Tag: Songwriting

Music and Pain

I’m sure after a month of constant RPM posts you are all going to be thrilled to hear this…

I have set up an official recording to-do,list for the near future. I still have four unfinished songs from 2007. One has gotten as far as having the rhythm guitars finished. The other three have bass and drums done. There are three unfinished songs from 2008 that I haven’t touched since then. They are on the agenda too. In the last week I have started recording two mid-90’s songs and am ready to start recording the vocals. There is one remaining song from this past November’s NaSoAlMo that is also ready for vocals. There is a song that was meant to be a songfight.org submission but was never finished. There is a little dueling acoustic guitar thing that it did off the top of my head one day a few months ago. That one might actually be finished. Finally there are two songs that go way, way back, one as far as 1987, that I put on the agenda last year but never touched. Those are what I plan to record over the coming months.

There is talk on the RPM forum of doing a mini-project over the summer. I hope to do that as well. I want to keep recording and playing and writing. I don’t want to find myself looking at a fast approaching February 2014 without having done anything over the prior months. I want to get better, not stay stagnant.

Of course, playing guitar is easier when you can use your left arm. Last fall, when I raked the yard for the first time I had major pain in my left arm for a week afterward. I could barely lift my arm at all. When I raked the second time, same thing. This winter I had the same reaction to shoveling the first time. Friday I did some shoveling. Not a lot, but some. I was fine all day Saturday and figured I’d gotten off lucky. Then today I tried to get something off a high shelf. Holy crap did it hurt. I can barely lift my left arm at all, and when I try the pain is huge. I am wondering if I slept on it last night to make it worse. I did play the guitar a little today without any trouble, so I’m not worried, but damn does it hurt!

We will see how it feels tomorrow.

Now What

I probably wrote this exact same post last March, but it needs to be stated again.

I have finished the RPM Challenge and FAWM. I’m very proud of my goofy self, despite the fact that the music I made isn’t very good. I wrote and recorded 14 songs in less than 28 days. It feels like a nice accomplishment.

Now what?

Last year I made a list of a big batch of unfinished songs I’d started in 2007 and 2008, as well as a few newer songs that needed to either be re-recorded or re-written and decided that I’d pick them off one at a time over the course of March and April or so in order to keep the happy RPM vibe alive for a while.

I finished recording 2/6 remaining 2007 left overs, and started tracking the other four, which are all at various stages of incompletion. I re-recorded one song, and re-wrote another. In November I started writing two new songs and have finished one of them.

For 2013 I have two little ideas on what to do next. One is to continue picking off the unfinished songs. There are eight of them, including the one from this past November. I also recently found a cd full of random songs I had written and played along with Mike and Maria back in the late 90’s. some of those songs might deserve a long awaited recording. I’ve picked two to start with, maybe three… or four.

So that’s the plan going forward. Finish more of the left overs, record some more ancient artifacts, and once in a while actually write something from scratch.

Lets see how long it takes me to run out of steam this year.

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!