Tag: Music

Band Practice

I haven’t posted any music from my band’s practices in a while and I just finished chopping up the recording I made with my iPhone on Sunday so I thought I’d try to remember how to embed hearthis.at files.

I wonder if this works…

Looks like it!

Who said that Lizardfish can’t bring the funk?

I think I need to do something new in the guitar tone department.  Maybe just add some top end to it?  The high knob on the amp is way down, and every pedal with a tone control has the highs rolled off.  Is it just the recording that sounds muddy or did I really sound like that in the room?  No idea, really.

RPM Challenge Global Listening Day

Today is a big day for RPM Challenge participants.  Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s community radio station, WSCA, 106.1 FM has declared today as the RPM Global Listening Day.  They are going to play one song from each of the 500 or so albums submitted this year.  They are literally playing music from all across the planet.  You can listen to their audio stream at this link right here.

Check it out.  There will be some great music, some not so great music, some music that lives somewhere in between, but all of it was made by people who felt the need to put the rest of the world on hold for a few weeks and let their own creativity shine for a while.  I applaud everyone who finished, and everyone who gave it a shot but didn’t finish, and everyone who thought about starting but never did (because next year they will own this thing).

Everyone, that is, except me.  My project was crap this year.  If you listen to the stream and you hear this song… then you know it’s me.

Music and Irish, Separately

Today is a day with two themes.  Music and Irishness.

Music because I have band practice, and my step daughter has pit rehearsal for her school play.

Irish because my beautiful bride, Jen is making corned beef.  I predict that it’s going to need salt.  Corned beef can never, ever be salty enough.  Jen always does a great job.

On an unrelated note, Facebook got weird this morning in a sad way.  I friended a guitar player that I’m a big fan of.  Today he was tagged in a post with one of my former teachers from Northeast Broadcast School.  Gotta admit, he was not my favorite guy there.  Something about him rubbed me the wrong way.  He was nice enough, very smart, and very talented.  There was just… something.  I clicked on him to see what he’s been up to.  He’s still in the same awesome band, which is nice.  I was surprised to see him tagged in another post with another one of my teachers from NBS.  This was a guy whose class I enjoyed very much.  He was a great guy.  Unfortunately he passed away recently.  Damn.  I hadn’t thought about him in years, and now he’s gone.  Very sad.

RIP Chuck Berry

They called Elvis Presley the King of Rock and Roll, but I think everyone always knew that was bullshit.  Yes, Elvis was amazing and yes he did more to spread Rock and Roll to the masses than anyone.  He is deserving of all the praise he’s received.

But let’s be honest.  Chuck Berry is the King of Rock and Roll.  When you line up all the greats who were there at the start, and there are a lot of them, Chuck Berry stands out the most.  He wrote tremendous riffs.  His lyrics were poetry at a time when most of his contemporaries were writing nonesense.  Most important to me, a guitar player, Chuck Berry was Rock and Roll’s first true instrumental hero.  Even with all the things that have come since, his playing still stands out.  He is a legitimate guitar hero.  Don’t believe me?  Go ask Keith Richards his opinion.  Go ask Eric Clapton.  If we still had them with us I’d say go ask George Harrison or Jimi Hendrix.  Chuck’s playing stands the test of time.

Chuck Berry died today at the age of 90.  Yes, 90 years is a pretty good run, but I was hoping we’d get to keep him around for another 40-50 years at least.

Rest in Peace, Chuck Berry.

The Shods

The Shods are trying to make a new record and they’ve started a kickstarter project to raise funds.  I swear to you, if you don’t chip in to this project then you are the worst kind of Trump supporting garbage.  I mean it.  Really.

It’s a moral imperative that you click that link and back this project. Now’s the time! Get in on the ground floor! Do your part for your country and back the new Shods record!

No “Now What” This Year

Every year when March comes around and RPM ends I feel compelled to ask myself (publicly, via blog), “now what?”

Not this year.

Musically speaking, of course. This year I am not really in that space. Maybe having to rush the RPM Challenge process at the end has taken the air out of my sails. I don’t know. I have started messing with one new song idea this month. The idea is to write a song that the band can play, but every time I do that it falls apart and none of the guys show a lot of interest.

It doesn’t matter.

As of tonight the RPM process is officially complete. I uploaded my project to the RPM website’s jukebox, and I also uploaded it to bandcamp.com.

https://robertparker.bandcamp.com/album/foaming-at-the-mouth

Posting to bandcamp is always the last thing I do. It marks February as officially over.

Musically speaking, of course.

Finished with 90 Minutes to Spare — #RPM2017

My 2017 RPM Challenge album is finished and submitted. Done, done, and done.

I mixed nine songs tonight and they all sound like cow dung, which is to be expected. Of the 14 songs completed (yeah, I won FAWM too) I dropped two. One was kind of annoying (and I think I forgot to include the lead guitar in the mix… oh well). The other wasn’t a bad song, it just sounded kinda blah and crummy. I could probably do it again and pull it off, but for now it gets the axe.

All in all it’s not a good album, even by RPM’s reduced standards. It’s kinda crappy. I don’t care. I finished on time for the sixth year in a row, once again staving off failure.

Now it’s bed time. G’night, everyone!

#RPM2017 Day 28/28 — PANIC

This morning, I posted the following on my blog over at the RPM Challenge website:

Let’s take stock of the situation…

14 songs.

All of the tracking is done as of about 8:30 last night. I cranked out seven songs worth of lead guitars at a frenzied pace that pretty much guarantees I played the same solo on every song. Who cares, it’s done.

Five songs are mixed. Poorly. I want to have a mix of every song so that I can have my RPM album and a decent recording for fawm.org for anything that gets cut. Unfortunately I don’t think there will be time to listen back to everything and actually edit the sequence. I know one song is probably going to get dropped from the album, but will I decide to drop others? I should, but I don’t know if I will. The running order is probably going to be the order I finish the mixes. Just like the old days.

I get out of work at 5:30 tonight, if I am lucky. My commute home is a little more than an hour. I will end up having from about 7:00pm to midnight to finish mixing between five and nine songs.

I’ll probably work right up until midnight and then check myself off as done at the last possible minute. After that, just make sure I get a decent burial and all will be well.

Thanks, RPM folks!

Five Down, Nine to Go #RPM2017

I finished the tracking tonight with a marathon lead guitar recording session. Now I have one day to mix everything that is still unmixed. That’s a grand total of nine songs, after I managed to mix two tonight.

This one might be my favorite of the bunch this year, although I literally fell asleep while mixing it (long, long day) so who knows if it sounds okay.

And Then There Were Three… #RPM2017

The lyrics to this song were partly inspired by the following tweet: