. We’re going to finish this year’s 50/90 Challenge and we’re going to go a couple of songs over the goal. I’m feeling pretty good about it this year. It’s going to take something major to stop me from finishing, though I am positive I just jinxed it so we can all expect to read a headline in tomorrow’s news: Red head struck by lightning in freak indoor thunderstorm.

Guaranteed.

I was thinking about taking a handful of less sucky songs from this year’s batch and making a stand alone album of some kind. Maybe pick 8-10 songs and redo them to make better sounding recordings and package them up as a sort of quarantine tunes spin off thingie. Maybe I could add a song or two from the Record Every Month RPM project too, as technically all of the 50/90 songs qualify for that too.

We’ll see.

Will this song make it? I don’t know. Let’s say it’s on the bubble and leave it at that for now.