I said in the last post that I was going to play guitar tonight but I decided to mix a song instead. The Great 2015 Re-recording Project only has two more songs outstanding after this one. They both need lead guitars and a mix, but after that the whole shebang is done.
Which means that after RPM is done I’m going to have to think of something new to do to waste my time.
When I say that the sixth and final round of The Great 2015 Re-recording project is scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as available songs is concerned, this is what I am talking about.
Not bad. Not good. Just, meh. I probably should have left this one off.
The only song from last year’s RPM Challenge to be added to The Great 2015 Re-recording project is this little sucker. I think this version is better than last year’s, which is nice. Mission accomplished. I also think this needs to be played loud. It doesn’t seem to land as well at a lower volume. That’s probably a sign that the mix is shitty, but I don’t care. It’s done. Again.
Ouch.
I did the last vocal parts for The Great 2015 Re-recording Project this morning. I had two songs remaining, an easy one and a hard one. I started with the easy one and quickly learned that it wasn’t very easy. It may have been easy back in 2014 but it sure ain’t easy now. Maybe I’ll get lucky, thought I, and the hard one will turn out to be not so hard. Nope. The hard one turned out to be really hard.
My throat hurts.
It’s done though, so that’s really good. Happy Happy.
Pics:
Here’s the view from my mobile recording studio window…
And here’s a pointless clock picture, again.
Okay, this post is going to be dumb. Just making that claim ahead of time. Transparency, right?
Right.
The Great 2015 Re-recording project was meant to take songs from older music projects and update/upgrade them. Last night I was wondering, which old projects contributed the most songs? In other words, out of all the crap I’ve done, which ones had the best songs?
So I made a spreadsheet because I am a fricken nerd.
There are six Quarantine Tunes projects. Number five is all from this year’s 50/90 so it really doesn’t count. For the other five projects there are a total of 47 songs, which is WAY more than I was originally planning.
Here’s the breakdown of where they all came from:
| Original Project | Number of Songs |
|---|---|
| 2007 RPM Challenge | 2 |
| 2008 Song Fight | 1 |
| 2009 RPM Challenge | 2 |
| 2010 RPM Challenge | 3 |
| 2011 Test Drive GarageBand for Mac | 2 |
| 2011 RPM Challenge | 2 |
| 2013 NaSoAlMo | 1 |
| 2013 RPM Challenge | 2 |
| 2014 50/90 | 5 |
| 2014 April Music | 2 |
| 2014 June Music | 3 |
| 2014 RPM Challenge | 3 |
| 2015 RPM Challenge | 2 |
| 2016 50/90 | 1 |
| 2016 RPM Challenge | 6 |
| 2017 RPM Challenge | 1 |
| 2018 RPM Challenge | 1 |
| 2019 Album in a Day | 1 |
| 2019 RPM Challenge | 1 |
| 2020 50/90 | 1 |
| 2020 June Music | 1 |
| 2020 RPM Challenge | 2 |
| 2021 RPM Challenge | 1 |
| 2012 RPM Challenge* | 1 |
There you have it. The 2016 RPM Challenge has contributed six songs for the win. The 2014 50/90 is a close second with five. Good work, folks! Now I have all the facts. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle**.
*Yes… when I was typing all of that garbage out I missed an entry. Sadly, the wordpress.com editor’s table function doesn’t let me insert a row, so I stuck it on the end. Yeah… I suck.
**Go Joe!
Right, so I did four rounds of re-recording old songs, then a round of re-recording recent songs, and now one more round of old songs. I am absolutely scraping the bottom of the barrel here, and the barrel isn’t exactly what you’d call deep.
This one comes from the failed 2010 RPM Challenge, which wasn’t finished until late summer 2011, along with the failed 2011 RPM Challenge. It’s slow, it’s dumb, and it’s ridiculously simple, but it’s got a lot of fuzz on it so it’s okay in my book.
I chased this morning’s car vocals with some guitar playing. Bad guitar playing, but better than my usual crap. Well… maybe not that much better. Whatever.
I put leads on three songs. Volume six of the Great 2015 Re-Recording Project now has four songs ready to mix and only two more in the pipeline that aren’t ready to mix. Maybe I’ll mix a song tonight. That’d be fun, wouldn’t it?
Pictures!
Compared to the last two days, this morning was a downright balmy 17 degrees when I went outside for some singing in the car. Just like yesterday I managed two songs. That leaves two for tomorrow. One song was a mellow guy in a register that’s really easy for me to sing. The other was very shouty and a smidge too high for comfort. Fortunately it only had one part.
I did the mellow song first to warm up. It went pretty simple. Two part harmony, but nothing too taxing. Then on to the harder song where I did the thing I keep doing. I only had one part to sing, right? So I added a harmony part that runs all the way through. That means I doubled the amount of shouty stuff I had to do. Dumb ass.
By the time I was done I was done. It was still early, I still had battery, I still had an empty bladder. It was my voice that sent me home. Hoping for some more guitar tonight… or maybe within the next few minutes or so, then some more vocal fun tomorrow? One of the two songs that remain has a lot of three part harmony. That should be painful and awkward as hell.
Rock on!
The secret to a successful car music turns out to be my glasses. Who knew?
I thought I’d switch things up on the drive home pics too and show you my town’s gigantic city hall.
…then I took a clock pic anyway, just because.
I played some guitar tonight. I wasn’t going to but I did and it made me happy.
I redid a couple of rhythm guitar tracks that I didn’t like the sound of and then I put leads on one of the songs that got vocals this morning. I used my new wah pedal a lot. It’s a Real McCoy Custom RMC10 and it is killer. The sweep on it is gigantic. It starts on Monday and ends on Thursday. That’s how gigantic the sweep is. It’s actually so much wider than I’m used to that I think it is going to take some time to adjust my brain to it. It sounds great though.
I started putting leads on the other song that got vocals this morning but I had to stop before I finished. I used my Fuzz Face again but this time I stuck a Klon copy after it as a boost and it was gnarly and bitchin and mean and nasty and wonderful.
Fuzz Face pedals and wah-wahs are notorious for not working well together. I haven’t tried the combo yet with the new wah, but I will.
I hope to get in some more car music tomorrow. We’ll see. For now though, I am feeling pretty good about the little bit that I accomplished tonight.
Back in 2015 I worked out a song for the RPM Challenge that tricked GarageBand into using different time signatures. It chugs along at 120 beats per minute switching between 7/8, 6/4, and 4/4 like nobody’s business. It was a cool song to play and I had a lot of fun working on it, but it took me a long time to get the rhythm guitars recorded in a way that was good enough to keep.
There was a section in the middle of the song though… 24 bars… written on a keyboard with the tempo set to something much lower than 120 bpm. It was, to my lame ears, a cool break in the middle of the song. Unfortunately I couldn’t play it at 120 bpm on the guitar. It was just too fast for my fat fingers to grasp. I ended up recording it in pieces. Three bars then one bar, repeat six times, then move to a second track and repeat the whole thing. It was pretty brutal to get through.
That was in 2015. One month later I started messing with the idea of a re-recording project. I didn’t get far. Then in 2016 when RPM ended I went back to the re-recording thing and added this particular song to the list. Apparently I forgot about all of the stress it had caused me when I first recorded it.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago and the re-recording project finally gets around to this song. I had forgotten everything. I started with the bass and drums and had to remember how to trick GarageBand into using different time signatures (hint: it boils down to math). Then I had to remember how to trick GarageBand into letting me use the Session Drummer with the different time signatures (hint: lots of bouncing segments between two tracks, one of which is not the session drummer). Then last night I took my first crack at adding guitars.
Intro? No problem. Verses? Easy. Chorus? Cake. All the little 1-2 bar bridge sections? No problem. The section in the middle (actually, while working on the MIDI tracks I cut a few sections out of the song. One of them was the last eight bars of the middle section so the 24 bar section is now only 16 bars, dig)? Hello? Anyone?
Could I play it?
Not even close.
While I was struggling last night Harry came home from work so I stopped trying. Today I had a little time to get back to it. I scrapped everything I did yesterday and started fresh, mostly just to build up my confidence. When I got to the middle section I did something unusual. I just sat here at my desk, looking at GarageBand, and practiced. Not for long. Just enough to get it under my fingers, even though it was wrong 90% of the time. Then I split the 16 bars into four, four bar segments and started on the first segment. Remember I double everything, so each four bar segment needs to be done twice. It took me a long time to get the first one. The second track went a little quicker. Same with segment two. For segment three, it took a lot longer to get the first track, but the second track was nailed in one take! WOOHOO! Of course that just jinxed me for the rest and I needed like 10-15 tries for each piece.
The end result though… I have the full 16 bars, twice. Kick ass! The punches were nice and clean too, so I can’t even tell that it was recorded in pieces. It just sounds like I am actually able to play the guitar like a big boy and I just did it. Nice.
Wow… I wrote a lot about this stupid little song.
Guitar pictures to celebrate my being able to pretend I don’t suck quite as bad as I clearly do!
I also retired a pick today, and the battery on my clip on tuner is about to die. That’s all the news that is fit to print.
Inside the Red Head's Head 