Skip to main content

Day Three Hundred Forty Six

First of all, last night's setlist from Grace Potter goes something like this:

1. Ah Mary
2. Hot Summer Night
3. Goodbye Kiss
4. Oasis
5. Apologies
6. Stop The Bus
7. White Rabbit
8. Nothing But The Water I
9. Nothing But The Water II
10. Medicine
11. Sugar
12. Paris (Ooh La La)

She played a few more than 9 songs, it turns out, but I wasn't complaining in the slightest.

Now, as for today's activities... I chatted with J. over Skype for a bit this morning. We talked guide tracks and drum tracks. I expressed my frustration over not having finished off the guide tracks yet, and he essentially let me off the hook by telling me he was exploring alternative drum sounds. Apparently, he's got some cool electronic stuff he wants to try out, and has been working with that.

He also provided more clarification on the guide tracks, and reassured me in the process that his changes shouldn't affect what I'm working on laying down guitar-wise. According to him, if I "work with the old drums, the new ones will fit right in." This was the first confirmation that I was supposed to be using the drums in my guide tracks. Mind you, I figured that would be the case, but it's still nice to have that confirmed. Also, he asked how B.'s mic was working out, and told me that he now wants two guide tracks. One that's just basic, and the next that's halfway between the first and the final performance. I'm really thinking I should just shoot for the final performance on this one. Still, all of this will help me in the long run.

Never did end up teaching today. I appeared at work (where we were scheduled to meet) at the appointed time, and they had left already. I consoled myself by picking up "Alpocalypse" by Weird Al, and "Revelator," the debut album by the Tedeschi Trucks Band.

Read some more of the Keith Richards bio when I got home, and then started in with the acoustic. The good news is that after fighting with that blasted progression for what feels like forever now, I am fairly certain that I have finished it off! Granted, it will have to meet with B.'s approval, but I'm still feeling pretty good about it. After I got that done, I started to really dive into the guide tracks. Didn't get anything recorded, but I did finish breaking down one of the songs in terms of what we played, and the structure of the whole thing. We did some pretty odd stuff all those years ago. Got started figuring out the second one, but didn't get all the way through it yet.

The other thing I did tonight, as long as I had the list of songs handy, was to start looking through it to see what was done, and what still needed to be worked up. I think with what we have finished off/far along toward completion right now, we could make a solid run at a full album, but there are still a few that need working up, and one old one that we wrote really early on that I'd like to revisit. For some reason we had crossed it off years ago, but when we were chatting a few weeks back, the song kept coming up, so we'll see about that one.

Productive day today! Will hopefully catch up with B. sometime this week. We texted a bit tonight, but that was it. Maybe by then I can have more songs done.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day Two Hundred Twenty Seven (Year Two)

So, the new Springsteen disc is amazing.  There's enough of a mixture of his upbeat rockers, his ballads, and his message songs to make this his best record since The Rising .  And speaking of that record... Buying The Boss the day it comes out always takes me back to a specific moment in life.  It was July 30th, 2002, the year after 9/11, the year after someone on the streets of New York told Springsteen "we need you now."  I had driven to Oshkosh, WI to visit some friends, when I remembered that Springsteen's disc was scheduled to come out that day.  I drove downtown to The Exclusive Company, but had to park a few blocks back.  At the time, there wasn't much going on downtown, but when I got out of the car, I could hear this music coming from up the block somewhere.  The closer I got to Exclusive, the more it began to dawn on me, they had set up a giant set of speakers in their upstairs windows, and were blasting the new album out into the streets....
Post a Comment
Read more

Day Two Hundred Twenty Six (Year Four)

So I dove back into 100 Riffs tonight, going into it with the hope that the hand written tabs I did last night would help me unlock the issue I was having transitioning from the first half of the riff to the second half.  It worked.  With both halves clearly written in front of me, I was able to work through the transition that had been tripping me up when the screen cut off was happening on SoundSlice.  That's going to be a nice thing to have in my bag of tricks for the times when I get stumped figuring these things out. I played a little bit of acoustic tonight as well, trying to be better about finding the balance between both instruments.  Late 90's-early 2000's rock has come up a lot in conversations at work of late, so in that spirit, I picked a song from that time period out of my set list notebook ("Your Winter" by Sister Hazel), and took a quick look at it.  Admittedly, it's a song I had mostly learned a long time ago, so the essential parts of it w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Day Two Hundred Thirteen (Year Five)

Finally!  A really good day.  And one that I really needed after the frustration with the rest of the weekend. I took a step back from a few things today, and got what I hope will be a bit of clarity in the process.  Instead of worrying about the progress I really haven't been making on the EP, I told myself that I needed to be happy with the few bits of lyric I stumbled across today, and that maybe I needed to focus my attention elsewhere, at least for today. I had picked up a really cool book on music theory as it applies to guitar last Tuesday when I was out and about, and having spent a little bit of time paging through it over the last few days, I focused in on it tonight and started reading, taking notes, and reinforcing some things.  It felt like progress.  It was great. When I had worked through some of that, I moved on to the whole "100 Riffs" thing, and got myself moving on that again.  It's astounding how much I can get inside my own head a...
Post a Comment
Read more