Tag: singing

My Voice is Still Broken

I spent the last three hours in meetings and I was talking quite a bit through all of them. My voice is almost gone. It’s mostly just a croaky, squeaky mess right now. I drank about 14 ounces of liquid (grape juice, babie) over that time, but it seems like it was a losing battle.

I haven’t tried to sing much since discovering my voice was damaged over the last weekend. Anything I have sung (in the car, driving places) has been in a low register. Low notes good. High notes bad. I was thinking on my drive to Tewksbury last night that I was hitting higher notes (while singing along to a Pineapple Thief record) than I was on Sunday (while singing along to a U2 record). I don’t know if that’s the case anymore. My voice is shot.

I need to stop talking. That should be easy enough for me.

It’s Cold Out There

Yesterday I skipped a car music opportunity because it was seven degrees out. Today when the question of to car music or not to car music arose I checked the temperature again. It was eight degrees out. Okay, that’s warm enough. Off we go!

I had six songs queued up to record vocals. I did two. I worked on one, and then ran the heater in the car for a few minutes and worked on the second. My voice was still feeling okay after two songs. The battery on the laptop was still good. I hadn’t been outside for very long so the clock was in good shape. Why did I stop after two? Because sometimes sitting out in the cold has a negative effect on the old bladder. I had to pee. If not for that I might still be out there yelling.

I’m hoping to go out again tomorrow and pick off another couple, and then wrap it up next week. Monday if possible, but I am off work again on Wednesday so maybe wait until then.

Now the obligatory drive-home-through-the-center-of-town pic!

As a bonus, there’s also this picture that was snapped accidentally while trying to open up the camera app.

RPM Update

Well, my plans for recording vocals more or less went down the shitter. I had Monday off for the holiday, and I took vacation days on Tuesday and Wednesday. The plan was to sing my ass off on the two vacation days, after using the three day weekend to get all the backing tracks done.

I got the backing tracks done, but my beloved wife Jennifer came down with a really awful cold. She called in sick yesterday, so I spent some time writing lyrics and melodies and whispering them into a mic because I’m too big a pussy to sing when there are people in the house.

This morning, my beloved wife Jennifer went to work and I immediately set up the mic and went to work. I decided to save the songs that I worked on yesterday until last, thinking that I should focus on the songs that still need lyrics to be written first. Good move. I finished three songs before Jen texted me that she was coming home. She gave it a shot, but she was too sick to stay in the office and risk passing it on to everyone else. She came home and telecommuted. That means in two vacation days off of work I managed a whopping three vocals. I am screwed.

I have my telecommute day tomorrow, so I can crank out some singing before work and during lunch. Over the weekend there will be a couple of hours where I will be able to be alone and get a little more singing done. Then I have to find time next week, when there isn’t any time to be had. Like I said, I’m screwed.

The good news is, there are a total of 13 songs with lyrics written, including the three that I’ve already recorded. If I can quickly record vocals for the rest of those and write and record one more, then I will be set for both RPM and FAWM.

Further good news, one of the songs with finished vocals is ready to mix. Guess what I’m doing tonight. So I have a goal to write and record 14 songs. The song that I finished tracking today is song number 18. I wrote the whole thing on my iPad last night, including the lyrics and melody, and recorded the whole thing today. I still have this half baked idea of sending in two 10 song CDs to RPM headquarters in Portsmouth. I actually started piecing together song #19 today. It’s just a 12-string and a little bit of a lyric so far, but it’s there. Getting to 20 songs is a given at this point. Finishing 20 songs feels like a pipe dream.

Of course the best news of all is that my brilliant, beautiful, beloved wife Jennifer is feeling much better this afternoon. Hopefully she’ll be right as rain tomorrow. I hate it when she’s sick and I can’t make her all better. Poor sweetie.

What was I Thinking

I’ve been warming up for RPM by digging out old songs and recording new demos.  I have done this the last two years as well.  This year most of the focus has been on 1997-2000 when I was in a band called Prime Meridian with Mike and Maria (and John and Dave and Leah and Tracey all at varying times).  I’ve got six of those songs ready to mix and I think I might try and crank out two or three more as well.  I have three old RPM songs left over from last January, and both last March and April had songs that qualify as well so I’ll use those as well when the time comes to make a playlist out of this stuff.

I’ve also started digitizing old cassette tapes and I’ve found a few decent sounding songs there as well.  I started working on two of them today.  They were both written and recorded in the MIDI room at Northeast Broadcasting School, probably in 1994 or 95.  Those two along with another that was actually used by Prime Meridian (and might have been used by Break Even too if I’d been up for it) were things I’d written on a keyboard and pieced together with other random things to make songs.  Kinda like what I do now with RPM.  Actually, there were probably 20 such songs before I left that job, but only 3-5 or so are worth listening too.  Back then though I wasn’t thinking in terms of actual songs.  These were arranged many months after they were recorded in the sequencer.  I also had never really been a singer before.

One thing I learned a couple of years ago when I was messing with demoing songs from the band I played in back in high school is that we never took little things like breathing into account.  Well, that was still the case in the mid-90s too.  I just finished tracking one of those songs and OH MY GOD MY HEAD HURTS!  I have been doubling all of my vocal tracks this time (rhythm guitar too) and the vocal lines are so long that they all cram in together without any room for breathe.  I’ve been breaking things up so that I sing one line on one track and the next on another, and then I double everything.  I don’t know how I ever could have considered putting something like this together as a song.  It’s so ridiculously difficult to sing.  No one could ever do it live.  Ever.

All of the singing has literally given me a headache.

Ouch, babie.

RPM Challenge – Day 23

I am about to leave to bring my step daughter to softball practice.  90 minutes later I will pick her up.  The plan?  Drop her off, find a parking spot as far away from civilization as humanly possible, crack out the MacBook and record at least two songs worth of vocals.  

Think I can do it?  I did it Thursday night when I dropped the kids off for karate, and I actually wrote the basics for songs #10 and 11 in the same parking lot two weeks ago.

Wish me luck!

What I Learned Today

Here are a couple of little things that I learned about myself today.

From about 6:30am through about 1:30pm I pretended I was a musician.  I took the four remaining unfinished songs from my 2007 RPM failure and worked them over good.  Three of the songs had rhythm guitar/bass/drums finished.  The one remaining only had drums and bass finished.

So what did I get done today?  Wrote and recorded lyrics and melodies for all four, finished the one missing rhythm guitar part, and recorded the lead guitar on three of the four songs. 

So you’re still wondering what it was I learned about myself today, right?  Well here goes.

I learned that for me, practice is wicked important.  I am way out of practice both as a guitar player and a singer.  It shows most clearly in my pathetic sense of rhythm.  My timing has been just the tiniest bit off all day long.  At a casual listen it sounds almost all right, but when I am paying attention everything just feels sloppy.  It’s… off. 

I’ve always had a problem keeping myself in phase, as it were, but lack of practice seriously exacerbates the issue.  (Yes, I just used exacerbates in a sentence that wasn’t referring to Shaun of the Dead.  100 points for me!)

I also re-learned just how important calluses are when playing guitar.  I needed about 10000000 takes to get the leads right on one of these terrible songs today and I now have the searing agony in my finger tips to prove it.  The blisters are forming.

The good news is, I am close to having four (4) more songs finished.  Bad timing and crappy soloing aside, that’s not bad for a random Tuesday, eh?

Two More

I’m up to eight songs completed now.  I just finished both of the songs that I had to go back and rerecord the vocals for.  Both songs have really been frustrating to me.  I thought I had the vocals done a week ago, but after a later listen I just couldn’t live with them… and give how bad most of the crap I leave in can be, that is really saying something.

This one needed the most work of the two.  It’s kind of a snooze.  I didn’t do a 12-bar blues this year, so this sort of takes the place of a slow blues tune.  I guess.

This next song was titled “So Frustrating” before it became a frustrating mess.  Sort of prophetic of me, eh?  Almost like I knew what was come.  I didn’t, but it seems that way now.  This is one of a couple of attempts this year to make 6/8 time rock.  I like this one, except for all the clipping.  Urgh.

I’m packing up for now.  It’s 5:22, I’ve been at this since about 7:00 or so.  My head is pounding, possibly from the headphones, and just as possibly from the fact that I have not had any caffeine today, and my fingers won’t play the guitar the way I want them to anymore.  I might sneak in another one later tonight, and I will definitely try to get one or two done tomorrow before work.  Only three days left.

I’m cautiously optimistic.