https://hearthis.at/rpm-works-in-progress/rpm-2020-03-ipad-2820-6.26-pm/

I’ve had a decent recording day today.  I added the rhythm guitar to the last four acoustic songs, and one of the electric songs.  I’m bushed.  My back hurts, my hands hurt, my head hurts, but I got a lot done.

Les Paul into KTR into Two Bassbreakers… it sounds like overdrive heaven.  It’s so sensitive that every little touch rings out.  It’s very unforgiving too so every spec of sloppiness comes through, but it just sounds soo damn cool.  That file up above (assuming as always that it pulled into the post) will be deleted the next time I work on that song.  For now let’s just use it as an example of how groovy this setup sounds.  Also, the song is complete shit.  I’m only interested in the trashy goodness of the guitar sound.

I’m guessing within five minutes of posting this I’m going to be embarrassed by how shitty it really sounds.  Oh well.

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.

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 #1.  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?