Tag: Rpm Challenge

RPM Day 18

Happy Presidents Day, USA. There are 10 days left in the project. Time to buckle down.

Yesterday I took five of the remaining six projects and arranged them into song forms. This morning I had the house to myself for a few minutes and managed to add vocals to one of yesterday’s songs. It’s up on soundcloud.com, but I’m not going to post it again yet.

My goal for today is to add the leads to the song with the vocals and write one more section for the suite thingie I’ve been procrastinating on. If I can write some more lyrics I will do that too, but I usually draw a blank until the last possible moment.

Think Positive!

RPM Day 17

My useless streak is over.  My stupid streak is in full swing.

I believe that I have all the rhythm guitar parts recorded.  I’ve been going pretty minimal this year.  Only one song has more than one rhythm part, and I’ve used my Les Paul for everything.  No acoustics or 335 at all.  I think I’m going to stick to the one guitar plan throughout, but who knows.

I still need to write one more section of the mini-suite thing (which still could be dropped in favor of using the A and C sections as a stand alone song) and to arrange the last five songs.  Those are tonight’s goals.  After that its vocals time, which is where my RPM projects normally die.  We shall see.

On the stupidity front, I did the recording last night in the dining room.  I cleaned off the table and gave it a quick wash.  Then I folded up my iPad’s smart case to use as a stand while I did my thing.  When I was finished I closed the cover and put it away.  Later that night I went to check my email and there was a spot of some kind of incredibly sticky Indian food sauce that I missed when I washed the table.  It got onto the inside of the cover, and when the cover was closed it got on the screen.  Crap!  I have to get something to clean the screen with, and I’m just going to replace the stupid case.  I’m pissed at myself.

 

Oh we’ll.

RPM Day 16

Okay!  I know!  Another day with no work done!  I’m sorry!  I have a life outside of RPM ya know!

Really, I haven’t done any work in a couple of days.  That should end today, or at least this long holiday weekend.  I hope to have all of the songs arranged and all of the rhythm guitars recorded by the time I go back to work.  That’s a tall order, but it should be doable.  I have a bunch of errands to run today so I might not get to anything until tomorrow, but I expect huge gains this weekend.

RPM Day 15

I did nothing yesterday. I sort of half heatedly tried to write lyrics but nothing came to me immediately and I stopped trying. That was the extent of my musical adventures yesterday. Sorry. I’m hoping for a big rhythm guitar recording push over the long weekend.

RPM Day 14

I had another slow, but not entirely unproductive day yesterday.  Song #13 is currently planned as the four part suite I talked about in yesterday’s update.  As of right now, parts A, C, and D have been sketched out.  A and C are on my iPad, while D is on my iPhone.  Again, I love living in the future.  B will need to be developed on my MacBook because I want to use a weird time signature and the iOS version of Garageband can’t do that.  I haven’t put any guitars onto these projects yet.  Maybe tonight or tomorrow I’ll get to that.

I also threw together another new project on my iPhone yesterday morning.  The structure is similar to another song that’s in the works, but if I should chose to keep it it will be song #14… which means FAWM could be completed this year.  I suppose that technically FAWM is complete now.  I have in fact written music for 14 new songs.  However, I don’t like to call the challenge complete until I have 14 complete songs, including lyrics and melodies.  That’s going to be the hard part this year, even more than usual.

My cold keeps getting worse.  I can barely talk right now, never mind sing.  I had planned to sneak some singing in here and there in the short space of time between my wife leaving for work and me leaving for work, but we’ve been car pooling on non-kid days.  I do have a vacation day scheduled for late in the month.  Hopefully I’ll be better by then, but I don’t think recording vocals for 14 songs in one day is really doable.

I’m going to have to figure something out.

RPM Day 13

Hello and welcome to day 13 of the 2013 RPM Challenge. Yesterday was not a complete waste, but it was close. The Bruins played the Rangers and lost in the shootout after a dramatic third period come back. This past weekend’s new episode of The Walking Dead reached iTunes and became available to my season pass. I had to watch that, right?

I did put a little more thought into the idea of a new suite type thingie. When I say “suite” I am thinking of something like “A Day in the Life” where you have a John Lennon song with a bit of a Paul McCartney song shoved into the middle. This time I’m thinking of three song fragments making up four sections of the suite. The A section will be a more or less complete song. I actually wrote something for this last night. It’s slow and riffy In E minor. The B section will be faster and in an odd time signature. I’ll probably do what I always do in this cases and write something in 7/8. I’ll change the key too, probably either A minor or B minor. The C section will be a reprisal of the A section, only shorter. Finally the D section will be something completely unrelated. I’m thinking really, really slow, quiet, as trippy as a non-drug user can make it, and instrumental. It will probably just end up being a long guitar solo. I’m also thinking of maybe going modal for this part. Mixolydian maybe?

Coming up with the B and D sections are my goal for tonight, but we have a few very important personal things to take care of today, so I might have to put it off until tomorrow.

I’m still thinking positive, but at the same time I’ve never had to record a vocal while suffering from a cold. This might all be a waste of time this year. Who knows.

RPM Day 12

Nothing new to report from yesterday. I had far more important things to do that left no time for music. In the interest of not posting nothing, I am thinking of an idea for another suite type, slightly longer form song. I tried that during RPM a couple of years ago and botched it big time. Maybe I can do better now.