Tag: nasoalmo

Back at It

It’s November 1st and you know what that means, music fans:

National Solo Album Month has begun again.

Last night at midnight I was laying in bed, unable to sleep, when I noticed the clock was about to strike midnight. I grabbed my iPad, brought up GarageBand, and when 12:00am came I started noodling through an idea. That’s one song in progress!

I don’t have a plan this time. I was vaguely thinking of using the 12-string more often. That was actually the plan I started with last year too. I’m also thinking of trying to make all of the songs be on the longish side, although I have no set definition of “long” in mind. Six minutes? 10 minutes?

We will see what happens.

Another Upload

Soundcloud accepted the 192kbps mp3 file so I can post the player from that site now too. This one includes the cover “art”.

Of course I had to delete almost everything off of this soundcloud account to make room… so even this one will go away eventually. I wanted to just stick with the alonetone playlist, but they just released a huge back end rewrite of the site and most of the playlist functionality appears to be broken for now. I’ll get things up to date eventually.

The Seventh and Final Crappy Song

That’s seven songs written, recorded, and mixed. All within the month of November. Look at that kids, I’ve finished NaSoAlMo!

I re-recorded just about all of this crappy song today. The one thing that wasn’t changed was the vocal. Of course, the one thing that needs to be redone is the vocal. Figures. Anyway, it sucks and I don’t care.

I’ve got an hour and a half left in the month. I am going to try to splice this garbage into a 33 minute suite thing. Yippee.

Song #6

Six songs down, one to go. That one will wait until later. This is sort of a goofy loop thing with an eight bar phrase repeating ad nauseum and a new instrument being added or removed with each repeat.

This one put me over the minimum time requirement for NaSoAlMo. It also apparently put me over the maximum for a free soundcloud.com account. Time to start deleting crap.

Oh, and did I mention that Garageband failed to give me the master reverb and echo controls for any of the tracks on this song? Good thing I wasn’t planning on using them, right? Oh wait. I was totally planning on using the hell out of them all over the place. Friggin’ Garageband.

NaSoAlMo Update – The Last Day

All of the tracking for my National Solo Album Month project is done, no thanks to GarageBand. Hey, thanks for not recording the six minute long take when I had it in record and was actually recording. It marked the region has having a recorded track but there was nothing in it. I had a nice fun moment when three separate guitar tracks magically disappeared as well. Again, screw you Garageband.

Two songs left to mix, and then I need to cut it all together into one (maybe two) audio files with sound effects acting as the transitions between songs. I should also probably put my name and the album name onto the cover photo as well. We are heading out of the house for a while in a few minutes, and i want to spend as much time hanging with the family today as possible, so the remaining work will probably be done after the kids go to bed.

No problem!

Album Cover?

As of this moment, this will be the cover of my NaSoAlMo album.

A crap picture for crap music.

When the plan was to make all of the rhythm guitar parts acoustic I was thinking of calling it Mostly Wireless. Now I’m thinking it will either be Radio, or Crap Radio.

20131129-212056.jpg

NaSoAlMo – How Much is Left?

I’ve got five songs mixed, and two songs still to go. How much is left on those two songs?

That was the question I asked myself tonight, and lo and behold one of those two unfinished songs is actually finished. Woah! Says I. I gave it a listen and…

It’s the worst guitar playing performance of my life. It’s a pretty bad vocal performance too, but those are always pretty bad. So I am pronouncing song #6 as still unfinished. At some point over the next two days (re: Friday) I am going to re-record the lead and rhythm guitars on song #6. Right now they are so bad that even I, with my non-existent standards cannot let them live. Song #7 is a loop thingie. The 12-string part is pretty awful, but I’ll live with it. I will put lead guitar on it, but I haven’t decided where yet. I might noodle from start to finish, but I don’t know.

I can get those two songs finished, and then get them mixed, and then cut everything together with some sound effects as transitions, and have myself a finished project consisting of a 33-34 minute suite.

Yeah.

Rock

Song #5

Garageband played nicely tonight. Lucky.

This is the fifth of seven songs. It fills the need for both a rotating speaker effect and guitarmonies. The melody is crap. I am 99% sure that this exact melody has been used in at least 10 of my older songs. I don’t pay enough attention to old stuff to be able to catch when I repeat myself repeat myself repeat myself.