Tag: Recording

Finish Line in Sight

The finish line is in sight for both the RPM Challenge and FAWM.

I put a very crappy vocal onto a song this morning before work.  Once that song is mixed, there will be 10 songs and more than 35 minutes.  Check and Check for RPM.  There are also three additional songs that I hope to put vocals on tomorrow.  If I can do that it will bring me up to 13 songs, one shy of a complete FAWM.

Last night, just before bed, I sketched out a little instrumental thing.  It will just basically be bass and guitar trading off.  Nothing terribly interesting there.  However, there is a bed consisting of a looped recording of the water dripping off of our picture window into a bunch of metal pots.  I recorded a couple of minutes worth of that sound and then chopped it into pieces so that it can drift around the stereo field, and every few seconds it will add more and more reverb and echo.  In all it will sound tres stupid, but it counts in my book.

That means I have one guitar part to finish and three vocals, and then mix mix mix.  If I am feeling dangerous tonight I might try to add another short vocal song.  That would mean I have to finish four vocals by about noon tomorrow, but it might be worth a shot.

Rock Star

I just received an email from hearthis.at basically telling me that I am a freakin’ Rock Star:

#4

Critical Mass
in Rock

Congratulations Robert,

Critical Mass is #4 of the weekly Rock ranking:

#1 Mouse and the Traps – Maid Of Sugar, Maid Of Spice by On The Flip-Side
#2 The Wig – Crackin’ Up by On The Flip-Side
#3 Mouse and the Traps – I Am The One by On The Flip-Side
#4 Critical Mass by Robert
#5 The Esquires – These Are The Tender Years by On The Flip-Side
#6 The Outcasts – 1523 Blair by On The Flip-Side
#7 The Outcasts – Smokestack Lightning by On The Flip-Side
#8 Dj MasterBeat VS The Mastermixers -the AC/DC megamix by DeeJay MasterBeat
#9 wreally wrongkey queen by Des Harmonic
#10 The Esquires – Judgement Day by On The Flip-Side

Listen online: https://hearthis.at/?type=trending&category=rock

Wishing you a nice weekend!

Benedikt Groß
hearthis.at

So how about that, huh? You didn’t realize you were dealing with a giant of the German Rock World, did you!  Me and the Hoff, just owning all of Germany!

Granted, seeing as seven of the top 10 spots are from the same band, that might tell you more about rock music on hearthis.at than seeing a doofus like me on their weekly chart.  Maybe I should check out On The Flip-Side.

Do you think this is just a way for the site to sucker people into using up my 5000 plays so that I will have to either pay up or stop uploading files?  Could be.

The RPM Challenge Begins!

It’s February 1st and The RPM Challenge is officially underway! Good luck to all participants.

I am ready to start as soon as I run a couple of errands. First, we are meeting a friend for breakfast. Second I need to drive home from New York. Nothing major.

I hope to watch the Super Bowl tonight with my guitar in hand and a copy of GarageBand open and running in front of me.

I also wanted to focus on a single guitar this time. If it’s going to be my Les Paul, then I need to get some strings.

…and they’re off!

Another Song

Here is the Prime Meridian Mega Closer. We called it that because it used to have a great big noisy rock out ending that was just a blast. I always liked this one a lot even though there wasn’t much too it. I had to dumb a lot of it down in order to pull it off in GarageBand, but it’s still fun to play even after all these years.

Impossible

This song is from my days at Northeast Broadcasting School (as an employee, not a student) and it wasn’t until the other day that I came to the conclusion that it would be physically impossible to play this song live.

The Downside

I just stumbled on the downside of being in a band again.

I was recording some guitars tonight using my Les Paul. I had decided that Les was going to be the only guitar I used on these old songs this month, and it would probably be the only guitar I used for RPM next month.

Then I broke a string. I haven’t broken a string inyears. It wasn’t until this moment that I realized all of my spare strings are in my equipment bag at Mike the Bass Player’s house.

Damn it! So the ES-335 makes an appearance on this months demo project. The best laid plans and all that happy crappy.

Old Music

Say hello to the first demo of 2015!  RPM starts in just under 13 days so it’s time to start blitzing you all with new demos of old songs.  This is a Prime Meridian song.  One of the last we wrote.  It comes from 1999 (or so) and was more or less forgotten about.

It’s kinda groovy, isn’t it?

What was I Thinking

I’ve been warming up for RPM by digging out old songs and recording new demos.  I have done this the last two years as well.  This year most of the focus has been on 1997-2000 when I was in a band called Prime Meridian with Mike and Maria (and John and Dave and Leah and Tracey all at varying times).  I’ve got six of those songs ready to mix and I think I might try and crank out two or three more as well.  I have three old RPM songs left over from last January, and both last March and April had songs that qualify as well so I’ll use those as well when the time comes to make a playlist out of this stuff.

I’ve also started digitizing old cassette tapes and I’ve found a few decent sounding songs there as well.  I started working on two of them today.  They were both written and recorded in the MIDI room at Northeast Broadcasting School, probably in 1994 or 95.  Those two along with another that was actually used by Prime Meridian (and might have been used by Break Even too if I’d been up for it) were things I’d written on a keyboard and pieced together with other random things to make songs.  Kinda like what I do now with RPM.  Actually, there were probably 20 such songs before I left that job, but only 3-5 or so are worth listening too.  Back then though I wasn’t thinking in terms of actual songs.  These were arranged many months after they were recorded in the sequencer.  I also had never really been a singer before.

One thing I learned a couple of years ago when I was messing with demoing songs from the band I played in back in high school is that we never took little things like breathing into account.  Well, that was still the case in the mid-90s too.  I just finished tracking one of those songs and OH MY GOD MY HEAD HURTS!  I have been doubling all of my vocal tracks this time (rhythm guitar too) and the vocal lines are so long that they all cram in together without any room for breathe.  I’ve been breaking things up so that I sing one line on one track and the next on another, and then I double everything.  I don’t know how I ever could have considered putting something like this together as a song.  It’s so ridiculously difficult to sing.  No one could ever do it live.  Ever.

All of the singing has literally given me a headache.

Ouch, babie.