Tag: nasoalmo

Song #4

I hate the new garageband so fucking much I can’t even express it. I want to light my god damned laptop on fire right now I am so friggin’ pissed off at garageband.

This is the fourth song. Listen to the minor seventh chord I snuck in during the mega-ending.

Oh wait. You can’t hear it. Why? BECAUSE GARAGEBAND WON’T EFFING EXPORT IT, THAT’s WHY!

When I play back, the last three bars of the song are there. When I export it to iTunes, the last three bars are gone. It’s not even a case of it just deleting a region because it plays the first god damn bar of the four bar region and then just ends. I can’t even believe what a piece of shit Apple has reduced this program to. It’s just awful. Every single thing I try to do is screwed up in some way. I HATE GARAGEBAND!!!!!!

Crazy

This has been the craziest busy day ever. Everyone seems to be cramming a full weeks worth of crazy into one day.

I started mixing another song last night but decided I would be better served by sleeping. Good thinking on my part.

So The Walking Dead… I knew they were working on a spin off, but I thought it would be all new characters somewhere else in the world. I didn’t think it would be just about The Governor, and I didn’t think it was replacing the original show. Did the main cast need a vacation or something? Two weeks in a row of side story. I’m ready for the main story arc to come back now. Hell, I was ready seven days ago. That being said, the crazier that character gets the more fun he is.. and he’s getting pretty crazy again.

The Bruins play the Penguins tonight in a happy playoff rematch. Remember how the Penguins were heavily favored and then got swept by the Bruins? Remember that? Do you think his Bruins teammates let Jarome Iginla forget that for even a second? Tonight is a match up between the two top teams in the East. I probably won’t watch much, but I might catch some on the radio. There are just so many things going on right now.

I had planned to finish up the last two or three songs worth of guitar parts today but I watched zombie television instead. The whole project this month is completely disorganized. I don’t even know how many songs are left to finish. After the big chunk of work I did on Friday, I expect it to get finished on time. I just don’t feel very good about the whole thing. My guitar playing has been so bad it’s painful. It’s painful to listen to, and it’s painful to play. My finger tips are still burning from Friday. My playing has been bad enough to take a lot of the fun out of this. If I don’t keep practicing between now and February I might not do RPM. I mean, I know I suck but at least when I’m at my best I can fool myself into thinking I don’t suck too bad. I can’t do that right now.

Song #3

Hello and welcome to the blog debut of the third song from my NaSoAlMo fiasco.

I had originally thought of using my 12-string guitar for all of the rhythm guitar parts. That idea fell by the wayside, but this is one of the songs that stuck with the plan. I also wanted one song to have a sort of free form section that resolved into a straight up rock groove. This song does that, it just doesn’t do it well.

Song #2

Here’s another new song. The second of the planned seven. This one is a pathetic mess and the awful new Garageband is only part of the problem. Most of this crapfests problems stem from my inability to play the guitar or sing. Urgh. It’s finished though.

So I am posting this one from soundcloud.com instead of alonetone.com. Turns out that just viewing a post with a song pulled from alonetone results in a play count. I don’t want to fudge my numbers. I’ll probably say screw it before the end of the month and post more crap from alonetone, but for tonight I am not padding my stats at all.

One Song Finished

Here’s the first of the seven songs on the agenda for this month.

http://alonetone.com/robertjames1971/tracks/like-a-brat.mp3%20

I hate the new garageband with a passion that is never ending and all powerful.

So the share to iTunes no longer exports as mp3. The compressed format is m4a. Thanks a pant load. Are you kidding me? I had to export this to an uncompressed file and then convert it to mp3 in iTunes.

Friday is Music Day… I Think

I took today off with the express purpose of finishing as much of the seven national solo album month songs as I can. I want to at least have the vocals done and any acoustic instruments (re: 12-string) as I can. I can sneak the electric guitar parts in later if need be, but ideally I’d like to have all of the tracking done today.

I started feeling sick yesterday. Coughing and a little stuffy nose. I am not better this morning.

The music project might be in even more trouble than I already thought.

I blame all of this on the Bruins losing to the Blues in a shootout last night. I listened to most of the game on the radio and then somehow fell asleep with the shootout tied at one. How did that happen? Maybe if they’d played 10 or 20 minutes of overtime instead of five minutes I would have been engaged in the game enough to stay awake. Shootouts are gimmicks. I don’t like them. Four on Four overtime is a gimmick too, but at least it still looks like a hockey game.

Anyway… wish me music luck. I think I am going to need it.

Is My NaSoAlMo Project Toast?

I think my NaSoAlMo project might be a lost cause. At least as far as finishing on time is concerned. If I am going to finish vocals, it has to be before work. I have two Mondays and two Thursdays left in the month, but this coming Thursday is out because I was added to a meeting that day. The second Thursday is Thanksgiving. That gives me two Monday mornings to finish five and a half vocal tracks. It’s just not enough time. It might be… I don’t know.

It seems to me at this point, that if I am going to finish I will need to burn a vacation day, probably next week. Given the last few days at work I can honestly say that taking a day off would be beneficial to me for more than just musical reasons. Sanity might be helped as well. I was supposed to have Jury Duty on Tuesday, but that was cancelled. Maybe I’ll replace that day out of the office with a vacation day on either Wednesday or Friday. I don’t know. We’ll see. Being home on Wednesday afternoon would also help my beautiful wife out a little. I don’t know. We’ll see how bad Monday and Tuesday are at work before I decide.

I want to finish this stupid project. I am just not so sure that there are enough available hours remaining.

NaSoAlMo Day 11 Update

Today is November 11. The day we honor those who fought for our country. For me, it’s also been a NaSoAlMo day. I have all the “songs” I am going to need. Right now the count is at seven songs and 33 minutes. That’ll do. All of the songs have the full arrangement spec’d out, all of the rhythm guitars, bass, and drums finished, and a random keyboard here and there. All that remains is lyrics, melodies, vocals, and lead guitar.

The mess that is the new version of GarageBand has taken 90% of the fun out of this for me. There are little things that are just infuriating. When in measure display mode, you used to be able to click on a beat within a bar and the play head would snap to that spot. Now, it snaps to the spot until you let go of the mouse button, then it moves a fraction of a beat to one side or another. Sometimes it would take four or five clicks to get it into place.

Other changes are gigantic. Where are all the effects? What do you mean I can’t add anything other than compression and EQ? And while we’re on the topic of compression and EQ, where the hell are all of those incredible presets that the old GarageBand had? This alone has pretty much destroyed any chance I had of ever being happy with a recording again.

Anyway. Seven songs. Lots of padding, I’m afraid. None of the songs are under three minutes. Very proggie of me, if I don’t say so myself. I have an idea of how to tie everything together into one big suite. I bought some sound effect tracks from iTunes last night. I think I am going to try and make the full 33 minutes sound like a listener flipping around a radio dial. Silly. Stupid, even. It’s just my sort of stupid silliness though.

19 days to go. Really, I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of finishing this one on time. I don’t care though.

Terrible Time Management

Last February there was a very important change to my daily routine that more or less allowed me to finish the RPM Challenge. Telecommuting. I worked from home on Thursdays. That allowed me to do a hefty chunk of musical work before work in the morning, and then during my lunch break. There were other contributing factors too, but Thursdays at home was a big part of finishing on time.

Now that I am trying another album-in-a-month deal I have the added benefit of telecommuting two days a week (for now at least), Mondays and Thursdays. This week I didn’t do anything musical on Monday morning before work (I watched the previous night’s episode of The Walking Dead instead. Priorities, man) but I did spend my lunch break working on a rhythm guitar part.

How about today? How’d I do?

Well this morning before work I sat on my fat ass on the couch eating Coca Puffs and watching Futurama on Netflix. At lunch time, I drove to Burger King because my ass obviously isn’t fat enough.

When it comes to music in November, my time management skills just plain blow.

On the upside, I did a little work on my iPad last night. It’s probably going to be short, the tempo is pretty fast, and I don’t know where I’m going to work the 12-string into it, but it’s a new work in progress. I can’t tell how many I have going now. At least three. Well, two if I take two of the three and stitch them together. There are other things, but I haven’t looked at them in about five days. So let’s say two actual works in progress. Pretty crappy progress, but still more than I had done on 11/30/12, right?

Holy Crap That Hurt

I spent a chunk of my lunch hour playing the new 12-string. I overdubbed one rhythm guitar part onto one of the songs in progress and DAMN did my hand hurt. It was brutal. I am so ridiculously out of playing shape. Hopefully by the end of this stupid thing I’ll be in better shape to start worrying about February.