Tag: Songwriting

RPM Day 2

The RPM Challenge officially began for me last night at a little before 7:00pm. My wife ordered take out from our favorite Indian restaurant. I was in the car coming home from work so I drove straight there to pick it up. I arrived about 10 minutes early so I started noodling on GarageBand on my iPhone. I got a couple of little melodies down on a piano. There’s not much there, but it will be developed into something useable. After dinner my wife was watching TV so I took out my iPad and pulled a second idea out of my ass. The second one is bass and drums. This morning I woke up and started on idea #3, using the iPad again. This one is bass, drums, and an organ.

I’m thinking of making one process change this year. Last year I would come up with a couple of riffs or progressions or whatever and arrange them into song structures on the iPad. GarageBand for iPad is really limited in that respect so this time I am going to work out a handful of related parts and transfer them to the Mac before arranging them together. I’ll do voices and leads on the Mac, but all of the individual sections will be done on the iPad. Assuming, of course, that all of it ports successfully. We shall see.

The project is underway!

Two Days, Nine Hours, and 54 Minutes

Two days, nine hours, and 54 minutes to go until the start of the 2013 RPM Challenge.  I have done nothing to prepare.  Here is an off the top of my head to-do list to prepare for my sixth attempt at completing the challenge:

Practice my guitar.  I have no calluses on my finger tips.  Pain is inevitable.

Decide on the platform I want to focus on.  Last year I ended up doing the whole thing on my iPad.  I think I want to go back and forth between the iPad and the Mac this time.  I expect the bulk of the writing and rhythm section tracking to be done on the iPad, but I also think I want to expand a little in an attempt to make the drum tracks sound a little more adventurous.  On the Mac I can move stray notes around so that they sound in time without messing with the quantize settings.  I want drum fills that are faster than just 16th notes.

Put the MacMini in the cellar back together.  I had moved a lot of computer equipment around a few months ago and the MacMini was taken apart.  I plan on using that to record vocals at least.  I still want to run my mic through my Mackie board so that I can EQ my crappy voice.  I’m not able to do that if I plug directly into the iPad.  I went through the board into the iPad last time and it worked, but I would like the added flexibility of working on a full GarageBand for vocals.  In Theory at least.

Clean the workspace in the cellar.  It’s a mess down there.  Really.

Test the lightning cable adapter on my New iPad.  Wouldn’t it suck if the adapter didn’t work and I couldn’t plug external sources into the New iPad?  Yes, it would suck.

If I plug into the JamUp app, can I record into GarageBand?  I’m 99.999% sure I cannot, but it is still worth looking into.

Sign up for FAWM.  Really.  I signed up for RPM last week, but the FAWM website is not going to open until tomorrow.  It’s going through a complete redesign.  While I’m on the topic, the website is fawm.org.  NOT fawm.com.  You don’t want to go to fawm.com.  Trust me.

Find some inspiration.  I was thinking about using the founders of the towns of Methuen, MA and Salem, NH as characters somehow.  I doubt I will though.  I’ll probably just write another 10 songs about my cat.

I’m sure I’ll think of 100 things to add to this list between now and the start of February, but for now this is enough.  And by enough I mean enough to make me start musically panicking.

February is Music Month

Today is January 8, 2013. Three weeks and four days from now will be February 1, 2013, and you all know what that means…

Robbie starts blitzing you all with bad homemade music. It’s still far enough away that both rpmchallenge.com and fawn.org are not even up yet. That doesn’t mean I’m not already thinking about them.

As always, I hope to come up with a lyrical concept to tie all of the songs together, but usually all I get is songs about how my cat is really a super villain out for world domination. No one has ever accused me of being the next Bob Dylan. Maybe in terms of my singing, but never my lyric writing.

I’m looking forward to this once again. If I write one song that doesn’t suck then I will have out done every other February writing project attempt in my past.

Rock on!