Tag: Song Writing

October Music

When I mentioned that the songs for October’s album in a month weren’t so much songs as technical exercises, this is what I meant:

Polyrhythms. One guitar, the bass, and the drums are in one time signature. The other guitar is in a different time signature. Dig?

All of the tracking for October is finished, and now the first mix down is finished too. Happy Halloween.

Car Music

I finished the vocals for October. Done and done. Just short little one line thingies. I added lots of harmony to some of them to make it more interesting.

I was joined in the movie theater parking lot by not one but two student drivers. One with an actual auto school and the other just learning on their own.

I just need to add some additional guitars to a few of the October songs and then all the tracking will be done. I also started mixing a re-recording yesterday but still have some work to do.

The last week of October will be very musical. Everything needs to be done before The Mandolorian season two debuts next weekend.

This is the way.

Getting There

As of 20 minutes ago, all of the rhythm guitar parts are done for what is passing for an October album in a month this month. I’ve got four songs with vocals (barely) and six to go. Two of the songs already have lead guitars too. Sort of. I guess.

Another Song

Maybe I should hire a singer. I think I hurt myself singing this one.

What’s Freddy Mercury doing these days? Ian Gillan? Ronnie Dio? Brad Delp? Hell, Graham Bonnet? Joe Lynn Turner? Naw, not Joe Lynn Turner. Whatever.

Brain Droppings

Random stuff coming……….

I am very pleased that I was able to cast my ballot in the presidential election early and safely. My state and my city have seriously come through for me in these unhealthy, uncertain times. I am proud of what we the people have accomplished in this regard and I am proud that as an American I was able to have my opinion heard.

However…

The downside of voting early is that November 3rd, election day, is kinda irrelevant to me now. Maybe not irrelevant, but more like unimportant. At least until the returns start coming in. I go on social media and have a thousand people asking thousands of other people, what are your voting plans, or how are you going to vote, or are you excited to vote, or everyone get out the vote, etc, etc, and my response is… been there, done that. I took election day off, just in case. I should have taken the day after so I could stay up all night watching returns. On second thought, that would probably be a bad idea. I tend to get a little… animated when fascism is taking over my country and I don’t want to put any added stress on my ticker, or wake up the neighbors, or anything like that.

Basically though… I’m done, there isn’t much excitement about the process left.

Counting today, there are nine days left in October. At the start of the month I decided I wasn’t going to do an album in a month. A few days ago I changed my mind. I’ve got 10 songs in the pipeline. They are all short. They are all weird. They are all simple things based around little poly-rhythmic tricks, or guitarmonies. I haven’t written any lyrics or melodies yet. None of the songs will be instrumentals, but they will all be mostly instrumentals. There aren’t going to be any hooks. Vocal tracks will be short and simple and lyrics will probably just be a line or two. The point of it all is to hear a guitar playing in 4/4 in your left ear, and a guitar playing almost the same thing in 7/8 in your right ear, and how they occasionally line up with each other. Or, songs where the “melody” is just three guitars with tons of fuzz playing in harmony.

In other words, October Music is Robbie’s “I’ve been listening to King Crimson” month.

I still can’t believe that Massachusetts had 1,000 new Covid-19 cases yesterday. The last time we’d had 1,000 cases was in May. All of the progress we made has been flushed down the toilet. How are we as a society capable of landing a space ship on an asteroid 300 million kilometers away and bring it home with a sample of asteroid rocks, but not able to stay in our houses so we don’t get sick. Why are we incapable of just wearing friggin masks and washing our friggin hands?

I thought I was going to have more this morning, but I’m letting myself get distracted. In closing, let me paraphrase my favorite line from this week’s episode of Archer.

I’m your rampage sherpa.

Talk to you all later. Happy Friday.

You are a Nerd, Robert

I just did something super nerdy. I went to my alonetone.com page and counted the number of songs I’ve written and recorded since February 1st. The re-recorded songs are in the recorded list but not the written list. Also, a few of the songs written in February were recorded twice. That’s why the two totals aren’t the same.

How many songs have I written since February?

I have written 112 songs.

How many songs have I recorded since February?

I have recorded 130 songs.

How many of the 112 new songs are worth listening to?

There are between zero and three songs that are worth listening to. Probably zero.

You are a nerd, Robert.

Progress

All of the non-MIDI tracking for the re-do’s is done. All that’s left to do is clean up some bass and drum things and mix.

For October’s album-or-whatever in a month, I have five songs underway and they all have rhythm guitars. I’m not really going for normal songs, more like little exercises. They are all about two minutes long and for the most part have a little twist to them. One has two guitars playing the same thing but off by one beat. A couple have one guitar playing in 4/4 and another in 7/8. It’s all just goofy fun. They might all end up instrumental, I don’t know.

Tunes

Four out of nine songs on the current re-recording list are now complete. I think this is the first one of these things that doesn’t live up to the original (which was from the 2012 RPM Challenge and sounds like a dog turd). I lost something here and I’m not sure what.

The drums at the very beginning… if you speed up the tempo, is it “I Feel Fine”? I think it is but I’m too embarrassed at my possible theft to go and listen to find out for sure.

New, New Music

Last night I said the pics I took of my guitar were better than the guitar playing. Today they are about even, maybe.

I worked on four songs. Three of them are new. I wasn’t going to do an album in a month this month as I was going to dedicate the whole time to The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project. Instead I started messing with some lame little proggie ideas. I’m thinking I could sneak in five of them by Halloween and call it a half an album in a month. Something like that.