Tag: Song Writing

March is Almost Over

I know that no one else on Earth gives even the slightest fuck about yet another stupid song writing project.  We all have much bigger fish to fry.  I don’t care.  You’re getting another March Music post and that’s all there is to it.

I’ve got three days left.  Tonight while watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I wrote the lyrics and the melody to the last three songs.  I now have three vocal parts to record, and six lead guitars to record.  I am hopeful that I can get them all done tomorrow, though that will require another trip to an empty parking lot for the three vocals.  No problem.

That will leave me with Sunday night, and Monday and Tuesday before and after work to mix the six remaining songs.  Easy Peasy, Lemon Squeezy.

Once that’s done all I will need to worry about is the global pandemic and the news stories detailing a growing sense of panic in some parts of the world… some of which are not too terribly far from me.

Until April 1st that is, when I start another month long writing challenge.

March Music

I finished two songs.  One last night and another just a few minutes ago.  I’d post them both here but hearthis.at is being a pain in the ass and not uploading the second song.  I couldn’t get the first one to upload last night either, but it worked this morning.

Both songs are crap, but they exist so there’s that.  If the second song ever uploads I’ll share it.  Until then, you’ll just have to settle for one stink burger.

 

Risky Behavior

I did two crazy things this morning and it’s still not even time to punch in to work.

  1. I left the house
  2. I recorded myself singing

It was risky behavior, not because I left the house.  Sure, I left the house but I never left the car.  I never even cracked the windows.  No, it was risky behavior because the security guard working at the strip mall whose parking lot I was hiding in buzzed me twice in his mall security mobile.  If he had come over to me I would have had to explain what I was doing and boy would that have been embarrassing.  I’m glad I avoided that hassle.

My mobile studio:

Untitled

Untitled

I’m a Terrible Musician

I finished two of my March Music songs today.  Everything’s done but the final mix.  I wrote two songs worth of melodies and lyrics, and then recorded two songs worth of vocals and lead guitars.

Given that these are the first two songs I’ve brought along this far this month it might be safe to assume they are my favorites of all of the things currently in progress (there are eight songs so far) and you would be correct.

After today’s contributions though, these are now officially the two worst songs I’ve ever written, the two worst vocal performances I’ve ever recorded, and the two worst guitar performances I’ve ever recorded.

I suck.

I tried to make myself feel better by going a little nutty with Hipstamatic.  Shake to Shuffle didn’t shake my current musical sucking.

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Guitars and Statistics

I doubled the number of songs with guitars recorded tonight.  I had three, now I have six.  They all suck and my attempts at keeping things low-fi are making them suck even more.  What can you do, right?  Two of the songs are in 7/8 time because prog, and two are in 3/4 time because… I don’t know, waltz maybe?

So… COVID-19.  WHO has declared it a pandemic.  Duh.  It is pretty global now so, yeah.  Pandemic.  Dig it?

I’m seeing all sorts of people calling the responses so far “panic”.  They don’t seem to get it.  It’s not panic, it’s resource management.  Every single infectious disease expert is telling us to put “social distance” into practice.  Why?  Resource management.  There are going to be x number of infections, based on the data we have from China, and y percent of those infections will require hospital care.  Finally, we only have z number of hospital beds available at any given time.  y is less than x, but y is greater than z.  Dig?  Statistically speaking there will be more infections requiring hospital care than there are hospital beds to put them in.  If we put “social distance” (I fucking LOVE that term and I’ve been practicing it since I was about four years old) into place then we spread out the infections over time, thus reducing the number of cases requiring hospital care at any one time so that suddenly y is less than z.  Boom.  Problem if not solved then partially alleviated.  Statistics, babie.  Stats for the win.

Read this from the New York Times: Flattening the Coronavirus Curve

Read this from WBUR: Harvard Global Health Expert: Mass. Hospitals Face Capacity Problem If Coronavirus Cases Spike Quickly

RPMarch 2020

Back in 2014 when I insanely did an album in a month project almost every month for the entire year, I started with RPM in February and then kicked off a new project in March.  I was looking at an old blog post where I referred to this 2nd month as RPMarch.  I also referred to how the nickname is ridiculously stupid, but I kept using it anyway.

Welp kiddies, RPMarch 2020 is well underway.  Three songs arranged with rhythm guitars.  One more is just a two bar guitar riff that I haven’t done anything with yet.  I will though, it’s mildly groovy in a dad-rock-bluesy kinda way (in other words it’s about as cool as rotting cheese).  I am such a tool.

The plan is simple.  Literally, that’s the plan.  Guitar, bass, drums, voice.  No doubling, just one rhythm guitar track played with as few punches as I can manage.  I’m also (gasp) not using any pedals (gasp, again).  I told you this was insane.  It’s just my Les Paul straight into my 15 watt Bassbreaker.  I’m not even using my tuner pedal.  Last Christmas I got a clip-on headstock tuner from my Secret Santa.  I’m using that.  I am only using one cable.  It’s utter madness!

191/365

Recording stuff before work also gives me a built in chance to cheat my way through the Flickr Photo a Day thingie. Happy day #191.

Just When You Thought it was Safe

Just when you thought it was safe to come to this page without being inundated with soul crushingly boring discussions about mind numbingly bad music…

I recorded some guitar today.  I snuck it in before I left for work.  Nothing special, no doubling, no multiple amps.  I didn’t even use any pedals, just straight into the amp.  I can almost hear r/guitarpedals screaming in horror from here.

Untitled

Could I Be That Dumb Again?

In March of 2014, after finishing my February RPM album, I started an album-in-a-month thing.  I didn’t finish.  In April I started another one, even though March was still out there.  I didn’t finish that one either.  In May I finished both March and April.  In June I started another one and finished it (yay).  In July, August, and September I did the 50 songs in 90 days challenge, and in the process completed an album-in-a-month each month.  In October I took a break and did half an album-in-a-month.  In November I did NaSoAlMo… an album-in-a-month.  In December I started one but somehow lost more than half of my GarageBand files and ended up with a little less than half an album-in-a-month.

So… when I woke up this morning, a telecommute day, I looked over at the corner of my room where all of my gear is still set up and thought to myself…

Could I be that dumb again?

I don’t know.  Maybe.  First I have a new episode of Star Trek Picard to watch.  Priorities, kids… priorities.

One Last RPM Post

I am still waiting on the good folks over at RPM headquarters to mark my album as received.  It usually takes a little while for them to acknowledge everyone’s submissions so I’m not concerned.  There was also the issue they had with the site crashing on the 29th so they let everyone have an extra day to check things in.  I had all of that done before noon on the 1st.

Here is my entry on the RPM profile page:

2020 Album name:

I Only Believe in Truth

Received

–

Date submitted:

02/29/2020

2020 Preferred Track name:

We’re Coming for You

About this preferred track:

Simple (mostly) 12-bar recorded mostly live.

About this album:

My original idea was half electric and half acoustic. That went out the window quickly and I ended up with a mostly disjointed mess of songs that are not so bad.

Favorite moment:

I used to be a sax player first and foremost, but once I started playing guitar while I was in high school I became a full time guitar player. On this album I decided to see if I could still play the sax. I can. Not well, but I can still do it. That felt great.

Words of wisdom:

I lost a full week due to a family vacation, though I did mix a few of the songs while sitting in a hotel in Disney World (we stayed at the Yacht Club). I was able to find the time to get all of the tracking done in plenty of time. You can do it if you need to, you just need to be creative with your time management.

Lessons learned:

I can still play the saxophone. A guitar played through two amps just sounds better than a guitar part played through one amp. Writing out a melody prior to writing the lyrics or sitting at a mic lead to me writing much more creative melodies that were not only more fun (and harder) to sing, but lead to songs that overall seem more interesting to me.

I also wrote a blog post during lunch today to act as a sort of recap for the month. Everything I wrote had been written on this blog at some point or another (except maybe the bit at the end about wishing I could change my mind on the sequencing).

I did it.  That’s nine years in a row with a finished album by March 1st.  I know that in terms of the real world it’s silly and stupid and not important, but for me it’s a huge thing and the feeling of accomplishment I feel cannot be overstated.

The finished product doesn’t look anything like what I planned.  I knew I was going to lose a full week to a family vacation so I kept my expectations kinda low.  I wanted 10 songs.  Five arranged for an electric three-piece rock band, and five arranged for an acoustic group in a coffee shop: Acoustic guitar, cajon and hand percussion, alto saxophone, and vocals.

It didn’t take me long to change the 10 song plan to 14 songs (seven of each type).  That was simply due to me writing too much music.  Even the 7/7 plan went down the tubes as I kept writing electric songs long after I should have stopped.  I ended up with seven acoustic songs and 11 electric songs.

If that wasn’t overdoing it enough, as I was working on a couple of the acoustic songs I starting thinking that they would sound pretty good with a set of drums instead of just hand percussion.  Eventually all seven of them had bass, drums, and electric guitar parts added and I ended up with two different mixes.  One for the coffee shop and one for a rock band.  So now instead of 18 possible mixes to use for the final album I had 25.

I thought about doing a three sided album where side one was all electric, side two was all coffee shop (my coffee shop analogy is starting to get annoying, but I’m rolling with it), and side three was band mixes of acoustic songs.

I scrapped that idea too.  Instead I went through all of the acoustic songs and picked the mix I thought sounded best and then went through all 18 songs and sorted them into three categories: Good, Kinda Good, and Crap.  Two songs went into the crap bucket, and three into kinda good.  I decided to drop them all from the final album and just go with the 13 that landed in the good bucket.

Here they are… 13 disjointed songs that no longer fit to any theme or structure, but which were the least offensively bad of the batch:

I Only Believe in Truth

So what did that leave me with?  Seven alternate mixes and five outtakes.  Two of the outtakes were acoustic so I really had five alternates of album tracks, five outtakes, and two alternate mixes of outtakes.  12 leftover tracks.  I figured the alternate mixes of the album tracks were all still pretty okay so I packed them all together into an alternate RPM album:

I Only Believe in Alternates and Outtakes

The saddest part of all of this is that last night I was listening through the dropped songs and I really think I should have kept one of them.  If I had paid a little more attention during the sequencing I would have made a better decision and the final album would have been a little different.  I am afraid that when I listen to the main album I’ll decide there were things I should have dropped.

Oh well.  February is over.  As with all RPM Challenges it’s now time to figure out what I want to do next.

What do I want to do next?

So yeah… what do I do next?

Guitar Goofy

Here’s one of the songs I finished today.  I started this a day or two before we left for Florida but I never got a chance to add the guitars.  I was able to carve out enough time to do it today.

It’s goofy… I own three Gibson guitars.  This song used them all.  The rhythm guitar is my 1979 ES 335 Pro, the melody/solo coming mostly out of your left speaker is my 2018 SG Standard, and the melody/solo coming mostly out of your right speaker is my 1978 Les Paul Custom.

Silly, but fun.

I took a picture of each guitar too but one of them didn’t make it to Flickr and I don’t know why.  It’s on my phone, but my phone is in the other room so you’ll just have to wait.