Tag: Song Writing

50/90 – 35 Down, 15 to Go

I uploaded song #35 today. There are only 15 more to go.

Four have vocals and are ready for guitar leads.
Five have lyrics and are ready for vocals. (Tomorrow morning in the car?)
Six have all of the rhythm tracks done and are ready for lyrics.

That’s all that’s left. Only 16 days left in September. I can do it, he said with confidence he didn’t really feel.

I was going to put a song file onto this post, but all of the songs I’ve been finishing lately are pretty lame so maybe next time. Instead, watch this video of The Great Tony Levin demonstrating the Chapman Stick.

50/90: Time Running Out

There are 17 days left in the 50/90 Challenge. There are 17 days left in September. I’m running out of time. How did that happen? Where did the time go?

Two ready to mix, four ready for lead guitar, and and a whopping 11 ready for lyrics. Yikes!

If I live to see October without my hands completely turning traitor I’m going to alter my monthly writing/recording game. Instead of writing 10 new songs I’m going to go back to The Great Re-Recording Project of 2015 and do another batch of tunes. If I have time I’ll try to add a few new songs to the list, but that won’t be the priority. Quarantine Tunes Vol. II will happen.

In the meantime, we’re going to watch that Princess Bride script read over Zoom (I think) tonight. That should be fun, I’m looking forward to it. I don’t have a link though, so you’re going to have to Google it for more info. Sorry.

50 Guitars

I put rhythm guitars on four songs tonight and lead guitars on two.

I have to check my math here but… I think that’s 50 songs with rhythm guitars. 50/90 just hit a gigantic milestone. I still have a lot of lyrics and melodies to write and a lot of recording to do.

Guitar Like Crazy

I feel a little less mentally defective now. I spent an hour and a half or so playing the guitar. I recorded five songs worth of rhythm guitars and two songs worth of leads. My fingers are sore, my ears are sore, I’m covered with sweat.

I feel better.

I Need to Play

I haven’t played my guitar this week and the stir crazy is getting to me. I’ve done a lot of work on 50/90 but none of it on guitar. I’ve got eight songs with vocals recorded that are just waiting for leads. I have three that are ready for rhythm guitar. Tonight. I hope. All totaled, I’m up to 47 songs now. Three more to go and then all I have to do is the gigantic mountain of work left to finish them up.

The Agents of Shield re-watch is up to season five episode one. It opens with a montage set to a Talking Heads song. At least I think it’s a Talking Heads song. It’s definitely David Byrne singing. It lead me to the question: The year is 2020, is it time for me to give Talking Heads a try? I more or less ignored them back in the 80’s. Should I change my mind? Change my tune, so to speak?

Jen and I have been trying to exercise. I’ve been getting 30 minutes or so in each day for the last few days. I’ve been slacking a little today though. One of the things the Apple Watch activity app tracks is calories burned. I had the goal set at 640. I can’t remember if I set that or if it defaulted that way, but it’s been like that forever.

My SleepWatch app has been giving me notifications stating that I get better sleep if I burn 800 calories. That’s interesting. The last few exercise filled days have seen me going way above 800 and I have been sleeping a little better than normal. I guess that settles it. My activity app has been upped from 640 to 800 calories. Yup. I need to go for a 5-6 minute walk now.

Car Music

I had six songs ready for vocals. This morning, while sitting in the movie theater parking lot, I cranked out four of them… poorly… as usual.

It was foggy out so it was a little harder to see people around me. I saw a couple of dog walkers and a jogger, but that was it. There was a tractor trailer parked near my usual spot so I went someplace new on the other side of the lot. A mall security car did a slowish drive by. I don’t think he was checking on me, I think he was just slow.

On an unrelated note, I have not had breakfast. The last food I ate was just before 9:00pm. I won’t eat anything until lunch at 1:00pm. I am officially trying this 16:8 fasting shit on for size. Also, I am really hungry. Four hours to go!

Not Today, Maybe Tomorrow

I fully intended to get up early today and do car vocals. I actually did get up early but… As I mentioned last night… that last song I worked on… the lyrics were so bad. It just took the umph out of the situation, you know? I need to rewrite.

So… fasting. What’s up with that? Give yourself an eight hour window each day where you can eat to your heart’s (stomach’s?) content, then the other 16 hours you don’t eat. In my 56 seconds worth of Google “research” it looks like most people set their eating window at 1pm-9pm. Outside of breakfast, that works okay for me. I want to cut down on between meal sowing. Something like this could gimmick me into cutting back some. Also, my 56 seconds showed me that zero calorie drinks (water, diet soda) are allowed during the fasting times.

I found an app I wanted to try to use to help. I thought you’d plug in times and it would tell you when to eat. It doesn’t. You turn it on when you’re fasting starts (9pm) and it tells you when it’s over. Okay… I guess I’ll start this fad tonight at 9pm. consider today’s breakfast my breakie swan song. What the hell, it’s quarantine. Let’s jump on this (a/any) stupid bus.

After my horrid performance trying to predict the winners of the second round of the NHL playoffs, I went into the third round with a tiny bit of optimism. Then on Sunday night the West series started and my pick lost game one. That’s okay, I guess. It’s just putting my pick into a statistical hole that is too big for the majority of teams to crawl out of but that’s okay, right? Ugh. I had this bad feeling that when the East series started up last night there would be another crushing loss. I checked the score just before bed. Would Tampa crush my heart again? Nope. They were up 7-2. I checked the final score today. They won 8-2. I feel a tiny bit better now.

Television. Season two of The Boys is out. I forgot that Amazon released shows weekly. Crap. At least they put out three on the first day. They are good so far, but now I have to wait for Friday for episode four. On top of that, Jen and I started watching Cobra Kai. We plowed through the first season. It is so much better than I thought it would be. I expected it to be goofy and silly and a bit of a farce. It was, sort of. Not a lot though. It was just good. Yeah we saw the series finale coming miles away, but it didn’t lessen the effect. I’m looking forward to season two, and season three is supposed to be on the way. I’m paused on The Watchmen for the moment, but I’ll get back to it. Same with Breaking Bad. Eventually I’ll get to Lovecraft Country too. For now though… I’m up to season four episode 15 of Agents of Shield. The rewatch continues.

For now though. Let’s have a good work day on this, the first work day after Labor Day. The first work day after the symbolic last day of Summer. Today is probably in my top three least favorite days of the year.

Ugh.

A Little Guitar

I added some rhythm guitar to four songs today. It mostly went okay. There were a couple of moments when the tendinitis in my thumb decided to remind me it was there. I had to adjust a couple of things to resolve it, but it was really the first time that my hurt thumb was a factor, even though it was a very small factor.

Gear wise, I started out with what more or less is my Lizardfish setup. If there was a sound that I was forced to call “my sound” meaning my usual go-to it would be this. Gibson guitar into a Klon KTR into a Malaise Forever Black Lives Matter into a lowish wattage amp. In this case, two lowish wattage amps. Sometimes we’ll throw in either an MXR Uni-vibe or an MXR Phase 90 at the front of the pedal chain. Today I started out that way, complete with the Uni-vibe, but it just felt off. It could be that I haven’t played at all in a week or so, but I just wasn’t connecting. I ended up turning everything off except the Klon. Ahhh… there it is. The magic place.

Next thing I knew, I had blown through three more songs. Nice. Next time I might try zeroing the gain on the KTR and maxing the output and letting it push the two 15 watt amps into overdrive. That should be fine. It might be a touch louder than I usually get, but it should be fun.