Pulled it Off

Crazy morning. I normally set my alarm for 5:00am on weekdays and then hit snooze a few times but still get out of bed well before 6:00. Today I didn’t get up until almost 7:00. I assumed my whole morning routine was going to get flushed.

Nope. I got everything I wanted to get done, done.

I fed and watered the cats. I emptied the dishwasher and put the dirty dishes in and cleaned them. I did a load of laundry. I watched Dead City (but not Fear the Walking Dead, thankfully). I ran in place for 32 minutes and closed my exercise ring. I ate breakfast. I drank 16 ounces of water and took my morning vitamins. I took a shower and got dressed and punched in to work with 10 minutes to spare.

I also extended the guitar playing streak to 12 days. I put lead guitars onto one of the songs I put vocals on yesterday. It wasn’t good, but it was a lot better than the last few leads I recorded. Nice.

I also used guitar as an excuse to take today’s photo a day challenge picture. I got everything I wanted to get to this morning done. Good job, Roberto.

Will the guitar playing streak end tomorrow? It probably depends on the weather, I think. If the weather is okay then I might go to the movie theater parking lot shortly after the sun comes up and start the couch to 5k thing. If I do that, I probably won’t have time for guitar before work. I could always try to get it in after work, but that is a lot harder to do.

I just checked the hourly forecast. It’s going to be chilly, but the 6:00am hour is currently looking like it will be rain free. We might be doing this thing, kids. We just might be doing it.

10 June Songs

Yesterday’s music output was decent. I put guitars on two songs in the morning. Later I wrote lyrics for two songs and mixed another song. Before bed I started a new song idea and that makes 10 for the month of June. I’m not saying I will finish my album in a month goal for June, but it’s a whole lot easier to reach it when you actually have the correct number of songs in progress. Now, having said that, I had 10 songs in progress in May as well and I didn’t finish any of them so… yeah.

The guitar playing streak is up to 11 days. I think today might be the last day though. I think I want to do car vocals tomorrow instead. We’ll see. I also might want to start the couch to 5k stuff tomorrow. I am still undecided. Again, we’ll see. I did spend about 20 minutes playing today though. I put rhythm guitars on the new song idea from last night. That means all 10 June songs have rhythm guitars now. Good stuff!

Nine Days and Counting

I kept the streak alive by playing some guitar today! Last night I cooked up a song idea in 5/8 time. I thought that rhythmically it was going to be tough to track the guitars today but I finished the whole thing, double tracking too, in about 15 minutes. That’s good for three reasons. One, it kept the streak going. Two, I have a bunch of stuff to do this morning and now have a little more time to do it. Three, I overslept quite a bit today and thought I was going to screw everything up but now I might not have.

Pics!

Guitar Streak

Eight days in a row babie, the guitar has been played for eight days in a row. I suck more today than I did on day one but who cares, it’s eight days in a row, babie!

I did the same thing as yesterday. The night before I threw together a new song idea and then put two tracks of rhythm guitar on it in the morning. The difference here is that yesterday’s song was super easy yet fun and might actually turn out to be a good song. Today’s song was super easy but not fun, instead it is boring and dumb and will likely turn into a terrible, awful song.

Who cares!

Nutubes totally aren’t a gimmick, right? All the dust is totally a gimmick though, but not the Nutube… right?

Focus was on the pedal. The King of Tone pedal I waited over five years for but am now totally loving

Whoops! This is what happens when you accidentally tap the touch screen on the Nikon Z5 while you’re rolling across the floor on your office chair. Whoops, indeed.

Okay, time to go get ready for work. Happy Thursday, kids!

Six Days and Counting

The consecutive days of guitar playing streak is up to six days. I didn’t get any playing in last Wednesday as it was a commuting day and I didn’t get up early enough. The following six days, including this morning, I played at least a little bit. I used my SG to put leads on two songs from May. I played especially poorly. I don’t think it was rust this time, I think it was physical impairment. Specifically, my finger tips didn’t work correctly, in part because the calluses are gone but the pre-callus blisters are coming in. Ouch. When I took a shower after I finished my crappy playing the hot water hitting my fingers stung like a mutha.

Oh well. Hopefully I’ll get up early enough to get a little playing in tomorrow, given that it is another commute day. It would be nice to have the streak hit the full week mark.

The playing was bad today and so were the obligatory pointless pictures. I had to take a second batch because the first batch was crap.

Nutube: Totally Not a Gimmick

I had a little window of time in between Jen’s scheduled meetings so I snuck in some guitar tracking for the November tunes. I put rhythm on song number five and leads on songs one and two.

I am still sticking to the plan to use my little Vox MV50 Clean amp for all of November, even though it’s sitting on top of a Fender Bassbreaker 15 which at it’s worst sounds about 10000000000 times better than the little Vox dude. Still, Nutubes… The MV50’s preamp section runs on a Nutube and Nutubes totally are not a gimmick. Right? Right? I mean there are only two (maybe three, but I’m pretty sure it’s down to two) factories on Earth that still make actual vacuum tubes and if the guitar community wants to continue having that glorious tube amp sound we have to prepare ourselves for the day that we can’t get the real thing anymore… and Nutubes are as close as we can get at the moment, assuming they are not a total gimmick that is just a façade in front of a regular plain old solid state amp. So many questions… so very many questions.

Anyway, the little MV50’s are at least cute to look at, and the Nutubes give off a warm glowing blue warming glow…

Also, playing anything gives me an excuse for lame, faux artsy guitar pics. Today we made use of the iPhone’s portrait mode. Like a telephone photography boss.

Attenuating

I think it was yesterday that I posted something about messing with the attenuator settings on my Vox MV50 Clean, the amp I’m using for this month’s demos.

It has three settings; 50 watts, 5 watts, and 0.5 watts. I usually use 0.5 but today I turned the volume knob way down and tried five watts.

I want to say it sounded better, but I only played for a short time and I kept things mostly clean and quiet.

I’ll try it again with some dirt and some serious signal boost into the front of the amp and see how the little Nutube (which totally is not a gimmick) responds.

I’ll let you all know how it goes.

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