Tag: Recording

Peak Music Nerd

I wanted to record some guitars tonight but I didn’t. Given the choice between guitar and hanging out with my wife there was no choice. She wins.

I was thinking of car music tomorrow. I had two songs ready to sing and I was hoping to get them tracked before my step son comes home on Thursday. I want to be able to hang out with him and start trying to find the elusive christmas spirit without having recording thoughts nagging me from the back of my skull. So car music tomorrow, finish off the two songs that are ready to go and maybe sneak in some lead guitar tomorrow night and that should hold me for a couple of weeks.

Then I nerd leveled up like you’ve read about.

I had the bass and drums done for another re-recording. Well tonight, sitting up in bed and avoiding the sleep I very much need, I put a MIDI guitar track down to use as a guide so when I do the car music tomorrow I can put vocals on this puppy too. How lame is that. A re-recording getting vocals before the rhythm guitars are recorded? That’s unheard of. It’s down right blasphemous.

But wait, there’s more.

Once I was done with that lame guide track, I took another song from the to do list and put together the drums and the bass and a guide fake guitar for that one too. Now I have four songs to sing tomorrow. Even more, I edited the arrangement for this fourth song pretty seriously. Also, I rewrote a chunk of the lyrics. What the hell am I doing? Go to bed! You’re not going to be able to record vocals for four songs tomorrow, you’re just torturing your musical nerd self! Stop it!

So I guess the question then, as the clock approaches 11:00pm, is whether or not I get out of bed early enough to do this tomorrow.

We’ll see.

Sleep Failure

Did I have a crummy night’s sleep last night or what?

I went to bed at midnight. Woke up at 1:00. Woke up again at 2:00. Woke up at 3:50 and could not get back to sleep. I bet I dozed off a little at a time without realizing it, but I know I saw the clock hit 4:40 before I really went under again.

My back was really sore and I couldn’t get comfortable. My arms kept going numb from laying on my side. I mean, my arms were just showing off. Look, jerk, we can go to sleep. Why can’t the rest of you? Ugh.

My CPAP mask kept feeling like it was losing it’s seal. I don’t think it actually was, but during the rare times when I was asleep I was drooling like a fooling and the mask was sliding around all over the place and it was driving me nuts.

At about 6:30 I gave up and got up. I took the trash to the street and I did my whole morning routine and I did car music. Just two songs. The one song I have for Record Every Month, and the last song I had for Quarantine volume 5.

I’m leaving work a couple of hours early today, but I have meetings pretty much for the whole rest of the day. It’s going to be a busy Tuesday. I expect by the time the day ends I am going to be wishing I had a good night’s sleep, right?

New Song Alert

Not really a new song. More like a new recording of a song from the summer, but it does have a new melody. I liked this song enough to included in the batch of 50/90 songs being redone, but I can’t tell if I like it because it’s good or just because it’s fun to just blow all over the ending. I’m thinking I like it for the jam factor. Whatever.

The lyrics in the verses and the chorus are haiku because I am incapable of original thinking.

I’m planning on car music tomorrow. Fingers crossed. I have so much more of this crap to share with you, gentle readers. Huzzah and shit!

No New Songs Tonight

I wrote lyrics and a melody for December’s song and made sure I had all of the lyrics I needed for the re-recordings so I’m set for Monday morning car music.

I brought up a song that’s ready to mix, but changed my mind. I’m feeling a little brain fried tonight. I’ll try again tomorrow night. We will see.

Headache and Finger Pain

Right now on this fine Sunday afternoon I have myself a bit of a headache and my finger tips are hurting. What could it mean?

Well the headache is a common side effect of singing. I can sing, but as far as voice technique is concerned I can’t sing, and the result of attempts at singing are often headaches and scratchy throats and lots of coughing. Note, it is not Covid. Thank you.

The finger tip pain is a common side effect of not being in good guitar playing shape and over doing it. If you don’t play enough you don’t build up tough calluses and playing just starts to hurt. The upside is that playing through some hand pain is how you actually build up those calluses so, you take the good with the bad.

All of this means that today has been a huge musical day for me. I mentioned earlier that I put vocals on three songs. That was this morning. This afternoon I have gone a little bonkers on guitar. I came up with an idea for a song for December and I put all of the rhythm guitars onto that. Then I put rhythm guitars onto a re-recording thing that I started messing with yesterday. The original dates back to February of 2009 (I think) and I think I could play faster and more aggressively back then because this stupid little ditty seriously kicked my ass today. Ouch. After that I put leads on all three songs that got vocals this morning and now my hands and my head and my ears are all nice and sweetly toasted. Ouch, babie. Ouch.

I might try to mix one or two later tonight, but I doubt it. My ears are telling me they are done. I do need to come up with a bass part for the December song as well as lyrics and a melody so that I can add it to the list of car music tunes for tomorrow… assuming I can get my shit together to do car music tomorrow. I now have four songs lined up. One for December, one for quarantine volume five and two for quarantine volume six.

Could I be a bigger nerd?

Guitar pics, because today is #Gibsunday and stuff.

Sunday Singing in the Car

I had five songs ready to sing and this morning, sitting in the car in an empty parking lot, I finished three of them. I was hoping to get at least one more of them in but my voice was feeling shot and I got a call from work, so I figured it was time to wrap it up. Christmas is going to start getting in the way of this stuff so I need to get as much done as I can as quickly as I can. That means there will probably be more car music tomorrow. We’ll see.

A little different obligatory drive home pic. The stop lights aligned in such a way as to stop me right in front of our awesome library.

Hey Look, Another Song Again

So the question here is, is this song appealing to me because it’s fun to play even though it’s not all that great to listen to? I think it might be. I also think I got a little too cute with this one. Maybe if I kept the rhythm guitars and the vocals dryer I might be feeling this more than I am. Who knows.

Okay, I have to go to bed now so that I can get up early and record more awful vocals in the morning.

Rock on! (or something similar)

Hey Look, Another Song

This is a re-recording of a song from over the summer. I haven’t listened to it back to back with the first recording, but I have a feeling this one is going to be the better one. I hope so. What’s the point of re-recording the little bastards if the second version isn’t better?

I have one more ready to mix right now but I am not sure I want to do it tonight. The Bruins are playing the Flames right now. I might just put the game on and fall asleep to it. We’ll see.

Until then, let me ask this question of the universe: Can a song be considered straight ahead rock if it is in 7/8 time?

Bad but Good

After work today I fixed the stupid screw up of a bass guitar track (not a real bass guitar, a MIDI bass guitar played into GarageBand using the Logic Remote app on my iPhone) I mentioned in an earlier post. Dumb ass.

I expected that that would be it for music fun for me today, but then the red sea parted and I was able to sneak in about an hour of guitar playing tonight. Sweet!

The actual playing was pretty bad but the fact that I was actually playing was good. Get it?

Where do the projects stand? Well I guess I have three of them going now? Boy, that was dumb of me.

First is REM, Record Every Month. I have yet to spend even one fraction of one second thinking about this for December. Don’t worry, it’s coming… some day. HoHoHo, I guess.

Second is Quarantine Tunes Volume 5 (aka Volume 50/90 because all 10 songs were written during the 50/90 challenge this past summer). That project is hopping along. I have four songs completely finished. Two more are ready to mix, thanks to me recording bad lead guitar tracks on both of them tonight, and the last four are all ready for vocals. Four plus two plus four equals 10, right? Yeah, so that’s where this project stands.

Third is Quarantine Tunes Volume 6. I don’t know why I felt compelled to start goofing around with a song from this list before work this morning, but I did so I guess now the ball is rolling. It’s still just one song but the drums, bass, and rhythm guitars are all down and it’s ready for vocals.

So… car music tomorrow? I’ve got five songs to work with. Sounds like a plan. It depends on whether or not I can get my gigantic fat ass out of bed at a decent hour. The weather could be a factor too. It’s supposed to be pretty crappy tomorrow and if it’s too crappy I don’t want to deal with it.

So that is my musical world this evening.

I Guess I Screwed That Up

Does that title count as click bait? I think it might when I actually describe my screw up and share that it’s nothing anyone on Earth would ever give the slightest care about. Whatevs.

I just royally screwed up a music track. I started a GarageBand file for a song that someday might be on Quarantine Tunes Volume 6, which is odd given that I haven’t finished volume 5 yet. Whatevs.

It’s a song that pre-dates using GarageBand and it’s full of riffs that start an 8th note ahead of the downbeat. That means my usual method of breaking down parts into sections doesn’t work cleanly. So I was putting together the bass part and I was working on two tracks. I’d record a few bars, including the off beat thing, play it back and make sure it lined up correctly, and then join the new section to the old section, which left me with one giant MIDI track instead of the usual segmented track, which means absolutely nothing to anyone who hasn’t actually looked at one of my GarageBand files before, which means it means absolutely nothing to everyone on the planet except for me. Whatevs.

I was all the way to the end of the song and I could only see the last 20 bars or so on the screen and I some how accidentally deleted everything I had done that at that moment was off the screen. Meaning I essentially have to do the whole stupid bass track over again. I tried Command-Z but there was nothing to bring back. Whatevs.

Ugh… I feel like an amateur. I feel like a tool.

Happy Friday, everyone.