Skip to main content

Day Three Hundred Fifty Nine (Year Three)

Finished up last night's project for the Start Experiment tonight.  It feels awesome to have the drums laid down for this first song.  It's amazing to me just how much more like music this progression sounds with a drum track behind it.

Tonight's project is recording the bass line, which should go pretty smoothly, considering that it's already written... I just haven't gotten around to it yet.  Granted, it took me about an hour to get the drums set up so the patterns were recorded in the right order.  Even with notes, these things take a lot of time, I guess.

Two things dawned on me today that need sharing:

1) I haven't done much listening at all this week, except for what has happened in the car.  It's still Drive-By Truckers right now, but that needs to change tomorrow.

and

2) There hasn't been a whole lot of work on the Buddy Holly tune in the last couple of days.  That needs to change tomorrow and Saturday if I'm going to feel good about where things sit as the end of the first week of the Start Experiment approaches.

It feels really good to be recording again.  Getting music out is like lifting something off of your shoulders that you didn't know was there.  It's therapeutic, it's freeing, and now that I'm doing it in a smart way (setting up tempo and a metronome beforehand), I think it's going to be astoundingly productive.

One last thing:

The email that Acuff sent around to keep us motivated today wanted us to address what our biggest fears were about this whole project.  Mine was easy: I'm scared that this is going to work.  If breaking things down like this is really as successful as it has been for the first few days (and I have no reason to think that it won't be), then I can't believe that I've let so much time go by without trying it this way.  

All I've got to do is bust through the mid-week blahs a little bit, and then I'll be good to go.

Comments

  1. What's with your lack of vinyl listening? Some things weren't meant for digital media and lose a lot of their soul when you just focus on mp3's and CD's. Bust out that turntable and rock like you're meant to, man.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You bring up a good point. I've got a huge stack of awesome vinyl that has been begging to have a needle dropped on it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Please tell me you're not stacking that stuff... The pressurization can RUIN them if they aren't stored properly. Gotta treat them hard copies nice.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh, good heavens, no. I used the word "stack" as a general term. Not actually leaving them in piles.

    ReplyDelete

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....

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...

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...