Skip to main content

Day One Hundred Ninety Four (Year Four)

So, today was my first real "put up or shut up" day in the month of February.  A lot of that had to do with the FAWM/RPM Challenge that I've given myself.  Going into today, I had the music for one song finished, and was hoping to be able to take at least two more of the "sketches" I had come up with the first couple of days, and turn them into complete songs.

I got in two separate studio sessions today, and suffice it to say that I'm over the moon at the progress I made today.  I didn't just take two of my sketches from rough ideas for either verses or choruses and turn them into musically complete songs, I did that one better and took three all the way to completion.  That gives me a total of four over the first three days, with a few more ideas still sitting in my notebook waiting to be worked on.

I was right, too, about the song structure stuff from yesterday.  I won't use it as a strict guide, but just having it written out and sitting there provides a fall-back if I need it, and spurs me on to see different ideas through to completion. 

I was so focused on the writing today that I didn't get around to much of anything in the way of lesson practice, but that can be on tomorrow's list. 

Writing everything on the acoustic, too, because if it doesn't hold up that way, it doesn't need a wall of distortion to make up for it.

Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't at least make mention of the fact that today marks the 55th anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and JP Richardson.  Whether it was Buddy or The Beatles or someone else, we all have that musician in our lives that made us realize it was okay to pick up a guitar or sit down at a keyboard and let out that which we kept inside.  This year, for me, is all about pushing ahead, about learning as much as I can in every moment that I can, and staying true to the vision of who I want to be, but sometimes, in order to progress, you need to look back and give a nod to the past you're leaving behind as you do so, for it is that road that informs not only who we are today, but who we will become in the future.  Holly was one of my first musical heroes, and were it not for him, my musical journey would be a little bit quieter, and look at least a little bit different.

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...