We have a cat named Robin. She was not named after English guitar hero Robin Trower*.
Robin Trower had a US tour booked for this fall and he has a 50th anniversary expanded edition of his biggest record, Bridge of Sighs, due to hit the stores tomorrow. I did not buy tickets to his show in my neck of the woods, on October 5th (which is also my sister’s birthday), but I was thinking about it. Strongly. I saw him live once in 1988 (I think) and would love to see him one more time before he packs it in.
Unfortunately, just the other day he had to cancel the tour. He has a health issue that requires surgery and has the possibility of a long recovery period. It seems I may have missed my chance to see him one more time. Crud.
Get well soon, Mr Trower. Come back and see us soon, and maybe bring a Les Paul with you. I mean you used to play Gibsons back in your Procol Harem days. I know you’ve been pretty much 100% Strat since then, but maybe it might be fun to be nostalgic for the old days, eh?
*Robin the cat was not named after Robin Trower. She was named after Robin Sparkles.
I think my band’s search for a new singer might be over. I am hoping we’ll know for sure this coming Sunday.
Who might our new singer be?
Our new singer might be our old singer.
He told us he moved back to the (Merrimack) Valley from Maine and he has the itch to play in a band again. Is that itch to come back to the band permanently or is it to just jam around for fun?
I just asked our group chat if anyone was up for some Rock and Roll at an absurd volume on Sunday evening. So far I have one positive response. If we get two more… then Sunday will be the day we find out what’s what.
It would be really cool if we could put the singer search away and just get back to playing regularly again. I haven’t played a gig since February 1, 2020. I really, really want to play a gig again. I want to play my new Les Paul through my new Vox amp in a public place in front of a crowd of happy (re: drunk) people. I want to know what it feels like to be up on stage for four hours without being 200+ pounds overweight. Will I have the strength and the stamina? Who knows. Let’s find out.
I mixed a song a couple of nights ago but didn’t get around to posting it to my alonetone or hearthis.at accounts so it just sat there on my laptop. Now it is out there for the whole wide world to ignore.
I think it kinda sounds like crap, but the song itself is okay, I think. You can probably hear the edits in the chorus because I wrote a melody without leaving any space for that pesky little breathing thing. Oops.
The lead guitar was through a nearly cranked amp. That was fun. Noisy as hell, but fun.
Collections? You mean like, do I collect bad decisions? Failures? Things like that?
I was a baseball card collector when I was a kid. I was pretty obsessed. I still have them all. They are in a box somewhere in the cellar. I haven’t added to the collection in ages though. I can’t really say I still collect them. I collected music on vinyl/cassette tapes/CDs. Most of them are gone. I had ripped them all so now all of that music lives simultaneously in a hard drive and in my iTunes Match account. Is that even still a thing? Streaming services are pretty evil (from the musical artist’s point of view) but they are so effin’ convenient from the listener’s perspective that I can’t really stay away. I want to, but I can’t. Thanks, Apple Music. I used to have a pretty significant collection of books. Mostly paperbacks in the horror genre. Thank you, Stephen King and Clive Barker. Almost all of them are gone now. I used to have a significant VHS/DVD/Blue Ray collection too. Almost all of those are gone too.
If I had to fess up to having a collection of anything these days it would probably be electric guitars. I have four. They are all Gibsons. A 1978 Les Paul Custom, a 1979 ES-335 Pro, a 2017 SG Standard, and a 2020 Les Paul Standard ’50’s. I would very much like for this collection to grow, but it’s so expensive. I could extend this to guitar gear in general as I have a few amplifiers and a slew of effects pedals. It feels cooler to say that I collect guitars though.
I could also say that I collect office desks. I have four, technically. One for personal computer stuff in the cellar. Right next to it is a work from home desk that I don’t use very much anymore. Another is upstairs in my step son’s currently unoccupied bed room. That’s where I work from home for the most part. Then there’s one in the actual office. I’m sitting at that one right now.
We have two cats… does that count as a collection? Probably not.
Yeah, let’s go with guitars. That’s my answer for today’s question. Thank you and good night.
What am I doing? I don’t know. I feel like the universe is in a weird place right now (yes, I know that mathematically that sentence does not make sense). I don’t know.
I had the opportunity to play my guitar tonight and I sat on my ass on the couch watching TV. I watched an episode of Torchwood. I’m trying to get back into that. While I was on the AppleTV app formerly known as HBO Max I figured I’d maybe start watching The Leftovers again. I watched the first episode. I’ll go to my grave saying that the second season of that show is television perfection. The first and third seasons are great too. The first season is just so soul crushingly depressing though. It is tough to get through and I suspect that watching one episode is part of the reason why I feel like I am in a screwy state of mind right now.
The point of all of this though is that I could have played guitar tonight and I did not. Ugh.
I had two slices of a small pizza for dinner tonight. The second one came back for another view. Oh yeah, TMI Alert here. Yeah. It went down, but it didn’t stay down. Shit. I ate too much too fast and paid the price.
I’m on the youtubes right now watching a photography channel. It’s a pro photographer telling me I should use Aperture Priority instead of Manual Mode. But what if I want to use Manual Mode? I use Aperture Priority a lot with one of my film cameras. The term Aperture Priority wasn’t invented yet when the camera was built, it’s called Auto on the camera, but it’s the same thing.. I use it because the light meter inside the view finder is often hard to read. I like using Manual though. It makes me feel like I know what I am doing even though I don’t really know what I’m doing. The video also says to keep the aperture away from the extremes. Don’t use f2.0 or f16, use f5.6 or f8. You don’t get the blurry background as much as you do with f2, but you get some which is more than f16 gives. The video says the images will be clearer in the middle ground apertures. I think I had figured that one out on my own and was starting to come around to this way of thinking. Then again… I really dig all that blurry background.
Miss Robin Sparkles says hello.
It’s Monday night, just about bed time. Almost 10:00pm. At this time four days from now we’ll be about seven hours into our road trip to Florida. That’s the main reason why I am in such a weird headspace tonight. I just want to go. I want to leave now. I don’t want to worry about work or anything outside of travel. I just want to go. I have a shit load of stuff to do before we go, but I just want to go.
Ugh… I should just go to bed.
Looking ahead to tomorrow. There is likely going to be an NHL predictions post for the third round. I am hoping the Edmonton Oilers will win their game seven tonight against Vancouver. If that happens there will be exactly one team that I kinda like in the Conference Finals. If they lose, there will be three teams I hate one one team I don’t care about. My heart is officially no longer in the NHL playoffs at all.
Also, expect lots of posts where I talk about how I just want to jump in the car with Jen, my wife, and head out on our trip. I have vacation-itis right now. Big time.
I wrote a post the other day detailing all of the musical stuff I wanted to get done over the weekend. Care to guess how much I accomplished? Go on, guess. Did you guess absolutely nothing? If you did, you guessed correctly. Good work.
Nothing.
There was a facebook messenger chat yesterday where our former singer, who I wasn’t sure if he wanted back into the band or not, started talking about where to book gigs. Does that mean he officially wants back in? Feels that way to me! Here’s hoping our singer search has ended. I’ll let you know.
Anyway, I took pictures this morning in the hopes they will guilt me into playing some guitar tomorrow before work. Cross those fingers, Mr. Red Head.
My pedal board is dusty again.
I switched on the amp for the benefit of the photo, but I didn’t take it out of standby mode and switched it off right away.
This is a to do list… read the title… it is a pun, my friends. Get it? I made a pun! It’s punny. It’s puntastic.
Ugh.
The current home recording music project is to take 10 songs from the 2020 Fifty Songs in 90 Days Challenge, edit them, rearrange them, rewrite them, and completely re-record them. When I punched out of work last night I had the 10 songs picked out. One is mixed and finished. Five are completely recorded but still need to be mixed. The other four hadn’t been touched.
Last night while sitting up in bed I took one of them and got as far as finishing the MIDI music bed. Bass, drums, arrangement, song form changes, all done. This morning after I finished today’s errands I cranked out the other three. Now I have four songs ready for rhythm guitars.
Best case scenario is that I track all of the rhythm guitars tomorrow. I work in the office on Monday so nothing is happening then. Tuesday morning before work should be car music where I track all of the vocals. Wednesday is back in the office. Thursday is lead guitars before work. At that point I will have all tracking done for all 10 songs before we leave for Florida.
Yeah. Let’s see if we can pull this off.
Note: It is 99% certain that I will not pull this off. When it comes to the musical planning stage, Robert is not terribly reliable.
Unrelated musical note… one of the reasons my band’s singer quit was because he moved to Maine. He told us yesterday that he’s moved back to the Merrimack Valley. He also mentioned getting “the itch.” Now is that an itch to just have one band practice just for fun, or is it an itch to get back into the band? I don’t know but I am thinking about maybe being hopeful that our singer search could be over. It’s probably not, but if I can’t be optimistic about the Bruins anymore this year, then I’ll be optimistic about this.
I managed to sneak in some guitar playing today in between my doctors appointment and punching in to work. The recording project I am trying to work through right now had three songs that needed lead guitar tracks. I finished off all three of them. My playing was poor at best, but who cares. Bad playing is better than no playing, right?
Here’s where things get super nerdy. I had three songs that needed work… and I used a different guitar on each song. My only regret is that I didn’t have a forth song to work on so I didn’t get to use all four of my guitars. Oh well. In further nerd news, I took a picture of each guitar with my Nikon Z5 and… well… nerd… I took a selfie with my iPhone of me playing each guitar too. Thanks, camera app on my Apple Watch that has a timer built into it.
No guitar playing today. It’s an office day and I didn’t have time.
Tomorrow though? Maybe? Not at 100 decibels like on Wednesday, but maybe? We’ll see. There’s stuff on the to do list that has to come first, but maybe…
Inside the Red Head's Head 