I got quite a lot done over the last two days. Not nearly enough, but quite a good chunk. I can’t go into it now because the birthday girl and I are watching TV like an old married couple.
I love it.
Tag: Music
Tired
https://hearthis.at/rpm-works-in-progress/rpm-2020-03-ipad-2820-6.26-pm/
I’ve had a decent recording day today. I added the rhythm guitar to the last four acoustic songs, and one of the electric songs. I’m bushed. My back hurts, my hands hurt, my head hurts, but I got a lot done.
Les Paul into KTR into Two Bassbreakers… it sounds like overdrive heaven. It’s so sensitive that every little touch rings out. It’s very unforgiving too so every spec of sloppiness comes through, but it just sounds soo damn cool. That file up above (assuming as always that it pulled into the post) will be deleted the next time I work on that song. For now let’s just use it as an example of how groovy this setup sounds. Also, the song is complete shit. I’m only interested in the trashy goodness of the guitar sound.
I’m guessing within five minutes of posting this I’m going to be embarrassed by how shitty it really sounds. Oh well.
Making Progress
I believe it was Ringo Starr who said it best when he said, “I GOT BLISTERS ON ME FINGERS!”
At least I think that was Ringo.
Anyway. I’ve always found playing an acoustic guitar is more of a work out for the arms than playing electric, and boy are my arms getting tired. (No actual blisters yet though)
It Finally Worked
I’ve mentioned that we’re going on a trip to Disney World soon. I’ve also mentioned that my foot has been all screwed up and painful lately. I may have mentioned that I sometimes have a lot of back pain too.
The foot has been okay of late and the back pain hasn’t been much of an issue, but I get sore and tired pretty quickly and there is going to be miles upon miles of Disney walking so… I started going to the gym. I’ve been three times this week.
Now before you get all pissy, this isn’t going to be one of those lets all get healthy kinda posts. Screw that, this is about music.
When I go to the gym I almost always just walk on the treadmill until my foot or my back start complaining. It doesn’t take long. I’ve been shooting for 15 minutes to start with. Hey, screw you and your in-shape-body, stop laughing at me! Bullies. Anyway, I always bring my phone and my air pods (I used to bring ear buds but let’s embrace modern technology!) and I listen to music. I always hope that I can just let myself focus on whatever I’m listening to and not even think about the amount of time I’ve been treadmillin’. It never happens though.
Until today.
Today I put on that stupid Spotify playlist that I added to the side panel over there —-> yesterday. The plan was to put 8-10 songs that I’ve been in the mood for lately onto said playlist and updated it every so often. So much for that, it’s about 20 hours long now. Sorry. My plan is to shuffle it, but that is redundant since I only have a free account and that means anything on my phone is shuffled. Fine by me.
So there I am, walking along, listening to music, not being distracted from the clock slowly ticking upward toward the goal of 15 minutes. Then it happened. The shuffle brought me to “Still Got the Blues” by Gary Moore and I just got lost in it. That song is perfect, that recording is perfect, that guitar playing is perfect, that song is perfect (I think I said that already). I let it take me to where ever it needed to take me and the next thing I knew I had been walking for 20 minutes.
Thanks, Gary. Rest in Peace, Sir. I don’t know if you were playing Peter Green’s ’59 Les Paul standard on that one or not (the guitar that is affectionately known as Greenie and is currently owned by Kirk Hammett of Metalica) but I am choosing to believe you did and that is part of why the tone is just perfect.
Anyway, here are some Spicket River pictures and one from downtown Methuen because it’s Saturday and that’s what I do on Saturday…
As I mentioned in a couple of posts yesterday, we are celebrating my beloved bride’s birthday this weekend. She asked for two things: One, to stay in her PJ’s all weekend, and two, for me to let her work all weekend. I will make it happen! I have a few chores to do this weekend, and I need to go grocery shopping. The rest of the time is (hopefully) going to be spent on RPM (probably not though, let’s be realistic). In fact, I’m going to go spend a few minutes recording some acoustic guitar right now.
Happy Saturday, everyone and thanks again to Gary Moore.
Widgets
Check it out, nerd boy is messing around with the layout on the page again. I had this goofy idea to add a music playlist to the sideboard. Just a few things that I’ve been in the mood for recently. I already forget where the idea came from (blame old age). Did I see it on someone else’s page? I think so.
Anyway, I went over to Spotify and started a new playlist and added a couple of Robert Fripp and Steven Wilson things because that’s where my head has been lately. I added a couple of Rush tunes too because RIP Professor. Then I went looking for a widget…
…and I couldn’t find one. Google to the rescue. While I was looking I found an Instagram widget too. I have a love/hate relationship with The ‘Gram. I love the idea of it, but I hate the shitty interface and the shitty algorithm and the shitty owned-by-Facebook. Oh what the hell, thought the social media whore, and I added the Instagram widget and a text widget with a Spotify tagger that linked to my new playlist. I then added a few more songs to the playlist. Prog and Blues, mostly. Not the most palatable of combinations, but screw you guys it’s my brain I don’t care, whatever.
You can see both things over there on the right somewhere. You might have to scroll down a little. >>>>>>>>
I also added a Flickr widget which didn’t work, and a twitter widget which reminded me that my twitter feed is almost entirely links back to this page. Can you say redundant? I can, and often do. I removed them both and moved on with my life.
Also, I totally forgot that you can’t actually play Spotify on an embedded playlist. It links you back to Spotify itself (I think it tried opening the player app before proceeding to the web player) and I think you need to be signed in to hear anything. Whatever. It’s only there because I’m a nerd and like doing nerdy things.
What this means is that any minute now I’m probably going to be changing my whole page theme. You have been warned.
12 Strings
My RPM album project is now officially electric/acoustic.
I added 12-string guitar to song #9. That means the rhythm guitars are done on two songs. Let’s see if I can sneak another one in before work tomorrow.
Checking In After Day Four – #RPM2020
I just posted this onto the RPM Challenge site:
I’m up to eight songs now. Seven have the song form sketched out and one has rhythm guitars (technically that’s a day five thing as I did it before work this morning).
Three of the songs are going to go with the acoustic guitar/hand percussion arrangement. My initial hope was to have five acoustic and five rawk-power-trio. Not sure how that’s going to shake out though.
The RPM Challenge needs at least 10 songs. FAWM needs 14.5 (it’s a leap year). RPM does not need newly written songs, FAWM, by definition, does. Given that I’m losing the entire last week of the month I have more or less decided to give FAWM a miss this year and shoot for 10 songs. If I can get two more and then get them all recorded quickly I might pull some old ideas into the project.
Last summer I spent a day with my acoustic 12-string, sitting on the patio, noodling chord progressions and strummy riffs. I was thinking of doing the whole acoustic guitar/hand percussion/sax thing then too and I actually started a few decent sounding ideas. I never finished them though. I might revisit some of them. I also did an album-in-a-day project a couple of months ago and there was one song that I might want to re-record.
It all depends on how quick I can get through the songs I’ve already started. We’ll see.
As mentioned, I was able to get a little recording in this morning. I finished all of the rhythm guitar parts for song #1. I double tracked it, as usual, but this time each take was two tracks, for a total of four tracks. I have been wanting to record through two amps at once for ages. I did it a few years ago but the two amps were both direct input into the computer, they weren’t mic’d. Today, they were both mic’d. Today it was… real. I guess.
The signal path was my Les Paul into the Klon KTR overdrive pedal with the gain cranked into a Radial ABY box (one input split into two outputs) into both of my Fender Bassbreakers (the 15 watt version and the 18 watt channel on the 18/30) to two Shure SM57 mics. I’m not sure what the reality of the situation is, but it sounded pretty flippin’ sweet to me!
Last year I made a rule stating I could not copy and paste sections of a song. That means I couldn’t record a verse section of a song once and then use it for three verses, stuff like that. I want to do that again this year, but the song I worked on today was kinda hard. Not really hard, just a little hard. It required a lot of takes to get everything kinda/sorta right. Unfortunately that took a lot of time. It actually took all the time I had available this morning.
Maybe I need to start waking up earlier?
Too Sleepy
The plan was to get up early and be ready for work before my beloved Jennifer left. That would give me a little time to record guitar parts before I had to leave for work too.
Unfortunately I couldn’t get to sleep last night. I was still up around 1:00AM which meant there was no way I was getting up early. I slept as late as I could and barely made it to work on time.
I did use all the setup I did last night as an excuse to take today’s photo-a-day pic. That’s me looking at the positive like some kinda fuckin’ optimist.
RIP Iowa Caucuses.
Record Ready
I noodled a little into GarageBand tonight, just to check the mics and the USB interface. My new mic stand (that I bought last year but only took out of the box today) was a lemon. Otherwise, all is well. Now I just need guitar parts to record.
Checking In on Day 3 – #RPM2020
I just posted this to the RPM Challenge website. Just checking in:
It feels like I’m off to a slow start but I don’t know if that’s accurate or not.
I have this vague idea of splitting the album into two, one being my usual three piece rock band kinda thing, and the other being an acoustic guitar/hand percussion/sax/voice thing. The acoustic stuff will probably fall by the wayside but for now it’s still on.
I’ve got two songs sketched out for the rock side and one sort of unfocused idea for the acoustic. The rock things are okay, the acoustic thing is garbage and should really end up in the trash.
That’s it so far. I had a gig on the 1st and I was very pleased with the way I played. Here’s hoping that carries through the month and I nail a few decent guitar parts.
I am hoping to get everything setup in my little corner of the bedroom tonight. Two amps, two mics, and the 8 input USB interface. If I can sneak in some recording too that would be great. We’ll see.
Inside the Red Head's Head 