I played some guitar tonight. I wasn’t going to but I did and it made me happy.
I redid a couple of rhythm guitar tracks that I didn’t like the sound of and then I put leads on one of the songs that got vocals this morning. I used my new wah pedal a lot. It’s a Real McCoy Custom RMC10 and it is killer. The sweep on it is gigantic. It starts on Monday and ends on Thursday. That’s how gigantic the sweep is. It’s actually so much wider than I’m used to that I think it is going to take some time to adjust my brain to it. It sounds great though.
I started putting leads on the other song that got vocals this morning but I had to stop before I finished. I used my Fuzz Face again but this time I stuck a Klon copy after it as a boost and it was gnarly and bitchin and mean and nasty and wonderful.
Fuzz Face pedals and wah-wahs are notorious for not working well together. I haven’t tried the combo yet with the new wah, but I will.
I hope to get in some more car music tomorrow. We’ll see. For now though, I am feeling pretty good about the little bit that I accomplished tonight.
Yesterday I skipped a car music opportunity because it was seven degrees out. Today when the question of to car music or not to car music arose I checked the temperature again. It was eight degrees out. Okay, that’s warm enough. Off we go!
I had six songs queued up to record vocals. I did two. I worked on one, and then ran the heater in the car for a few minutes and worked on the second. My voice was still feeling okay after two songs. The battery on the laptop was still good. I hadn’t been outside for very long so the clock was in good shape. Why did I stop after two? Because sometimes sitting out in the cold has a negative effect on the old bladder. I had to pee. If not for that I might still be out there yelling.
I’m hoping to go out again tomorrow and pick off another couple, and then wrap it up next week. Monday if possible, but I am off work again on Wednesday so maybe wait until then.
Now the obligatory drive-home-through-the-center-of-town pic!
As a bonus, there’s also this picture that was snapped accidentally while trying to open up the camera app.
I didn’t get up until after 7:00 this morning. No car music again. I have six songs that need vocals. I want them all done before February 1st. When I say done I mean vocals, leads, and mix. I don’t want to be thinking about any of these songs when RPM starts. I don’t have any specific plans for RPM yet. I don’t know if I want to do anything special for a theme or anything, or if I just want to write a bunch of new songs.
I didn’t watch Book of Boba Fett yesterday. We’re going to try and do a watch party with Harry tonight. I hope so. Jen and I started the new season of Cobra Kai. They are like 30 minute pieces of candy. We blew through the first three before we even realized it.
The show to watch right now, if you have access to it, is Yellowjackets. My spoiler free review of the first six episodes, which are the only ones I’ve seen so far: WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?????
Just jotting down a gimmick idea for RPM in February….
Write a melody. Sing it on a guide track. Reverse the guide track. On a second track, sing along with the reverse track. Reverse the second track. You now have a backwards vocal track singing the correct melody.
Just a dumb idea I had in the car this morning. Gimmicky, yes, but fun.
Back in 2015 I worked out a song for the RPM Challenge that tricked GarageBand into using different time signatures. It chugs along at 120 beats per minute switching between 7/8, 6/4, and 4/4 like nobody’s business. It was a cool song to play and I had a lot of fun working on it, but it took me a long time to get the rhythm guitars recorded in a way that was good enough to keep.
There was a section in the middle of the song though… 24 bars… written on a keyboard with the tempo set to something much lower than 120 bpm. It was, to my lame ears, a cool break in the middle of the song. Unfortunately I couldn’t play it at 120 bpm on the guitar. It was just too fast for my fat fingers to grasp. I ended up recording it in pieces. Three bars then one bar, repeat six times, then move to a second track and repeat the whole thing. It was pretty brutal to get through.
That was in 2015. One month later I started messing with the idea of a re-recording project. I didn’t get far. Then in 2016 when RPM ended I went back to the re-recording thing and added this particular song to the list. Apparently I forgot about all of the stress it had caused me when I first recorded it.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago and the re-recording project finally gets around to this song. I had forgotten everything. I started with the bass and drums and had to remember how to trick GarageBand into using different time signatures (hint: it boils down to math). Then I had to remember how to trick GarageBand into letting me use the Session Drummer with the different time signatures (hint: lots of bouncing segments between two tracks, one of which is not the session drummer). Then last night I took my first crack at adding guitars.
Intro? No problem. Verses? Easy. Chorus? Cake. All the little 1-2 bar bridge sections? No problem. The section in the middle (actually, while working on the MIDI tracks I cut a few sections out of the song. One of them was the last eight bars of the middle section so the 24 bar section is now only 16 bars, dig)? Hello? Anyone?
Could I play it?
Not even close.
While I was struggling last night Harry came home from work so I stopped trying. Today I had a little time to get back to it. I scrapped everything I did yesterday and started fresh, mostly just to build up my confidence. When I got to the middle section I did something unusual. I just sat here at my desk, looking at GarageBand, and practiced. Not for long. Just enough to get it under my fingers, even though it was wrong 90% of the time. Then I split the 16 bars into four, four bar segments and started on the first segment. Remember I double everything, so each four bar segment needs to be done twice. It took me a long time to get the first one. The second track went a little quicker. Same with segment two. For segment three, it took a lot longer to get the first track, but the second track was nailed in one take! WOOHOO! Of course that just jinxed me for the rest and I needed like 10-15 tries for each piece.
The end result though… I have the full 16 bars, twice. Kick ass! The punches were nice and clean too, so I can’t even tell that it was recorded in pieces. It just sounds like I am actually able to play the guitar like a big boy and I just did it. Nice.
Wow… I wrote a lot about this stupid little song.
Guitar pictures to celebrate my being able to pretend I don’t suck quite as bad as I clearly do!
I also retired a pick today, and the battery on my clip on tuner is about to die. That’s all the news that is fit to print.
After including three Rush songs in the last post, this new thing should sound that much shittier.
A song from 2010 with new lyrics and a new coat of paint. I waffled on whether to re-do this song for years. Literally. It went on the list of songs to work on in 2016 and was dropped off and re-added at least twice. Now that it’s done… I probably should have left it off.
I forgot to post this yesterday, but I mixed the January song for the RPM Challenge’s Record Every Month thing. I guess that means I am done? We did the actual RPM in February, and then I had at least one song each month from March through January. Three of them were also part of the 50/90, and one was National Solo Album Month, and I forgot to submit most of them to the RPM site, but I still did at least one song each month. Hooray.
I wasn’t planning on any guitar playing tonight. Mostly because I didn’t have songs ready for any guitar parts. So what did I do? I started a new re-recording just so that I could have something to play.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need to have something to record to play. If I want to play I can just play. No big whoop, right? It’s just that I wanted to play and I wanted to record something so I came up with something to record, that’s all.
I didn’t play for long, and I didn’t play well, but I did play and that’s all that I care about.
Inside the Red Head's Head 