Guitar parts have been recorded. Some of them, anyway.
Tag: Rpm Challenge
Special Announcement
I have a special announcement to make.
For today’s session the part of the recording studio will be played by my telephone.
heh heh
I freakin’ love living in the future.
RPM Day Three
I’m actually losing track of how many things I have in the musical pot right now. I think I have four on the iPad and one on the iPhone. Yesterday I added some pieces to the piano melody I had on the phone. I like it significantly less now than yesterday, but it’s still alive. I added two new things on the iPad. One is a quiet little electric piano thing that I’m not sure what to do for the guitar. I can’t do anything without a guitar part, ever. What would be the point, right? But this one… kinda doesn’t need a rhythm guitar. I’ll squeeze something in somewhere. The other thing I played with will probably be dumped. I was testing the lightning cable adapter by plugging in my guitar. I recorded the first thing that popped into my head. At the time I was pleased, but now I think it’s a riff that is awfully similar to one that became an RPM song a couple of years ago. I’ll try to salvage the idea somehow.
Is it possible that I might have five songs in the works and it’s only February third?
Wicked!
RPM Day 2
The RPM Challenge officially began for me last night at a little before 7:00pm. My wife ordered take out from our favorite Indian restaurant. I was in the car coming home from work so I drove straight there to pick it up. I arrived about 10 minutes early so I started noodling on GarageBand on my iPhone. I got a couple of little melodies down on a piano. There’s not much there, but it will be developed into something useable. After dinner my wife was watching TV so I took out my iPad and pulled a second idea out of my ass. The second one is bass and drums. This morning I woke up and started on idea #3, using the iPad again. This one is bass, drums, and an organ.
I’m thinking of making one process change this year. Last year I would come up with a couple of riffs or progressions or whatever and arrange them into song structures on the iPad. GarageBand for iPad is really limited in that respect so this time I am going to work out a handful of related parts and transfer them to the Mac before arranging them together. I’ll do voices and leads on the Mac, but all of the individual sections will be done on the iPad. Assuming, of course, that all of it ports successfully. We shall see.
The project is underway!
Two Days, Nine Hours, and 54 Minutes
Two days, nine hours, and 54 minutes to go until the start of the 2013 RPM Challenge. I have done nothing to prepare. Here is an off the top of my head to-do list to prepare for my sixth attempt at completing the challenge:
Practice my guitar. I have no calluses on my finger tips. Pain is inevitable.
Decide on the platform I want to focus on. Last year I ended up doing the whole thing on my iPad. I think I want to go back and forth between the iPad and the Mac this time. I expect the bulk of the writing and rhythm section tracking to be done on the iPad, but I also think I want to expand a little in an attempt to make the drum tracks sound a little more adventurous. On the Mac I can move stray notes around so that they sound in time without messing with the quantize settings. I want drum fills that are faster than just 16th notes.
Put the MacMini in the cellar back together. I had moved a lot of computer equipment around a few months ago and the MacMini was taken apart. I plan on using that to record vocals at least. I still want to run my mic through my Mackie board so that I can EQ my crappy voice. I’m not able to do that if I plug directly into the iPad. I went through the board into the iPad last time and it worked, but I would like the added flexibility of working on a full GarageBand for vocals. In Theory at least.
Clean the workspace in the cellar. It’s a mess down there. Really.
Test the lightning cable adapter on my New iPad. Wouldn’t it suck if the adapter didn’t work and I couldn’t plug external sources into the New iPad? Yes, it would suck.
If I plug into the JamUp app, can I record into GarageBand? I’m 99.999% sure I cannot, but it is still worth looking into.
Sign up for FAWM. Really. I signed up for RPM last week, but the FAWM website is not going to open until tomorrow. It’s going through a complete redesign. While I’m on the topic, the website is fawm.org. NOT fawm.com. You don’t want to go to fawm.com. Trust me.
Find some inspiration. I was thinking about using the founders of the towns of Methuen, MA and Salem, NH as characters somehow. I doubt I will though. I’ll probably just write another 10 songs about my cat.
I’m sure I’ll think of 100 things to add to this list between now and the start of February, but for now this is enough. And by enough I mean enough to make me start musically panicking.
February Music
January 23, 2013. We are eight days and a wake up away from the start of album in a month month. Otherwise known as FAWM and the RPM Challenge. I don’t feel mentally prepared. I felt the same last year when February arrived and yet managed to finish both projects on time for the first time ever. Maybe not being ready is a good thing.
If that’s the case, then maybe it’s a good thing that the 2013 version of both websites still hasn’t launched. Looks like I’m not the only one who is unprepared.
I plan on giving both challenges a shot, as always, but after finishing both on time last year the drive is lessened by quite a large amount.
We shall see.
February is Music Month
Today is January 8, 2013. Three weeks and four days from now will be February 1, 2013, and you all know what that means…
Robbie starts blitzing you all with bad homemade music. It’s still far enough away that both rpmchallenge.com and fawn.org are not even up yet. That doesn’t mean I’m not already thinking about them.
As always, I hope to come up with a lyrical concept to tie all of the songs together, but usually all I get is songs about how my cat is really a super villain out for world domination. No one has ever accused me of being the next Bob Dylan. Maybe in terms of my singing, but never my lyric writing.
I’m looking forward to this once again. If I write one song that doesn’t suck then I will have out done every other February writing project attempt in my past.
Rock on!
My 2012 in Pictures – Part Deux
Yeah, I did a my-year-in-pictures thing the other day. It was fun. What the hell, thought I, why not do it again? This time I’ll run fast and loose with the whole one-pic-from-each-month thing. I’m crazy like that.
We have to get our pics of the Sands Bridge in Methuen before she collapses. Or maybe I should say before she finishes collapsing. It’s already started. Also, I don’t think I found a relative in the Grove Street Cemetery, but who knows?
In February I finally finished an RPM Challenge on time. It only took me five tries. We also got a new bed. Jen’s penguin approved.
In March, the kids and I became wilderness explorers. Hipstamatic came along for the ride. Actually, we just wandered around in the woods behind our house for a little while. It was fun.
April in San Diego. I want to go back RIGHT NOW!
May gave us baseball, Bar Harbor, and my first up close New England Lighthouse.
The picture pickin’s are slim in June, but we did get a new Rush album (and it is awesome) and we got another fantastic piano recital from the kids.
July offers more choices after a spontaneous trip to Boston, and a week long stay in Maine that included some time in the mountains of New Hampshire.
In August we went to the Top of the Hub for the first time in my life. The views of my city were spectacular. We also spent some twilight time on Hampton Beach.
September had mountain waterfalls, leaf peeping, my first ever attempt at photo-walking in Tewksbury, and more Rush.
October continues to belong to Washington, DC.
The camera didn’t come out much in November, but I did torture the cat, and my wife, with my camera phone, and we did celebrate Turkey Day.
December had more mountains, more mountain streams, and Christmas.
And there we have a second view of my 2012 in pictures. Forgive the gratuitousness.
Happy New Year (again).
My 2012 in Pictures
In January I took my swanky new lens out and about in Methuen to see what it could do. These trips usually focus on the Spicket River, but this time I went to the Merrimack.
As usual, February focused on the RPM Challenge. This year my saxophone came out of retirement.
In March I finally managed to get a few pictures of the night sky that only mostly sucked, as opposed to the normal total suck. This is the Moon, Venus, and Jupiter, all at once.
April brought us back to San Diego and I swear, each time we go there it gets harder and harder to come home.
In May we brought the kids to Fenway Park. Dustin Pedroia and the Red Sox won the game, but went on to their worst season in 100,000 years.
June was very quiet, photography wise, but we did get another piano recital in the wonderful Nevins Library in Methuen.
In July we spent a week on Long Lake in Maine. I managed to accidentally take a few pictures that didn’t suck.
In August we spent a day wandering around Portsmouth, NH including Strawbery Banke.
In September we took the kids to see Rush. Now they know what I’ve been talking about all this time.
In October we took the kids to Washington, DC and tried our best to see everything in the short time we were there.
In November I didn’t post a single picture taken with my D90. I did, however, learn that this existed and it made me feel a little better about the human race in general.
In December my wife and I ran off together to the mountains for a few days. It was wonderful to get away.
And there you have it. A brief synopsis of my 2012, in pictures. I could have posted hundreds of pictures. Maybe I will later on.
Inside the Red Head's Head 