Tag: RPM2020

School Wimps

I wanted to record yesterday before work but we got ~one tiny inch of snow and my step son’s school district cancelled for the day. It sucks but okay, whatever.

I was going to sneak in a little recording before work this morning, after everyone else left the house, but it’s drizzling a tiny bit so the school district set a two hour delay.

There is no ice here. There are puddles of rain water but no ice. There had better be a frozen effing tundra two towns north of here where Harry goes to school.

Screw you, school district. Stop messing with my friggin album!

12 Strings

My RPM album project is now officially electric/acoustic.

I added 12-string guitar to song #9.  That means the rhythm guitars are done on two songs.  Let’s see if I can sneak another one in before work tomorrow.

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Checking In After Day Four – #RPM2020

I just posted this onto the RPM Challenge site:

I’m up to eight songs now. Seven have the song form sketched out and one has rhythm guitars (technically that’s a day five thing as I did it before work this morning).

Three of the songs are going to go with the acoustic guitar/hand percussion arrangement. My initial hope was to have five acoustic and five rawk-power-trio. Not sure how that’s going to shake out though.

The RPM Challenge needs at least 10 songs. FAWM needs 14.5 (it’s a leap year). RPM does not need newly written songs, FAWM, by definition, does. Given that I’m losing the entire last week of the month I have more or less decided to give FAWM a miss this year and shoot for 10 songs. If I can get two more and then get them all recorded quickly I might pull some old ideas into the project.

Last summer I spent a day with my acoustic 12-string, sitting on the patio, noodling chord progressions and strummy riffs. I was thinking of doing the whole acoustic guitar/hand percussion/sax thing then too and I actually started a few decent sounding ideas. I never finished them though. I might revisit some of them. I also did an album-in-a-day project a couple of months ago and there was one song that I might want to re-record.

It all depends on how quick I can get through the songs I’ve already started. We’ll see.

As mentioned, I was able to get a little recording in this morning.  I finished all of the rhythm guitar parts for song .  I double tracked it, as usual, but this time each take was two tracks, for a total of four tracks.  I have been wanting to record through two amps at once for ages.  I did it a few years ago but the two amps were both direct input into the computer, they weren’t mic’d.  Today, they were both mic’d.  Today it was… real.  I guess.

The signal path was my Les Paul into the Klon KTR overdrive pedal with the gain cranked into a Radial ABY box (one input split into two outputs) into both of my Fender Bassbreakers (the 15 watt version and the 18 watt channel on the 18/30) to two Shure SM57 mics.  I’m not sure what the reality of the situation is, but it sounded pretty flippin’ sweet to me!

Last year I made a rule stating I could not copy and paste sections of a song.  That means I couldn’t record a verse section of a song once and then use it for three verses, stuff like that.  I want to do that again this year, but the song I worked on today was kinda hard.  Not really hard, just a little hard.  It required a lot of takes to get everything kinda/sorta right.  Unfortunately that took a lot of time.  It actually took all the time I had available this morning.

Maybe I need to start waking up earlier?

158/365

Record Ready

I noodled a little into GarageBand tonight, just to check the mics and the USB interface. My new mic stand (that I bought last year but only took out of the box today) was a lemon. Otherwise, all is well. Now I just need guitar parts to record.

156/365

Checking In on Day 3 – #RPM2020

I just posted this to the RPM Challenge website.  Just checking in:

It feels like I’m off to a slow start but I don’t know if that’s accurate or not.

I have this vague idea of splitting the album into two, one being my usual three piece rock band kinda thing, and the other being an acoustic guitar/hand percussion/sax/voice thing.  The acoustic stuff will probably fall by the wayside but for now it’s still on.

I’ve got two songs sketched out for the rock side and one sort of unfocused idea for the acoustic.  The rock things are okay, the acoustic thing is garbage and should really end up in the trash.

That’s it so far.  I had a gig on the 1st and I was very pleased with the way I played.  Here’s hoping that carries through the month and I nail a few decent guitar parts.

I am hoping to get everything setup in my little corner of the bedroom tonight. Two amps, two mics, and the 8 input USB interface. If I can sneak in some recording too that would be great. We’ll see.

HTML Restrictions Suck

Well that’s no fun.

Back in the old days when I was writing on Blogger I could embed all sorts of fun stuff into my posts.  Anything you can put together inside of an HTML tag was fair game.  I used to put all sorts of goofy mp3 players and countdown clocks.  With both a gig coming and RPM about to start I thought it would be wacky to find some countdown clock websites that generate HTML code and put ’em onto a blog post.

I looked at three or four.  No dice.  They all use an HTML tag that wordpress.com blocks.

Aw, fiddlesticks.

Two days and about 4.5 hours until the gig.

One day and 7.5 hours until RPM.

That would have been so much cooler if it was a countdown clock.  Bummer.

Oh well, have a flyer (again).

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What the Hell is a Cajon?

I can’t remember when it was, maybe about two years ago?  I was listening to a cover band podcast and one of the hosts was talking about an acoustic duo he played in.  One guy played an acoustic guitar and sang, the other was a percussionist/singer who played a cajon.  I thought to myself, what the hell is a cajon?

It’s this.  It’s a box.  There is a pad on one side of it that has wire snares built into it.  If you slap the middle of the box you get a thump.  If you slap the edge you get a snare drummish snap.

Fast forward to October 2018.  I was in Epcot Center, at the cafe outside of Soarin’.  I was sitting at a table by my lonesome and I don’t remember why.  I wonder… was this Summer 2018 and not October 2018?  Maybe.  Whatever, it doesn’t matter.  I was thinking about a songwriting challenge, either NaSoAlMo or 50/90 and I was trying to think of things that I could do to mix up my usual workflow.  I thought about arranging a couple of songs for acoustic 12-string, a cello instead of a bass, and hand percussion instead of a drum kit.  I never did it, partly because the strings function in GarageBand for iOS kinda blows, but while looking at GarageBand Percussionists in the Drummer function I found one with a cajon.

This past summer, just before another trip to Disney World, I was working on 50/90 ideas and I came back to that guitar/cello/percussion idea.  I scrapped the cello for an upright bass at first, and I declared that all hand percussion would revolve around a cajon… because why the hell not?  Then I got a really crazy idea.  Why have a bass at all?  Why not just go 12-string, percussion, and voice.  That would be way out of my comfort zone.  Then the kicker came to me.  Where I would normally play lead guitar… play saxophone.  Oh we’re just one step beyond now!

Of course I never did any of that at all.

Well now we’re three+ days away from the RPM Challenge and I’m looking for ideas again.  Due to still another Disney World trip (this is becoming a trend) I am going to be in quite the time crunch.  I thought about maybe doing half of the songs as usual, and then half as trippy instrumentals.  Last year I did 20 songs, the equivalent of two RPM albums.  Maybe this year I stick to 10 songs but make it two separate five song EP’s.  Then I thought about that damn cajon again.  How about five rock songs, five trippy instrumentals, and five acoustic songs.  The rockers would be guitar/bass/drums/voice, the trippy instrumentals would be guitar/keys/bass/drums with shit loads of sound effects, and the acoustics would be 12-string guitar/hand percussion/alto sax/voice and the percussion would center on a cajon.  Three EP’s which would let me have a complete RPM project and a complete fawm.org project (which I haven’t even considered shooting for this year).  That sounds awesome.  Super awesome.  Super epic awesome.

Granted there is zero chance of it happening.  I’m going to end up with 10 bluesy rock songs in odd time signatures arranged for a bad power trio.  Eh, that would be cool too.

Three days, 10 hours until RPM officially kicks off.