Tag: Music

Don’t Daisy Chain Your Pedals

My new Crybaby wah pedal is on my pedal board. My RYRA Klon Klone and Keeley Blues Driver clone are not. The board is powered by two MXR bricks. The two non-board pedals each have their own plugs.

I was using the two clones, but I wanted to use the crybaby with them and I didn’t have a third plug. I took it off the board and did what you shouldn’t do. I put all three pedals onto a daisy chain. I did leads for one song and then tore it all down.

Don’t daisy chain pedals together. My already noisy rig reached new, previously unimagined levels of awful noise. Just don’t do it.

The crybaby sounded great though.

I Broke My Rule

I broke one of my primary album-in-a-month challenge rules today. Twice. I think I might do it again too.

I mentioned before that I was a little unhappy with the first few rhythm guitar parts I recorded this month. Well, I have a rule that states once a track is done, it’s done. Today I kicked that rule to the curb and re-recorded all of the guitars on songs #1 and 2. I’m just out of control.

I also put lead guitar on both of those songs. That means I have two June songs ready to mix. It’s just crazy!

Car Music: Day Two

I went out to my current car music parking lot of choice again today. That’s two days in a row of vocalizing madness!

I have vocals on nine of the 11 songs now. I was on a roll today and the only reason I didn’t finish off the last two songs was that the lyrics haven’t been written yet.

One item of note…. today is the first day of summer, and car music in summer is a much sweatier experience than car music in winter. Believe me on that one.

In closing, if you were curious, yes I did bring a mask with me…….. four of them.

Car Music: June Edition

As of last night, seven of the 11 June music songs have lyrics. As of an hour ago, four of those seven have vocals.

Car vocals, to be precise.

Road trippin’, mobile studio style.

Sum Up Today’s Music

I took the day off from work today to be available for the dishwasher delivery. I was able to use the downtime before and after to work on some music. I was able to make a little progress on both projects.

For the album in a month thing, I wrote lyrics and melodies for two of the 11 songs. That’s it. I was hoping to get to more than that today. I might sneak another song or two in before bed tonight, who knows.

For the re-recording thing (tentatively titled Quarantunes Volume 1) I redid the rhythm guitars for one of the songs I did over the weekend. I didn’t like the tone. It’s better now, and I’ll probably keep it, but there’s something weird about it that isn’t happening in the other songs that used the same setup. I don’t know. I then added the guitars to the only one of the eight songs that I hadn’t touched yet. Some of it sounds good. Some of it doesn’t. I had an idea that didn’t really pan out.

Finally, I took the two songs that I put the guitars down a year ago and redid them. They both sounded pretty good already, but they both sound better now. I’m very pleased with how they turned out.

That means both projects are now fully at the stage where the next step is vocals. Crap.

Oh yeah, and the amp I bought online this morning will be delivered on Monday.

Music

Remember those 11 June Music songs? Neither do I.

The great re-recording project continues. I’m looking at it like a series of two or three EP’s. I have eight songs earmarked for volume one. Two of them got rhythm guitars on Saturday, two on Sunday, and one tonight. I think I’m going to redo on of the Saturday songs. Two more songs got good guitar takes about a year ago, but I know I can do better. The eighth song got rhythm guitars back when all of this started, five years ago, but I’m going to redo those as well.

Tonight’s song included slide guitar. Just for a noisy effect, not for anything even remotely melodic. I’m the world’s worst slide guitarist.

Now, I need to get back to the June music. I’m not abandoning it at all. Also, I need all of this crap finished by the time 50/90 starts on the Fourth of July.

Yikes!

Therapy

There is something delightfully therapeutic about bashing the holy hell out of an electric guitar when you’re in a state of near permanent near panic over a global pandemic. The plague might get me, but until it does I’m going to vent all of my frustrations through bad music and mediocre guitar playing.

Amen and all that.

That’s a Lot of Noise

I played a lot today. More than I expected.

When I finished playing on Thursday night, June Music had nine songs with all of the rhythm guitars. I had an idea for a 10th song, but it was just a single chord change. On Friday after work I found myself wishing that I had more to do. I’ll have to do leads eventually, but I like to save that for last, and I still have to write and record the vocal parts before I get there. What to do?

I wrote out music for two more songs, that’s what. I invented new stuff for me to do. Today I recorded the rhythm guitars for those two. Neither one is the 10th idea I had socked away, so now there are 11 songs with guitar/bass/drums and one that’s still only a snippet of nothing.

When I finished the second song today I saw that my MacBook’s battery percentage was still above 70. I didn’t want to stop. That’s when I remembered there was a song left over from April that had everything except lead guitar. I brought that up, finished it off, and now I have a song that’s ready to mix.

There was also a ton of battery left, and I still didn’t want to stop. What to do next?

I’ve mentioned about 100 times that in 2015 I started a project where I would re-record the least awful songs from all of my prior RPM Challenges and stuff. Every so often I try to get some work done but I never seem to finish anything. Screw it, thought me. I picked a song out of that batch, scrapped all of the guitar parts that were already done and did ’em again. When that was done I picked a second song. When that was done… my battery was below 10% and I had to help cook dinner.

In the grand scheme of things it’s all stupid and pointless and silly but damn if it didn’t feel good.

For the June and April songs I didn’t use my pedal board. I played the 335 into the RYRA The Klone and the Keeley Super Phat Mod. I had the gain dialed pretty far back on both, but with the Bassbreaker 15 that was enough for some good, chunky distortion. For the lead on the April song I just upped the gain on both pedals a smidge

For the 2015 Project songs I only did rhythm parts and I switched back to the pedal board. The most recent plan for this project was to use the same setup I use with Lizardfish. I followed that rule for the pedals but that’s it. Technically the 335 is still retired and not allowed to leave the house, so it’s not a Lizardfish thing. The Bassbreaker 15 has never been used with Lizardfish, though I still have the idea of pairing it with a Vox AC15 and using that with the band. Guitar Center’s website has a listing for a used AC15 for under $500. I am really tempted.

The signal path today was 335 to Klon KTR to Keeley D&M Drive (just the Dan side) to the Bassbreaker 15. The problems I was having when I first switched to that have been fixed. As expected, lowering the output level on the KTR by a ton really did the trick. No more mushy compression. Everything sounded clear and dynamic and great.

I noticed one other little detail. For one of the 2015 songs, a song that was written for the 2014 50/90 Challenge, I had previously added rhythm guitars to it. The song requires a clean sound and a distorted sound. When I recorded them before there was a little weirdness in the transitions that I hadn’t done on the 50/90 recording. I didn’t catch it until a couple of days after I finished the takes but it was reason enough to redo everything. Today when I finished each take I listened back to just the guitars, with everything else muted.

I don’t think I’ve done that for any of the recordings I’ve done since March, and I’ve only used the 335 on the most recent songs, so maybe it didn’t happen… When I had the distorted guitars solo’d and there were no other tracks playing, I realized that the microphone is actually picking up a little bit of the acoustic sound of the guitar. You can hear the pick hitting the strings. It’s really subtle, and you can’t hear it within the full mix, even when the guitar tracks are cranked. Either I was bashing the guitar really hard, or the amp isn’t as loud as I thought it was. I might go back to some of the old songs and see if it happened while playing a solid body guitar. Interesting.

Anyway, here’s a picture.

287/365