Skip to main content

Day Three Hundred Fifty Four (Year Six)

Today was the first day that I've felt like I could really relax into the house since we moved.  There is still work to be done (and a looping pedal to find), but for the most part, all of the rooms are at least set up and organized enough that I can walk into them without feeling like I have to do something related to organizing or sorting.

That being the case, I feel like today was the first real day of my time to focus on music (and writing and grad school).  With that in mind, I went back to the list of goals for the rest of the year that I had started on or around the 1st of July.  Right at the top of the list was the following:

Finish Writing & Recording:  EP, Power Pop Record, Double Album

In the spirit of honesty, the "Double Album" one had a question mark next to it, mostly because I wasn't sure, on the 1st, what I would be able to get done by the end of December.

It made sense to me to start with the shortest project, and just start by seeing what I had taken for notes on the tracks, listen to the tracks themselves, and then see if I agreed with my earlier thoughts.  Right now, I'm seeing the EP as 4 songs.  The music for them is at least roughed out, and (now) burned onto a CD, so that I can take it with me tomorrow when I've got some running to do.  My hope with that is that I'll either start to get some lyric ideas, or that I'll be able to hear where the weak points are in the music, and figure out what (if any) changes need to be made.

There wasn't as much time tonight as I would have liked there to be, but I definitely made the most of the time I had in the studio tonight.  I'm hoping that I can start evaluating the power pop ideas later in the week.  Those will need a bit more work, I suspect.

It finally feels like things are getting started!
Labels:

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