Tag: Recording

Busy Busy

Today is Sunday. The last day of May, 2026. It is about quarter past 8:00am and it is 48 degrees out. It is warmer than it was for most of the day yesterday. Thanks for nothing, mother nature.

I have a home owner type project going on this weekend that is both overwhelmingly intimidating and completely kicking my ass. That’s probably why I am writing this post rather than actually working. That’s okay though. I guess. Maybe?

We are doing a long term sort of thing. At some point later this year we are going to upgrade our HVAC system. We had a guy out to do some routine maintenance on the AC unit and he told us it’s pretty much at death’s door. Shit. The upgrade is going to cost a fortune, but Massachusetts has some solid rebate and loan options if you qualify. Now in order for us to qualify we have to have some work done on the house to bring us up to code. 

One of those upgrades requires me to clear a three foot wide path around the outer walls in the cellar. Unfortunately for me, about 60% of those walls is made up of storage and closet space, all of which is full to bursting with crap. I have to clear all of that out which wouldn’t be too bad except that our cellar interior is also full of crap… well, crap, a laundry room, an office space where I do my morning exercise and my music stuff, and a living room. Basically, I have to pull everything out of storage but the only place that makes sense to move it to is already full of stuff. Shit.

The solution then is to purge. We’re going to book a visit from a junk removal service. They are going to take as much of the shit as I can pile up. Then we’re going to book a second visit and they will take the rest of the shit when I pile it up where the first load of shit was piled up. After that I just have to move furniture away from the walls. It’s going to suck to the high heavens, but it is worth it. We have all of that storage space (which was a huge selling point when we bought the house) but it’s all full. Now it will be cleared out for the most part and we can get to work filling it with new useless shit. Bonus!

So that’s my big project for this weekend. My smaller, less important project is already finished. On Friday night after work I mixed two songs. I wrote them on Monday, Memorial Day (I think the last time I wrote about them in a post here I said I wrote them on Sunday, but it was Monday). I had the bass, drums, and rhythm guitars done on Monday. I put the vocals on both songs on Thursday morning before work, and put the lead guitars down on Friday before work. Then I mixed them and uploaded them to my alonetone.com account before bed on Friday. For the first time in ages I submitted something to the RPM Challenge’s Record Every Month challenge thing. 

I accomplished something musically. That felt good. Maybe next week I can accomplish something photographically too. That would also feel good. Creativity is good for my soul, or something like that.

So Much for Grand Awakenings

What Can You Do

Okay… time to start my day and see if I can’t get some stuff done. Happy Sunday, everyone.

Not Fun and then Fun

It is 3:30pm and it is already the longest day in the history of the universe.

I went to sleep at about 10:30pm last night. Later than I would have liked, but earlier than most days over the past month or so. I woke up at about 2:15am needing to go to the bathroom. I’m old. It happens. Deal with it. When I was done I fell right back to sleep.

Then at 3:51am my phone rang. It was work. The overnight staff were dealing with a customer issue that was causing the customer a lot of stress. I knew what the issue was but I wasn’t sure how to find the process that was causing it. Fortunately the overnight guy I was on the phone with mentioned one little detail which set off a trigger in my teeny tiny little mostly still asleep brain and I knew where I had to go to set things right. By 4:15 I was off the call. I took a few minutes to write a message to all of my staff members who would be involved in the follow up during normal business hours and I went to bed. I didn’t sleep much before my alarm went off at 5:30am, but I did manage to snooze a little.

All of that was not fun. Not fun at all. It was a lot less catastrophic than it could have been, but it is never fun having work call in the middle of the night. I’m just glad I was able to help. Even though the situation was not fun, I felt pretty good about myself when it was over.

By 6:00 I was out of bed and starting the day. By 6:15 I was in the cellar starting my daily exercise. The ball was rolling. An hour later the fun part of the day was starting. Guitars, babie!

On Monday I wrote two new songs and started recording demos. Bass and drums were MIDI instruments, rhythm guitars were the real thing, the melody was sketched out on a keyboard and lyrics were written stream of consciousness style to fit the melody. Yesterday before work my laptop and I drove to an empty parking lot in town and I recorded the vocal tracks for both songs. Today before work I recorded the lead guitar parts. Normally the lead guitars are my favorite part of the song demo process but right now I am so out of playing shape that there are no calluses on my finger tips and playing for more than a few minutes hurts. The strings start to feel like razor blades, especially when you play like I do and you bend strings all over the place. Ouch.

Still, despite the pain, I was able to finish tracking both new songs. Now all I have to do is mix them so that they are somewhat listenable (relatively speaking, of course) and then they are done. A few years ago I was writing 10+ songs each month over the course of the whole year. Last year I did the RPM Challenge in February (write and record an album’s worth of music all within the month of February) and then nothing for the rest of the year. This year was starting to look the same. I finished RPM in February and then it wasn’t until Memorial Day weekend that I even thought about doing anything more. Now that I am feeling like I am back in the saddle again, or some horse shit like that (get it? Saddle? Horse shit? Oh, come on!) I am thinking about trying to write a bunch in June and then do the fifty ninety challenge over the summer (that challenge is to write 50 songs in 90 days between July 4th and October 1st). We’ll see if I can stick to that.

So on this fine Friday in May, in fact the last Friday in May, the day started off not fun, and then for a little blast of time it was fun, and then it was just the usual… right up until about an hour after lunch when the lack of sleep caught up with me and now I am completely out of gas with 93 minutes left in my work day.

It’s going to be a long afternoon.

Noodles

The electric guitar was noodled upon today. I worked out two new song ideas on my laptop and decided that even though I was grossly rusty and have no calluses at all on my finger tips, I put rhythm guitar tracks onto both songs. Four tracks on one song and two on the other.

My playing was absolute garbage but I enjoyed every second of it. Well… not counting the burning agony in the tips of the fingers on my left hand. That’s a kick in the nards, but other than that… Fun.

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Musical Epic Urges

I have this weird musical urge right now and I don’t think I will be able to stop myself from trying to make it happen.

I have this urge to write a song that runs for at least 20 minutes.

  • Introduction is slow and quiet. Maybe just a cleanish electric guitar soloing over an electric piano. The intro needs to be long… very long.
  • Next we have basically a 4-5 minute uptempo, noisy rock song. Preferably in an odd time signature with shouty vocals in the chorus.
  • Another instrumental break. Change key and time signature and tempo and jam for a while. Maybe have a guitar and a sax trade off.
  • Another stand alone kind of song section. Slower, quieter, less shouty.
  • Come up with a riff. Something long and drawn out. Maybe a full eight bars without repeating anything. Start quiet and slowly but steadily get louder, just repeating the same phrase. Get louder and heavier and more intense. I’m thinking something like Whaling Song by Procol Harem. Something that just builds on itself over a long stretch of time.
  • Return to the second section. Different key maybe. Not a full repeat, but bring back the same changes and phrases in a new arrangement. Sort of like a coda section.
  • Return to the introduction but not nearly as long.

What do we think, universe? Do I suddenly have a new musical project to sink my untalented musical teeth into?

Will it run for 20 minutes?

We’ll see.

2026 RPM Challenge Day 28/28

Done. Finished. Complete. Success. 15 years in a row, babie. Every year since 2012 has seen me successfully complete the RPM Challenge (and the FAWM too).

The album is called The Great American Road trip because it was mixed during the great american road trip. Duh. The official home is my alonetone page, right here. The unofficial home is on my hearthis.at page which only exists because it plays nicely with wordpress.com.

I ended up with 16 songs and dropped six of them from the final project. My overall reaction to this year’s batch of new songs is… meh. I don’t care. That’s not the point of this thing. They didn’t exist and now they do and that is a good thing, even if the songs themselves are not good things. Dig it?

2026 RPM Challenge Day 27/28

We are home from our week long epic road trip. I was expecting to get home tomorrow but we made it back a little early.

I mixed one song today. I’m not sharing it because it is terrible and I should have left it unfinished. That leaves me with one song left to mix, then I have to pick the running order and make some cover art and then I’m done.

I would do more tonight but I am utterly exhausted and I want to flake a little before I fall asleep.

I’ll wrap all of this stuff up tomorrow.

2026 RPM Challenge Day 26/28

As I sit in a hotel room somewhere between Fredericksburg, VA and Washington, DC I managed to mix one song. That’s it for today. There are still two more to go and I could probably squeeze one more in but I’m really tired and I want to watch Starfleet Academy before I conk out.

I was expecting to hate this song. I am scraping the bottom of the barrel now and I thought this would be unbearably awful. It’s better than I expected though. Let’s say it is bearably awful.

2026 RPM Challenge Day 25/28

The RPM Challenge asks for 10 songs or 35 minutes of music. FAWM asks for 14 songs.

With two songs mixed tonight while sitting in a hotel room near Knoxville, Tennessee I am up to 13 songs finished with three more still left to mix and three days left to finish. I think we’re going to have another success this year, don’t you?

2026 RPM Challenge Day 24/28

Today was the day I had scheduled for the big mixing push. My wife and I are on an epic road trip, the basis for which is her job. She had to work today and I was planning to spend the day sitting in a hotel room with my MacBook mixing songs in GarageBand.

It didn’t come out quite as planned as her meeting ended at 1:00pm and not 5:00pm and as soon as she was free we hit the road to Tennessee and Arkansas. I did, however, manage to mix six songs today. Speed mixing is not conducive to great music, but it gets the job done for me.

I was going to post all six songs but that would be silly so here’s one…

What the hell, here’s another one too…

2026 RPM Challenge Day 23/28

The epic road trip took us from Louisville, KY to Nashville, TN and back. My gastric bypass disagreed with lunch and I puked on the side of the highway, route 65 North, somewhere in Kentucky.

I had also hoped to mix three songs but I am exhausted and only managed two. I’m going to bed now even though it’s still laughably early. I’m so old it’s like a joke, man.