Tag: Nikon
Instant Friend
I saw this while driving through Lowell this morning. I instinctively know that the owner of this car is a smart person who I would instantly get along with.
Prettiest Cat Ever
Our kitten, Lily, may have the best personality in a cat we’ve ever encountered. You really can’t show that in a photograph though.
Now Robin… she’s more of a feline introvert, but I think we can all agree that she is objectively the prettiest cat on Earth.
The Pain The Pain
I told my beloved wife Jen that I was going to take a page out of the Brian Adams playbook today and play it ’till my fingers bled. I didn’t go quite that far, but I am in so much finger tip pain that I had to stop a little early. I put lead guitar parts onto five of the remaining seven songs. My playing on the fifth song was atrocious, not because I suck (though, naturally) but because my finger tips hurt so much I couldn’t make them do anything. Ouch town, population me.
I will finish the last two songs, but it won’t be for a while. I might try again after dinner. I might wait until tomorrow. I can’t say yet. What I do know is that I have finished tracking a total of 12 songs so I am at the point where I could stop, apart from mixing, and call this year a win. I am pleased.
As always, I went into this year’s RPM Challenge with a specific gear setup in mind. Pedal-wise I was going to use my Klon KTR to push my Keeley Super Phat Mod. I never got on with that Keeley pedal and I was going to force it this month. Then the Marshall Bluesbreaker hype hit. Marshall released a pedal called the Bluesbreaker, which was supposed to make your amp sound like the amp Clapton used on the Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton record from 1966 but doesn’t, in the early 90’s and discontinued it after a couple of years. Fast forward to the 21st century and John Mayer uses the pedal on one of his records and suddenly the used market prices are through the roof and every boutique pedal manufacturer on Earth is either making a direct copy of it, or cloning it and modding it. I own a direct copy.
There was a rumor a year ago that Marshall was going to reissue the pedal. That rumor appeared to come true last week though it wasn’t until a day or so ago that Marshall actually verified the rumor was true. All the talk made me want to use my copy. I put it on the board and used the shit out of it. Today I was using it like crazy. Sometimes with the Klon KTR pushing it and sometimes just by itself. It’s not the kind of sound I usually get up for, but I have been seriously digging it the last few days, and for some reason using it with the neck pickup on my Les Paul today was a little slice of bliss.
What does that mean? Nothing. I just thought I’d share, that’s all.
I used my Les Paul on four of today’s five songs, and my SG on one. I was planning on using the SG for the two I didn’t get to as well, but now that I need some time to heal I have no idea what I’ll actually use on the last two. Probably the Les Paul. Either way, I took some obligatory pics.
Also… selfies… because I suck at being cool.
Also, I am rearranging how I keep my work and personal laptops on my desk. My desk suddenly feels very small.
Okay, now I can break for lunch. Maybe watch a TV show for 45 minutes or so and then start mixing again.
Progress, babie. Progress.
Oh yeah, here’s a video on the Marshall pedal. Just so you know what I am talking about.
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.
Snowy Charles River
It snowed all through our drive to Cambridge and back. Stupid snow.
Progress
I’ve already mentioned putting vocals on four songs this morning, and I’ve already posted two songs that I mixed today, but now I am posting about putting lead guitar parts onto four songs. My fingers are killing me. I still don’t have calluses on my left hand and good heavens am I feeling the repercussions of that right now. I still have four more songs that are ready for leads but I have to take a break for a while. Maybe for the rest of the day. Jen and I might be going down to Cambridge for some tech gear after dinner tonight, so this might be it for guitar on this fine Saturday. I still have to write melodies and lyrics for the last four songs as well.
Soooo much left to do.
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.
Cat Meet Deer
We had 12 deer in the yard just now. Twelve.
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:
Also, a pic of half of my audience for the day:
And now for a few shots of the scenic drive to the not-so-empty parking lot:
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.
Inside the Red Head's Head 