Skip to main content

Day One Hundred Eighty Three (Year Four)

Tonight felt like one of those nights that could have used a rewind button.  I spent the first hour I was home fighting with the new iTunes update (which made me uninstall, and then completely re-install the program, all the while making me think I had just lost my entire music collection).  Finally got that figured out, and then uploaded the record that the Mrs. picked up today, Is There Anybody Out There? by a band called A Great Big World.  Their big single right now is a song called "Say Something," that I first heard because of its appearance on last season of The Voice.  I liked the song the first time I heard it, but had been wary of the rest of the disc (which was released this past Tuesday).  I'm happy to report that, in this case, the rest of the record is just as much fun as the single.  It's piano-based pop that's joyous and catchy.  It's almost like a more upbeat Dashboard Confessional, where the guitars are swapped out in favor of keyboards.

What does this mean for my own musical exploits today?  Unfortunately, it means that my hopes of spending any quality time in the studio tonight, either working on songs, or focusing my attention back on the Acoustic Goldmine book went largely unrealized.  As frustrating as that was tonight, it just means that my studio time tomorrow night (and headed into the weekend) will need to be that much more productive.  Right now, that's a challenge that I'm really excited about.  I know for a fact that I'll get a good chunk of time Saturday night while the Mrs. is at work, so perhaps the better challenge is building the music time in for the hours before and after her shift.  I think it's going to be a really good weekend for music.

Comments

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...