I am going to work in the office today and tomorrow. There won’t be any time for morning music. There isn’t even time to post this world-shattering blog entry.
Saturday… I will play guitar on Saturday. I’ll setup some GarageBand files tonight and tomorrow. Maybe a couple of re-recording things and an entry or two for the Record Every Month challenge that I haven’t even given a single thought to yet even though it’s March 21st.
I promise.
Check it out, I said I was going to mix a song and here I am with a second mix! It’s bonus song time!
This was the title song from an RPM Challenge a couple of years ago. It’s okay. It was probably borderline worthy of re-recording, but now that it’s done I am all right with it. It’s not a disaster, though the goofy panning tricks I did at the beginning and end are probably mistakes.
I mixed a song, just like I said I might in my last post. I guess I am just the kind of guy who keeps his promises to himself and his blog.
This one was written and originally recorded last summer (June, I think) for the Record Every Month challenge thing that I haven’t even thought about this month. I should probably come up with something new soon seeing as the month is half over. Anyway. I liked it a lot right away and immediately added it to the Quarantine Tunes list. Now it’s done and I still like it. I can’t say if I like this new take better than the old one, but I do think it’s all right.
I mixed a song for The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project, aka Quarantine Tunes (Volume Seven). I should really wait until tomorrow to share it anywhere because I am so freakin’ tired that I can’t tell if this sounds anywhere near decent or not.
I actually finished recording this song in June of 2022. Coming up on two years ago. Why did I wait so long to mix it? Because I fear that I actually freakin’ love this song. The chorus just slaps. Well, at least to my ears it does. The rest of the song is okay, but the chorus just makes me want to bang my head and scream. It is very rare for me to feel that way about one of my own songs. So rare that when it happens, the idea of screwing up a mix really scares the shit out of the tiny little creative portion of my tiny little brain.
I don’t want to screw up a good song, dig?
Anyway, here’s the good song that I probably screwed up. I’ll listen to it tomorrow after I’ve slept and see if I still find the mix acceptable. I doubt I will, and if I don’t then I’ll remix it.
I’ve been talking about it all month, but finally we have a new recording all mixed and ready to share. This is a song that was written and originally recorded for the 2021 RPM Challenge and re-recorded here for Quarantine Tunes Volume Seven, aka The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project.
What do you think, should I have put some more reverb and echo on everything? This is the wettest mix I’ve ever done… maybe. It’s pretty much dripping wet.
Hopefully there will be more stuff coming in the next few days.
Was today the first car music of 2024? I think so.
I snuck out of the house a few minutes after 7:30, got to the movie theater parking lot (which wasn’t quite as empty as I like it to be) by 7:40 and recorded vocals for two songs until 8:25. I didn’t have time for any more, and even if I did I might not have. It was a struggle today. My voice was very scratchy and I’m not terribly pleased with the results… then again I am never pleased with the results so what difference does it make?
The upside is I now have two songs that are ready for lead guitars. The downside is that I have no calluses on the fingers on my left hand so recording lead guitars is going to hurt a bit. I can hack it though. I’m practically a pro at this… not really… whatever.
Here’s the view of my “studio” today:
There was a truck parked right next to my usual spot so I had to move over a few rows.
In closing, here is the obligatory clock picture:
I didn’t play my guitar this morning. I had to punch in to work early to get some paperwork wrapped up before the start of the business day so I spent my time on that instead of music. A fair trade, I guess.
The plan for tomorrow is car vocals. Get up early, do my exercise, have breakfast, hop into the car and drive to an empty parking lot and sing like a deaf canary. Epic. I have six songs in the current volume of The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project that are ready for vocals. Maybe I can pick off two of them. If things go really well, maybe three. I spend more time on the re-recording stuff than on the usual demo projects. I want them to be better than usual, even though I am a crappy singer and they end up sounding equally as garbagey.
Last night before bed I spent some time adding guide tracks to some of the songs. Just a MIDI piano playing (roughly) the vocal melody and harmony parts so that I can have a little help when I record the actual vocals. All of these songs have been recorded once before, but I tuned the guitar down a half step this time around so they are all in a different key and that’s just enough to screw up my memory of how to do things. My ear is good enough that it can usually rise above such mini-challenges, but why not give it a little help, right?
I already have two songs that are ready to mix. One of them has been ready to mix for about 18 months now and I just haven’t had the energy to get it done. I’d like to pick off one of them tonight, but as the haiku in the previous post hinted, I am freakin’ exhausted already today (it’s 2:46pm and I am ready for bed). I am not going to have the energy for anything tonight beyond making dinner, going grocery shopping, and then coming home and impersonating a vegetable in front of the TV.
I call that making plans.
Car vocals tomorrow! You heard it here first! (Now don’t let the public down, Robert!)
When I finished playing guitar yesterday morning I had run out of tracks that needed to be recorded. Last night I started another re-recording song so that I could have something to work on today. Now here we are again with nothing ready to work on because for the third day in a row I played guitar!
I now have six quarantine tunes ready for vocals. That’s what I call a backlog. It’s going to take me a while to get through all of that. I have one more song on my list for this round of re-recordings. I had two but I decided to drop one of them. If I can prep that one with bass and drum MIDI tracks today then I’ll have something to do tomorrow morning. Then we start doing car music on Tuesday? We’ll see how it shakes out.
Obligatory guitar pics, via Hipstamatic shake-to-shuffle….
I played guitar again this morning! Two days in a row!
I put rhythm guitars on a Quarantine tune, and lead guitar on another song. It was my first recorded lead on the new frets and the first recorded lead in months, meaning I have no calluses, meaning ouch town, population: me.
In other guitar playing news, the new pick journey officially began today as well.
I started with a Dunlop grippy model and amazingly dropped it within seconds of starting to play. WhatWhatWhat??
I recorded some guitar tracks today! WOOHOO!
I put rhythm guitars on one Quarantine Tunes vol. Seven song. Lots of chunky wah-wah groove. Awesome. Here’s hoping I get to make some time to play a lot this weekend. I have a lot of stuff ready for car vocals too.
Get to work, Robert!
Inside the Red Head's Head 