Skip to main content

Day One Hundred Ninety Six (Year Two)

So, last night I promised more on "American Pie."  I've scoured the internet in year's past for an explanation of the many details present in that song, who the characters are, etc.  Here's a link to a site I found tonight that does a pretty decent job of covering the basics, at the very least.  The link is amazingly original too, don't you think?: understandingamericanpie.com

Stopped at Half Price Books tonight.  Mom's been in town, and it's a ritual.  Cool thing was that I found the first 2 books of Berklee's Guitar Method (the first of which contains a DVD-Rom that has 14 HOURS of lessons on it!  How amazing is that?  Considering that the be-all, end-all goal of this blog is to get me to the point musically where I can audition and be accepted to Berklee School of Music in Boston, I figured that having the first two books of their guitar method can only be a good thing.

Now that I'm 5 days into February, I'm thinking that I'm going to try and do the RPM Challenge thing.  I'm not going to officially register with their website or anything, I'm just going to try and do it on my own.  I figure, if I can at least get the songs written, that would be a victory.  That would mean finishing one song every 2.4 days.  That's not too bad, if I work on it every day.  SL challenged me to write one song by the end of the month, and I know I can pull that off.  She didn't say whether it also needs to be recorded by the end of the month as well, but I kind of figure that the recording of it was in her thought process, so we shall see.  If I end up somewhere in between those two extremes, that'd be all right too, as the other criteria for the challenge is 35 minutes of music.

All told, I was pleased that I was able to fit at least something musical into my day.  Still haven't cracked open the Ritchie Valens record or the Buddy Holly rarities collection, but that can happen tomorrow.

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