Tag: Music

Slept Late Again

I didn’t get up until after 7:00 this morning. No car music again. I have six songs that need vocals. I want them all done before February 1st. When I say done I mean vocals, leads, and mix. I don’t want to be thinking about any of these songs when RPM starts. I don’t have any specific plans for RPM yet. I don’t know if I want to do anything special for a theme or anything, or if I just want to write a bunch of new songs.

I didn’t watch Book of Boba Fett yesterday. We’re going to try and do a watch party with Harry tonight. I hope so. Jen and I started the new season of Cobra Kai. They are like 30 minute pieces of candy. We blew through the first three before we even realized it.

The show to watch right now, if you have access to it, is Yellowjackets. My spoiler free review of the first six episodes, which are the only ones I’ve seen so far: WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?????

Enjoy.

Musical Thought for February

Just jotting down a gimmick idea for RPM in February….

Write a melody. Sing it on a guide track. Reverse the guide track. On a second track, sing along with the reverse track. Reverse the second track. You now have a backwards vocal track singing the correct melody.

Just a dumb idea I had in the car this morning. Gimmicky, yes, but fun.

13 days until the 2022 RPM Challenge.

Rush 1984

Listening to the audio from the Rush Grace Under Pressure Tour video today has had me in the mood to listen to bootlegs of complete shows from that tour.

Here’s a good one:

1984 was memorable for my Rush fandom. I first started listening in 1981, but they slipped the Signals album and tour past me without me being aware. I was 11 years old, so that’s not too surprising. By the time we got to ‘84 I was a complete fanatic and I had run out of records to buy. The Grace Under Pressure album was the first one I had to wait for, and the first one I had my first listens to at the same time as the rest of the cult.

It was also the first time I had knowledge of a tour. They played the Worcester Centrum. I didn’t go, of course, but after the show one local radio station played every song on the set list and I heard a tape of that. As lame as it was, it was still pretty exciting.

So when bootlegs became a thing I could dip my ears into (thank you, internets) I was always kinda drawn to shows from 1984.

Yes. Nerd. Obviously.

Recording Studio Magic-ish

Back in 2015 I worked out a song for the RPM Challenge that tricked GarageBand into using different time signatures. It chugs along at 120 beats per minute switching between 7/8, 6/4, and 4/4 like nobody’s business. It was a cool song to play and I had a lot of fun working on it, but it took me a long time to get the rhythm guitars recorded in a way that was good enough to keep.

There was a section in the middle of the song though… 24 bars… written on a keyboard with the tempo set to something much lower than 120 bpm. It was, to my lame ears, a cool break in the middle of the song. Unfortunately I couldn’t play it at 120 bpm on the guitar. It was just too fast for my fat fingers to grasp. I ended up recording it in pieces. Three bars then one bar, repeat six times, then move to a second track and repeat the whole thing. It was pretty brutal to get through.

That was in 2015. One month later I started messing with the idea of a re-recording project. I didn’t get far. Then in 2016 when RPM ended I went back to the re-recording thing and added this particular song to the list. Apparently I forgot about all of the stress it had caused me when I first recorded it.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago and the re-recording project finally gets around to this song. I had forgotten everything. I started with the bass and drums and had to remember how to trick GarageBand into using different time signatures (hint: it boils down to math). Then I had to remember how to trick GarageBand into letting me use the Session Drummer with the different time signatures (hint: lots of bouncing segments between two tracks, one of which is not the session drummer). Then last night I took my first crack at adding guitars.

Intro? No problem. Verses? Easy. Chorus? Cake. All the little 1-2 bar bridge sections? No problem. The section in the middle (actually, while working on the MIDI tracks I cut a few sections out of the song. One of them was the last eight bars of the middle section so the 24 bar section is now only 16 bars, dig)? Hello? Anyone?

Could I play it?

Not even close.

While I was struggling last night Harry came home from work so I stopped trying. Today I had a little time to get back to it. I scrapped everything I did yesterday and started fresh, mostly just to build up my confidence. When I got to the middle section I did something unusual. I just sat here at my desk, looking at GarageBand, and practiced. Not for long. Just enough to get it under my fingers, even though it was wrong 90% of the time. Then I split the 16 bars into four, four bar segments and started on the first segment. Remember I double everything, so each four bar segment needs to be done twice. It took me a long time to get the first one. The second track went a little quicker. Same with segment two. For segment three, it took a lot longer to get the first track, but the second track was nailed in one take! WOOHOO! Of course that just jinxed me for the rest and I needed like 10-15 tries for each piece.

The end result though… I have the full 16 bars, twice. Kick ass! The punches were nice and clean too, so I can’t even tell that it was recorded in pieces. It just sounds like I am actually able to play the guitar like a big boy and I just did it. Nice.

Wow… I wrote a lot about this stupid little song.

Guitar pictures to celebrate my being able to pretend I don’t suck quite as bad as I clearly do!

I also retired a pick today, and the battery on my clip on tuner is about to die. That’s all the news that is fit to print.

Another New Old Song

After including three Rush songs in the last post, this new thing should sound that much shittier.

A song from 2010 with new lyrics and a new coat of paint. I waffled on whether to re-do this song for years. Literally. It went on the list of songs to work on in 2016 and was dropped off and re-added at least twice. Now that it’s done… I probably should have left it off.

It has a drum solo though.

Edits to the To-Do List

I didn’t go out for car music today. Nope. I was going to. I woke up at 6:45am (on a Saturday, you savage!) and my watch told me it was 2 degrees out. Yikes. Well… we’ll see how things look after my shower and stuff. When I was all dressed and ready to go my watch told me it was 1 degree out. Welp, maybe next time.

That’s one thing dropped from the to-do list. We are hoping to add one thing too. There will, hopefully, be a FaceTime call with Bellana today! All the way from The Netherlands where she is quarantining and probably super bored. I still haven’t decided if I want to share their YouTube video or not. I’m hoping they post things regularly so we can feel like we’re a distant part of their adventure. Fingers crossed. I probably won’t post the videos here. I don’t know. Maybe, but probably not.

In closing, yesterday I listened to a podcast that broke down the Grace Under Pressure Tour video that Rush released in 1984 or so. It brought this little masterpiece back to the front of my brain and it doesn’t show any signs of leaving any time soon.

Fear. A sort of suite. Sort of. In 1984 when Rush released the Grace Under Pressure album, the song The Enemy Within was subtitled Part One of Fear. Well what the hell did that mean? They eventually explained it to us. One of my friends in Junior High said he had figured it out, but I don’t believe him.

Fear is a three song suite-ish that includes one song each from three albums… in reverse.

Part One is The Enemy Within from Grace Under Pressure, released in 1984.
Part Two is The Weapon from Signals, released in 1982.
Part Three is Witch Hunt from Moving Pictures, released in 1981.

Simple, right? If I remember correctly, Neil said he numbered them in order of the hardest to write to the easiest… or was it the other way around. Damn it. I don’t remember for sure. It doesn’t matter, they were numbered based on the writing process, that’s all you need to know. I don’t recall if The Weapon and Witch Hunt were ever officially given a Fear subtitle on any subsequent release, but they might have. There was also a fourth song, Freeze from Vapor Trails, released in 2002, but they never played all four of them together. In fact, they never played Freeze live at all. They were never supposed to play Witch Hunt either. That was written and recorded as a studio only thing as there were little things that couldn’t be pulled off live with just three people at the time. As a result, this arrangement is a little different than the Moving Pictures album and that was something that Rush just didn’t do, making this version extra special. Years later, as sampling and triggering technology caught up with the band, they did do Witch Hunt as it was originally arranged. I really like this one though. It lacks the cowbell in the beginning, well most of it at least, but it adds that killer guitar solo at the end. Awesome.

Gee, I hope these videos actually play though… seems like a lot of people have posted this with the sharing options off. Yikes.

Whatever.

We’re going to hear from Bellana today. Happy.