Tag: photography

Snow?

I did my car music this morning. I was out of the house a couple of minutes past 6:00am. I only had two songs to work on so I knew it was going to be a short trip. What I didn’t know was that it was going to freakin’ snow!

We only got enough to cover everything, but I don’t think we were supposed to get anything at all. At least I didn’t hear anything yesterday. Granted, I knew the forecast was calling for it to be warm today so I didn’t pay attention to any precipitation predictions but still… what the hell?

Fortunately it didn’t stop me from finishing the last two songs worth of vocal tracks for this year’s RPM Challenge. Once I got home I finished the last three saxophone parts too. On top of that, I managed to sneak in a few songs worth of guitar leads. I am still not finished with tracking for this month’s project. I still have to add lead guitar to two more songs. After that, all that will be left is to mix the last (gulp) 12 songs. Yikes!

All of this zaniness ends tomorrow… record two guitar leads and mix 12 songs… and work two full work days… yeah… I can do it. I’ll stress out and be on the verge of constant musical freak out, but I can do it.

Forming Bad Habits

Two days in a row now I have skipped my daily exercise. Uh oh, bad habits forming over here!

Why? So I could record guitar tracks for RPM Challenge songs. That seems like a good reason. It will probably happen again tomorrow but instead of guitar it will be recording vocals in the car… assuming I can write the vocal parts for the last two songs before I fall asleep tonight. That’s a pretty big if.

Should I manage to get up early enough tomorrow I might be able to sneak some guitar playing in before work too. What about saxophone? I’m not sure if any of the remaining songs have plans for sax or not. I think one or two might. I also think I might just make a game time decision and change those planned sax parts to guitar parts. We’ll see. I put sax on four songs so far. That’s 20% of the entire project. That seems like an acceptable amount… though 25 or 30% seems more acceptable. We’ll have to see.

Once all of the songs are mixed (and hopefully that means all 20 songs and not some smaller number because I just declared mixing done while there were still songs outstanding) I have to pick an album running order. I might actually do three playlists. One with the 10 electric songs, another with the 10 acoustic songs, and then one with just the best 10 overall. That would be the one that I declare the Official 2025 RPM Challenge Album Submission, whatever that means. I thought about using AI to generate an image for the album cover but AI is fucking evil so I will just “borrow” something off of wikipedia. The working title of the final album is still Groundhogs Wear Top Hats but I might change that to Groundhogs and Top Hats to make the image search a little less ridiculous. We’ll see.

For now though, here are this morning’s stupid pics. I switched from the 85mm f1.8 lens to the 40mm f2.0 lens to give myself a little bit of a new option for the same old pics. The first one is today’s photo a day picture (179/365).

179/365
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Shake Things Up

Since today is an office day for me and I am in a state of near panic over the current status of my RPM Challenge project, I decided to screw up my daily routine. Instead of getting up early and getting my daily exercise in, I got up early and recorded some guitar parts. I didn’t get up as early as I had planned, so I didn’t get through as much tracking as I had planned, but I did add rhythm (acoustic 12-string) guitars to one song and lead (electric 6-string) guitars to two. Actually, one song got both.

Acoustic guitar…

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Electric guitar (which also serves as today’s photo a day challenge picture, 178/365)…

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There is a very good chance I am going to make the same change tomorrow as it too is an in the office day. I am out of control and it’s all RPM’s fault!

Pre-Work Music

Did I mention that I did some car music this morning? My weird, random bout of insomnia last night meant I was up super early and had more than enough time to drive out to the movie theater parking lot to record vocals. I made it through five songs. One of them had the lyrics and the melody written on the spot. I haven’t done that in quite a while. I still have two more songs to add vocals to. I am going to be in the office the next two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) so hopefully I’ll have them all ready to go by Thursday morning.

The RPM Challenge is stressing me out big time this year, and none of the songs are any good. It has me questioning whether it’s all worth it or not. I still think so… but by how much? Who knows.

Obligatory Clock pic from the drive home which will act as today’s photo a day challenge picture:

177/365

DIY Desk

The main focus of the IKEA project today was a huge new desk for my wife’s office. It isn’t an actual desk. Call it IKEA meets DIY.

There are a bunch of additional projects happening today, but the desk is the big one. It’s pretty much all setup now so Jen can work on it. It came out really nice.

I think we’re running out of gas for today. We’ll sneak in a little more work. A couple of things have been postponed to tomorrow so we will continue. This little home improvement day has been a good one.