Skip to main content

Day Three Hundred Twenty Nine (Year Two)

B. and I got together around 12:30 today.  We had lunch and plotted out where to begin, music-wise for the day.  For the first time in about 7 years, she actually flat out asked me where we start if we want to be rock stars, and meant it as a serious (or at least semi-serious) question.

I told her the same thing that I've been trying to get across for those entire 7 years.  I told her that the songs are the most important part.  And that whether we were producing it ourselves (which currently appears to be the case) or having someone else do it in a big time studio on someone else's budget, if the music was tight and the songs were good, that was most of the battle.

Our biggest problem has always been that we didn't start with click tracks and build from tempo.  So that's where we started today.  Using a combination of the recordings we've already made and Magix Music Maker from B's computer, we constructed temporary backing tracks for 6 out of 7 songs, and figured out the tempos that the click tracks need to be at so that I can start building rhythm tracks as soon as I get home.  This is where we should have started all those years ago.  And whether J. rejoins the fray at some time in the future or not, we are at least pushing forward toward putting something out.

It felt good to sit in the same room and just swap ideas back and forth, too.  I thought for a while that we were going to wind up revisiting one of the early, early songs that we discarded, but instead we wound up picking up the pieces of a progression we had gotten late, late on my last night home last August.  We took that, re-tooled it a bit, and came out with another chord progression that we thought was incredibly cool.  And all because of one riff that I've never quite been able to let go of.

All told, a productive day.  Could've gotten more done, but for a 3-4 hour stretch, it was pretty darn good.

More tomorrow, including the pilgrimage to Exclusive Company.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Day Three

Short one today. I've got a bunch of the DVDs that Guitar World has put out. Waded through those to see what I had, worked off of the lead guitar one. Just basic scales , but still a light place to begin. It was nice to just start loosening up my fingers again. Off from work tomorrow, so hopefully I'll get a lot of playing done. Said I'd mention the other project I'm hoping to finish this year. Back when I was living in WI, I started a hard rock band with a friend of mine. She was heavily influenced by Evanescence, and so, with her as vocalist, we started writing songs. We had written and demoed almost a full album's worth of music by the time I moved to IA, and had even purchased a P.A. in preparation for eventual gigs. We never did find a permanent drummer or bassist, so our demos sound very rough (and not nearly loud enough). I'd like to finish those songs, and make an EP of the 4 or 5 strongest, just as a way to put a cap on that project. More tom...

Day Three Hundred Fifty Seven (Year Seven)

Today was okay.  It ended up being quieter than I wanted it to be, but I got in a few things. 1.  I got the music from the car hauled in and sorted out in advance of my road trip to Dubuque for a little longer than a day.  I'm taking the Radiohead reissue with me for that, since I haven't gotten a chance to sit down with it yet. 2.  I'm also taking an empty notebook along with me, in the hopes that I might start to get some lyric ideas down on paper while I'm gone.  I watched some cool videos early this morning about the idea of writing all of the music before writing lyrics, and the way things are going that is looking like what's going on with me. 3.  I wish there had been more playing today, but I'm still feeling good about where things are sitting.  This next week needs to include a lot of writing.

Day Three Hundred Fifty Four

Today was a hodgepodge of musical stuff. Here's a list of the stuff it included... 1) I uncovered two more songs to add to my ongoing list of "supremely catchy pop music." One of the songs is the first song on the latest record by the Smoking Popes, who I saw the other day. It's called "Wish We Were," and it's a glorious pop-punk distillation of unannounced love.  The second song is by a band called the Vaccines. It's called "Norgaard," and it comes off as a mix of 60's California pop, punk energy, and surf rock. 2) Found a poster frame for my Alkaline Trio poster. 3) Heard from B. via text tonight. Apparently she has rediscovered her knack for "creepy, cool lyric writing again." I couldn't be more excited about this. When she hits that kind of stride, B. usually comes up with some pretty great stuff. She tells me she got an entire lyric tonight. Some rough ideas about melody, but nothing concrete yet. As for me,...