Tag: nikon coolpix s7000

Vocals are Done

Last night before bed I added quick and dirty lyrics to two of the four outstanding songs. This morning, after exercising, I went out for some car music. I recorded the vocals for those two songs and then improvised a vocal part for a third song.

That’s it. I’m done with the vocals. I mentioned a few days ago that I was thinking of dropping songs before they are finished. That’s what I am doing with that last song. Song #3, if you must know. It’s just too crappy to continue. That’s going to leave me with 14 songs which, years ago, would have given me a complete FAWM. I don’t do FAWM anymore, but it’s still as good a goal as any, right?

The exercise this morning has a funny story to go along with it. Last month, thanks to walking for hours around Disney World, I doubled my 30 minute exercise goal nine times. This month, my Apple Watch activity app challenged me to do the same in February. On Friday I doubled it for the seventh time. That gave me four days to do it two more times. I had every intention of making yesterday the eighth but I failed miserably. This morning I decided to get it done right away and not leave anything up to chance. I ran for a full 60 minutes. I set a bunch of personal work out records on the various Watch apps. I need to do it one more time over the next two days. I mean… I feel pretty lame getting worked up about stuff this stupid but… there you have it.

Episode seven of The Last of Us airs tonight. Three more to go. The serious is stellar. Absolutely fantastic. The Mandalorian season three kicks off on Wednesday. I started watching Star Trek Deep Space 9 from the beginning the other day. As I am typing this I am eating breakfast and watching the first episode of The X-Files. I guess you could call it binge watching season now.

Back to music, but this time guitar gear, I have spent the last couple of years trying to find a suitable replacement for an overdrive pedal that I removed from my board because the designer/owner of the company that makes it is a racist piece of trash and I can’t in good conscience use his products anymore. I have two pedals that are damn close and I think I found another one that I want to try out. It’s a very small pedal builder somewhere in Canada called KO Amps. How much is 140 Canadian dollars in US dollars?

Okay. Let’s finish breakfast, let’s finish this episode of The X-Files, and then get some serious work down on the ol’ RPM Challenge. Three songs complete, between seven and 11 left to go.

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Frozen Car Music

Holy crap, is it cold out there. I just got home from car vocals at the movie theater parking lot and I am frozen to the core. It was six degrees out when I left. It rocketed up to 10 degrees by the time I was done. Heatwave! I would record a song, then listen back to the entire thing as an excuse to turn the car on and run the heater for 3-5 minutes or so. Once I forgot to turn the car off and recorded a whole song worth of vocals with the heater’s fan on full blast. So… professionalism, yeah?

I put vocals on four songs. That was all I had lyrics for. It brings me up to 11 songs with vocals and that means I will have an RPM submission this year. Thanks, I appreciate all the applause.

I currently have two songs ready to mix, eight songs ready for lead guitars, three songs ready for lyrics, and one song that’s still just MIDI bass and drums. It’s going to be a long day.

First though, breakfast and an episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine… while my laptop finishes adjusting to room temperature.

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See, Flickr? I can shoot abandoned buildings too!

Crappy Weather and Crappy Singing

We got a couple of inches of snow yesterday followed by some rain and a drop in temperature which turned the snow to ice. I went out after work and shoveled and it was like shoveling bricks. It was not fun. I was happy that the driveway and both cars and the path to the garbage barrels and the area around the fire hydrant were all cleared.

Then later, around bed time, it started snowing again. Not much, but it quickly turned to rain again and immediately froze. When I got up this morning everything I had shoveled yesterday had been magically transformed into an ice skating rink. Yippee. I was also ran out of ice melt last night. Oh goodie.

I did not let it stop me though. I hacked the layer of ice off of one of the cars and proceeded to drive to a not-so-empty parking lot for some car music! I say not so empty because there were two humongous trucks trying to plow the layer of ice off of the lot. You can probably hear them on the vocal tracks. Yippee, again.

I got through four songs and oh my goodness do they suck. That brings me up to seven songs with vocals, with eight more to go. Only two of those eight have lyrics though, so I need to do a lot of work tonight. There must be another car music in the morning. Fortunately tomorrow is Saturday so I can spare a little more time, and if needed I can go out more than once. I can do the same on Sunday. Assuming I can get all of the lyrics written (and one song still needs rhythm guitars as well) then I will have all of the vocals down with a couple of days to spare. Then it’s just lead guitar and mixing, which will likely take a lot of time to get through. I’m already sort of sorting things into two buckets: Songs that might be useable for the final album, and songs that most likely will not be useable. There are two on the later list. Drop candidates, as it were, and one on the bubble. The rest of them are bad, but not so bad as to throw away… maybe. We’ll see how I feel when they are mixed.

My studio view today is thusly:

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Also, a pic of half of my audience for the day:

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And now for a few shots of the scenic drive to the not-so-empty parking lot:

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So the musical plan for later tonight is record some leads, record one song’s rhythm guitars, mix a song or two, and write a shit ton of lyrics and melodies.

Yeah… I can do that. Some of it at least.

Car Music: 2023 Edition

I did it today. I went out and recorded some vocal tracks. Three songs. I got out of bed around 5:40, did my exercise for the day from 6:00-6:40, jumped into the car a few minutes before 7:00, drove to the movie theater parking lot, and recorded vocals for three songs. I was hoping to get to more, but I wanted to get home in time to shower and have breakfast before work.

I did song #’s 1, 2, and 4. I skipped #3 because I hate it more than all of the others and therefore have not written lyrics or melody yet. I still have four songs that are ready to sing, so there should be another car music tomorrow.

There was a new gear hiccup. Isn’t there always? I started getting lag. Where the hell did that come from? I’ve been doing this process for YEARS now and I have never once had an issue with lag. It started mid-way through the first song. I saved everything, killed off the Garageband session, restarted it, and everything was fine. It happened on the second song too and the same steps cleared it. It didn’t happen again. It’s yet another thing that can go wrong these days that never went wrong before. Annoying, but not debilitating.

Want to see my studio? How’s it look…

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Nice, huh?

So tomorrow I hope to do more car music. Wednesday I won’t be able to because Wednesday is a work-from-the-office day and I won’t have time. Thursday and Friday… one of those two days I need to go to Lowell General Hospital and get some labs done. They open at 5:00am, so maybe I can do that and then do car music for an hour, and then do my exercise after work? The faux jogging (“yogging”) is currently taking about 40 minutes. I think I can hack that after work once.

I am up to 12 songs now. Remember when I used to do FAWM and my goal was 14 songs? Maybe my goal is once again to get to 14 songs. I know there’s one I want to drop before I submit the project to the RPM Challenge folks, 14 songs just gives me more options. Adding two more songs will also give me more guitar playing that can act as a warm up before I start recording leads… now that I have three songs that are ready for leads.

We’ll see how it goes. Shit loads of work left to do and only eight days to do it. I’m not panicking yet, but I am gettin’ there.

Cemetery Ornaments

Jen and I visited my mother’s grave today. There’s no grave marker yet. Well, there is but it’s just a piece of paper in a plastic holder. There’s no permanent stone yet. There also isn’t any grass, which is a little disturbing, but not really.

At the funeral service, I noticed a lot of decorations on the trees near her grave. I took this for my photo-a-day thing on 2/14:

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See the Christmas ornaments? There were things like that all over the place. While we were there today I took a few more pictures.

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So is this a thing? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen stuff like this decorating a cemetery before. Sure, I’ve seen things left on headstones and that sort of thing, but never in the trees. I kinda like it. There may be Christmas ornaments from me in these trees’ futures.

Another trend that I am not really fond of us having images engraved into headstones. Specifically, photos of the deceased. That creeped me out a little. When my time comes, please don’t engrave my picture into my headstone. Thank you very much.

Okay, I am going to make myself a little lunch now. Eventually I am going to put my nose to the musical grindstone and write some lyrics and record some guitars. Before that though, I think I am going to try to figure out how to load a firmware update into my new camera. I’m also starting to tag things differently both here and on Flickr. I’ve been tagging the new camera as “Z5”, but everywhere I look I am seeing Nikon list it as “Z 5”, with a space in the middle. I’ll do both for now. Wish me luck on the firmware thing. This is a new one for ol’ Robbie.

Playing or Fighting

Two cats…

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Two seconds after I took this very uncomfortable looking photograph, they were tearing into each other. I can’t tell if they are just playing rough or actually fighting. I might have to go get a degree in cat psychology to know how to tell the difference.