Tag: Recording

One Last Pre-RPM Oldish Song

One more before the RPM craziness begins. This one was written in 1998 during Spring Break. It was then recorded in 2007 when I first heard about RPM but was too late to try it officially so I recorded 10 songs in March before taking a real shot at the challenge in April and failing miserably.

How’s that for a run on sentence?

I’ve always liked this one but I’ve never really been able to pull it off. The lyrics are about a photo of my grandparents that I first saw at my grandmother’s wake. I never new my grandfather, but my grandmother had always been there. Then she was gone. At the wake there was a picture of the two of them together when they were young. I think it might have been taken while they were dating. They were standing on the street looking like too kids who were acting goofy. It was hard to reconcile the saint I knew with the goofball in the picture. A few months later I came up with this song. My brother, John wrote the drum part. I was playing the guitar part in our little practice room at home and he came running in and jumped on the drums and started playing along. Just one more reason to really dig this song.

Here’s the new version:
http://alonetone.com/robertjames1971/tracks/photograph-redux.mp3%20

Here’s the old version, for suffering’s sake:
http://alonetone.com/robertjames1971/tracks/photograph.mp3%20

ADAT to GarageBand Conversions

Back when I recorded this little puppy I said it would be the first of a handful of pre-GarageBand RPM songs that I was going to do. I picked out 3-4 other songs to work on and then never did anything with them.

Until now.

I have three songs ready for guitars and vocals. I’m going to try and get them finished this week, but I want to use my amp for all of the electric guitar parts. That means I’ll be recording before work on Monday and Thursday. We shall see how they go.

New (Old) Song

I finished another song today. This one was written in 1991. I can’t say for sure, but it might have been the first song I ever wrote from top to bottom all by my lonesome. At least I can’t remember anything older. There were actually two others that were written at about the same time that might have been my first solo effort. It doesn’t matter.

I think it was 1994 or 1995 that Mike, Dan, and I went into Northeast Broadcasting School’s 24 track studio after hours and recorded four songs. This was one of them. The other three have all been redone in GarageBand too. At first I wanted to record this one, and then make a playlist with all four. Then I thought I’d record the other three too. Then I thought I’d add a few new songs onto the end, just for fun. Then I thought I’d keep the three finished recordings and still add the new songs.

As of this moment, I’m going back to the original plan. Just the four old songs, using the already finished recordings. Yippee.

There is one cool thing about this demo, from my goofy point of view at least. Ever since I started playing the home recording game back in 2007, every song I’ve done (with one exception) has either used a headphone amp, or some kind of software amplifier simulator for all of the electric guitars. Not this one. This one is my actual, real life, physically there Marshall amp. Somehow that little fact made this one seem 100 times more fun.

Here it is:
http://alonetone.com/robertjames1971/tracks/drift-away.mp3%20

Song #4

I hate the new garageband so fucking much I can’t even express it. I want to light my god damned laptop on fire right now I am so friggin’ pissed off at garageband.

This is the fourth song. Listen to the minor seventh chord I snuck in during the mega-ending.

Oh wait. You can’t hear it. Why? BECAUSE GARAGEBAND WON’T EFFING EXPORT IT, THAT’s WHY!

When I play back, the last three bars of the song are there. When I export it to iTunes, the last three bars are gone. It’s not even a case of it just deleting a region because it plays the first god damn bar of the four bar region and then just ends. I can’t even believe what a piece of shit Apple has reduced this program to. It’s just awful. Every single thing I try to do is screwed up in some way. I HATE GARAGEBAND!!!!!!

Music Projects

I want to do NaSoAlMo next month, but I’ve got the bug to do some recording right now. I can’t though, I can’t use up any ideas too early, can I?

Urgh.

Anyway, this song got some attention on alonetone this week. I wonder if I should re-record it.

NaSoAlMo

Every January I get psyched up for the RPM Challenge in February, and for the last two years I’ve actually finished. Every October I get psyched up for National Solo Album Month in November and I lose interest after a day or two.

Why? It’s essentially the same project. Why can’t I keep my focus through both? I don’t know.

This piece of crap is the only thing I’ve ever started during a NaSoAlMo that has ever been finished. Of course it wasn’t finished on time.

/%20

I have this vague idea of doing something with all of the rhythm guitar parts being played on my 12-string, but the action is so high on that guitar that playing is painful. I don’t think I would get very far.

I want to do it. Maybe I will. I don’t know. Maybe. We’ll see.

Scale and Sleep and Stuff

There were a number of reasons why I wanted to change what I eat. The main reason being that I felt like garbage all the time due to having to carry around my gigantic stomach. The other reasons included things like clothes not fitting right anymore, spending way too much money on junk food, fearing that when I sit in a chair it will be crushed beneath me. You know, the little things.

Another of those reasons was due to the digital scale in our bathroom no longer being able to read my weight. When I stepped on it the display would say ERR. In other words, you’re too fat for the scale you fat ass. I’m happy to say that after two weeks of no coca~cola, smaller lunches, no junk food breakfasts, and less snacking between meals, the scale gave me an actual number today. Granted it was an absurdly huge number, but a number. I feel happy about that little detail. Granted, hippopotamuses often feel happy too. I’m still a monstrous fat ass, but I’m enjoying my tiny little victory.

On a less successful note, another reason for changing my intake was that I had trouble sleeping through the night. Eliminating coca~cola from my diet would remove the vast majority of my caffeine intake. If I can cut back on chocolate too (so far so, sort of good) I could stop having caffeine all together. Well I haven’t had any caffeinated soda of any kind in over two weeks now, but I’m not seeing a lot of improvement in my sleeping. A little, maybe, but not that much. I still wake up 1-2 times a night for no apparent reason, and I never feel all that rested in the morning. I probably do feel better than I did a couple of weeks ago, but there has not been any major change. I wonder how long it takes caffeine to purge from your system? I wonder if my massive caffeine intake over the years would skew things so that it takes longer to purge. I wonder.

On the upside of things, the cold that cleaned my clock last week is about 95% gone. Jen is feeling better too, although it hit her much harder than it hit me (and it kicked my ass) and she still has a way to go before she’s all better.

On a non-health note, I put some new strings on one of my guitars yesterday during telecommute lunch and I did a little recording. Then immediately after work I did a little more recording. Then this morning before work I did a little more recording. New/old song in a couple of days? Seems likely. Maybe if I keep up the pre morning commute schedule there might be two new/old songs soon.

In the meantime though, Robert says no to caffeinated beverages. The goal is to have a decent beach body by 2033 (kidding). At this rate, anything is possible.

Another Song

Over the last two days I threw together a new recording of the first song I wrote for my 2009 finished-way-after-the-deadline RPM Challenge.

Why?  Because the old recordings sound like vomit and I can’t tell if the songs themselves are vomit or just the recording.  So maybe if I dust some of them off I can make that determination.

Here’s the new recording…

And here is the old recording…

Both of these files are going to be deleted at some point, when I figure out what to do with the new version.

Three New Songs

I sat in the car, waiting for the kids to get out of karate class, and I mixed three songs.  I am such a dork.

First, Out of Control.  Written in 1997 by me, Mike, and Maria.  Unlike the other songs I’ve taken from the Prime Meridian set lists, this one was actually written for and by Prime Meridian.  We had a number of different singers over our three years together.  One of them used to call this song, Out of Control Like a Tootsie Roll.  It took huge willpower not to sing that line today.

Second, The Monica Song.  More than any other song I’ve posted online, the lyrics to this one make me cringe.  A lot.  This song is me, a not quite 21 year old, musing over a picture from a Sports Illustrated Swim Suit Calendar.  If memory serves it was April ’92.  I lacked the confidence to ever explicitly write a song about a woman, so I wrote this crap as a sort of exercise. It is a little painful to listen to now.  However, I still really dig the way the guitar part grooves.  I believe this is the one song I’ve tinkered with the most of any as far as arrangement is concerned.  When I first wrote it, it was a heavy rocker.  While working at Northeast Broadcasting School a couple of years later I flipped it on its head and made it an acoustic song with just one guitar, one voice, and one saxophone.  This arrangement is meant to be a bit of a hybrid of the two others.  I don’t know if I like it or not.

Thirdly, The Sky.  Speaking of embarrassing, back in ’94 or ’95 Mike and I were playing in a band with a drummer named Dan.  The band never got a name, but we were occasionally very good.  I think that period might have been the best I’ve ever been as a guitar player.  Anyway, we made a 24 track demo at Northeast Broadcasting School.  Three of the four songs we did have been re-recorded by me this month, including this one.  Although at the time it had very different lyrics.  On two of the songs on that demo, Jim the Keyboard Hero contributed freakin’ fantastic keys.  This song was one of them.  Unfortunately, I totally suck on keyboards so I had to seriously dumb down Jim’s awesomeness in order to at least have some organ on the track.  It’s kind of painful to think how much better Jim’s part was.  Still, I always had fun playing this song, even though it’s pretty cheesy.