Tag: Rpm Challenge

Snow Sucks

It’s been a busy morning so far.  Busy and freakin’ cold.

I spent some music time.  I redid the rhythm guitars on song and also did the rhythm guitars on song #13.  I actually did that one twice too.  After I finished it I listened back and didn’t like it, so I just did it again.  I then did the lead guitar on song .  That one is about two measures of drums away from being complete.  I wrote 12 and 13 at about the same time.  I had listened to 1 through 11 and decided I was lacking in dumb rock songs.  12-14 were meant to fix that oversight.  Unfortunately, 12 and 13 sound really similar.  I might glue them together.  After making a nine song, 34 minute suite in November, I wasn’t going to do anything like that this month.  Now I think I am.  Song 14 was supposed to rock too, but after adding the drums it feels a teeny tiny bit funky.  About as funky as a fat, white, Irish American can get at least.  I might make that one acoustic.  We shall see.

After the music was done, it was time to watch USA play Slovenia in men’s ice hockey.  After one period it was Slovenia 0 and Phil Kessel 2.  I thought I’d run outside quickly and clean off some of yesterday’s snow.  In one of those happy magical events, a plow dumped snow just off the side of our driveway.  In doing so, the driver completely cleared the snow bank.  Thank you, oh blessed plow driver.  You made my day 100000 times easier.  I will forever appreciate your kind gesture.

So after I shoveled and cleaned most of the ice off of the cars, and dug out the fire hydrant again, I went slightly crazy.  The previous owners of our house left one of those roof shovel things in the garage.  We had major icicles hanging of the gutters.  We also have ice dams.  Yippee.  At first I thought I’d take that roof shovel thing and just knock down the icicles.  After I finished the front of the house I went nuts.  I couldn’t reach too far up onto the roof, but I dragged down as much as I could.  There is still an ice dam that seems to be located mostly in the gutters themselves, but there is a lot less snow on the edge of the roof itself.  I did the back of the house too. In some places I sank knee deep into the snow.  I’m something like six feet five inches tall.  Knee deep on me is chest deep on normal people.  There is a ton of snow out there.

So team USA won their game against Slovenia.  They are 3-0 in the preliminary round.  Amazingly, Russia and Slovakia are scoreless in overtime right now.  If Russia loses again… damn.

Later today we are going to go to my nephew’s third birthday party.  I am still not feeling terribly well, and my wife woke up with the same bug today and is really feeling sick.  Therefore we are going to go to the party, but we aren’t going to stay very long.  We need to go home and let my love get better.

In unrelated news, I started a backup of my Flickr account yesterday afternoon.  It’s about half way done.  I have so much stuff over there, you can’t even believe it.

I might try to do some more recording later today.  We’ll see how the day turns out.

Go Team USA!

RPM Challenge – Day 15

I haven’t done much over the last two days. I’m up to 14 works in progress, so I should be done with that part of the project. However, the idea of shooting for 16 songs has been worming around my head for a while. We’ll see.

Here’s another link to the WiP playlist:
https://soundcloud.com/robertjames1971/sets

There is another Team USA hockey game at 7:30 am tomorrow. I am considering getting up a couple of hours before that to try and pick off another couple of rhythm guitar parts before the day gets rolling. We’ll see.

Sick

I left work sick today. I managed to record guitars for two song and vocals for one before work. I also wrote what should be the chorus to song #13. It may end up as an entry on songfight.org. We’ll see.

For now though, let’s just try to not be sick, m’kay?

RPM Challenge – Day 11

As February 11th draws to a close I have a couple of updates to mention.

The 12 bar blues, aka song #6 has a rhythm guitar track.  Two of them, actually.  Song #8 has a tiny bit of rhythm guitar, although I am not sure if I like it or not.  

The song count is up to 12 now as I just put together bass and drums for a dumb, fast rocker.

Two weeks and three days to go.

RPM Challenge – Day Ten

It’s February 10th.  What’s the RPM status?  Well, it’s not bad.  I’m up to 11 songs in progress.  Three more and I’ll have enough for both RPM and FAWM.  Five of the songs have rhythm guitars finished.  One even has the vocals finished.  Two of the songs are in 6/8 time.  One is in 5/4.  One is in 7/8.  the rest are in boring old 4/4.  I don’t know if the quality is anything to write home about this year.  I feel like I’m doing the same things over and over again. 

I wanted to get some work done before work this morning, but The Walking Dead came back last night and I had to watch it before I did anything.  It’s funny.  I’ve read two issues of the comic.  One was the first issue.  The other was more or less last night’s episode.  I have to say that, unlike many fans of the show, I don’t want Carl to get hurt.  Carl getting in zed trouble scares me more than any other character, by far.  I don’t know why.

Anyway, I did sneak in a tiny amount of work this morning.  I came up with a chorus for song #3 and got it into GarageBand in two part harmony.  I have been having more trouble with finding vocal harmonies than ever before.  I need to start listening to The Beatles and Dada (my go to bands for practicing picking out harmony parts) to get my ears back into shape.

RPM Challenge – Day Eight (Continued)

Hey, check out the playlist I posted earlier today. It’s up to 10 songs at 39:59. That clears both requirements for the RPM Challenge. Four more songs to sketch out and I’ll have enough to complete FAWM. OF course, then I just have to finish writing and recording everything. I am feeling good about this though. (even though all my songs sound exactly the same)

RPM Challenge – Day Eight

I’m up to song nine last night. Song eight has a lot of structure left to figure out. I did it on the iPad last night and haven’t ported it to the Mac yet. Song nine is the obligatory 7/8. It’s just bass and drums so far, but I used the drummer function again. It worked out pretty well in this case.

On a net-nerd front, I had been using my “B” soundcloud account for works in progress. Today I figured that was silly so I loaded everything into the main account.

Here’s a playlist that will be deleted once the project is complete:

RPM Challenge – Day Six

Last night before bed I started work on song #6. It’s just base and drums for now but it is a return to form for me. Last year’s RPM project was the first one I’ve done that did not include a 12-bar blues. Well this year I have rectified that error. Song #6 is a 12-bar! Welcome back!

Tonight I started work on song #7. It’s a little melody I tinkered out on the iPad using GarageBand’s Heavy Metal Organ sound. Gotta love that. I ported it over to the Mac and used the GarageBand Drummer function again. It worked. I’m satisfied with it this time.

This project needs more time signature variety. I’ve got one 6/8, one 5/4, and five 4/4s. It might be time to break out the old prog rock favorite, 7/8. Maybe over the weekend.