Has this been the most productive three day weekend of my musical life? It very well could be. Two songs finished. Two songs ready to mix. Five other songs in progress. Today’s songs are definitely weaker than yesterdays, but they don’t ask how good, they ask how many. Am I right?
It’s now 41/87.
50/90 and FAWM are the same people. Why then can I host the songs I add to my FAWM account at alonetone, but I cannot for 50/90. I’m a little ticked off right now.
Anyway, the first songs I recorded using GarageBand were all about Hurricane Irene. Wouldn’t you just know that on the day a big writing project starts we get another hurricane? Arthur was just a rain storm by the time it reached us, but it’s still song worthy.
I’m planning on keeping better track of which guitar I use for which parts of which songs. Why? I don’t know, leave me alone. For this one, the rhythm guitar is the Strat and the leads are the Les Paul.
One song finished, forty-nine to go, and 87 days left.
The day isn’t over yet, but as of right now I have six songs in progress…
Four of them are finished.
It’s been a productive two days, eh?
I have officially gotten further on 50/90 than in any years past.
In other words, I’ve done something. There are three things going, one of which is already fleshed out. I’ve even set up a soundcloud account to hold any works in progress.
So far so good, but there is so much further to go.
A little mini-suite. I had my 10 songs underway for my June album in a month project and like a doofus I threw together an extra song at the last minute, and made it three songs in one. (I then added two more, because I’m dumb).
Mostly this was an excuse to add an acoustic guitar (my Takamine 12-string) and a Gibson electric (ES 335 Pro) to a project that had been 100% Stratocaster to that point.
One night recently my two step kids and I all had a really difficult time falling asleep. That lead to some anxiety among the kids who thought that the inability to sleep was a sign that there was something wrong with them. I reassured them that it happens to all of us once in a while and that they should just relax, and then I wrote a song about not being able to sleep because of nightmares. I am a lyrical hypocrite. Accept it, I have.
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Here is the iOS mix.
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June Music is now as done as done can be. It’s 11:45pm on July 3rd. 50/90 officially starts in 15 minutes. I, however, will wait until morning because I am exhausted.
G’Night everyone!
This is a June throw away. I wanted to put 8 bars of acoustic guitar on one of the June songs. When I finished I just opened a new project and threw down the first things that came to me. A vocal with some live and let live lyrics, a ton of reverb, and a ton of delay later…
we have a throw away.
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For completeness sake, here’s the iOS mix.
I set out on June 1st to write and demo 10 songs. When June ended I had 10 complete songs and three more that were still incomplete. As of this moment, all three of the extras have been recorded. One has been mixed, I posted it the other night. The other two had vocals recorded yesterday and today. One of them is in three separate parts but will still probably be only five or six minutes long. No prog masterpieces here. The other one is just a little thing for 12-string and vocal. Nothing complicated. If I can mix them tonight, then I’ll have a clean slate for the start of 50/90 tomorrow.
Talk about over complicating things!
This was meant as just a little finger picking noodle. I am hopeless as a finger picker and did this more as an exercise than anything else. It’s four tracks of guitar, all with a different picking pattern. I was curious if I could accidentally come up with something along the lines of the awesome stuff Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett used to do in Genesis. I didn’t, but at least it’s finger picked. The chorus is dumbed down. It’s only two tracks. The break part where the drums go away and the cello comes in (yes, I am a prog nerd) used a pick. I can only do so much, you know?
What are the lyrics about? Well, some days completely suck, but other days don’t. If you persist you can get to the non-suck. That’s sort of the point. I spent all of 10 minutes writing them. Gimme a break, okay?
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Here is the iOS mix too.
I started a new song tonight, because I’m an idiot. It was really just an exercise. I can’t finger pick to save my life, so I quadruple tracked a little eight bar thing with a different finger picking pattern on each track. I then worked it into a song. 3:15 of song later I had four tracks of rhythm guitar, one track of lead guitar, drums, an upright bass, and a cello. That’s right, kids, a cello.
It wasn’t until it was all done and I listened back and realized the four different finger pick patterns and the chord changes combined to form…
A Led Zeppelin song.
Oh for crying out loud!
I keep talking about the left over song from May that I was adding to the pile of June songs. Here it is. Just a dopy little 12-bar blues that was really just an excuse to write something on my new Strat. In the end, it’s kind of a fun little groove.
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Here is the iOS mix.
Inside the Red Head's Head 