Oct. 20, 2012 at 10:10pm with 5 notes
bobdoomguitarmusiceffectspedalsBig MuffweirdconversationSaturdayrecordingplanpipe dreamgoals
Wild Saturday

My baby-mama tried to eat a banana peel, eats lemons like apples, and hides hats.  One of the weirdest conversations I’ve had in a long time.  Context?  Please.  You will get no context.

You want to hear more?  Well, I guess I could tell you about playing guitar.  That’s right.  I sometimes play guitar.  Today was one of those days.

I played with some new effects for about 2 hours.  My Big Muff has a loose ground, so I’m gonna have to solder that.  After I do that, it’ll be whisper-quiet between notes.  The Visual Volume is everything I’d dreamed it would be, except it’s a little slow.  It sounds amazing but I can’t swell notes too fast, rhythmically.

The MVP was the EHX Black Finger.  I went far too many years without a compressor and now that I have one, I want to have it on, all the time.  It sounds nice and tasteful with single coils, but it really came to life with the Les Paul.  It just made everything sound better.

This was the first time I got to play all of them together.  The little VOX combo doesn’t take dirt pedals well, but when I crank the preamp on that compressor and it drives the front end of the amp, going through 2 different tube-preamps, it sounds gorgeous.

The Muff is actually growing on me.  I just had to find out that it’s simply not right for lush open chords.  I have to play power chords.  Single notes, 2 notes, and 3-note harmonies come through, but I can’t get too complex.  This is gonna be a great rhythm distortion.  I need to plug it into my old Bandmaster at some point and hear this monster pushing a Fender.

So that’s exciting.  I still need to clear the 8gb of demos on my desktop.  Yes, 8gb.  I recorded a bunch of spur of the moment/reminder demos last year when I was in a writing phase.  I was editing, labeling, and converting all of them to mp3s.  Then I stopped.

Now there’s a folder of riffs I don’t remember being played slightly differently each time.  There are tracks of me mumbling vocal melodies for songs I never wrote and probably won’t ever write.

…but I can’t abandon these ideas.  I’m always afraid that the one I forget will be the one I needed to write.  I don’t want to miss the opportunity to fulfill my musical destiny.  I’m afraid that I’ll have wasted my life, only to fail to do the one thing I was meant to do.

Anyway, I need to clear those out.  At least 1-2gb is just dead air and count-in’s.  Once that crap is out of there, my computer won’t freeze up anymore and I can start recording demos again.

I have rosin!  I’m gonna bow some stuff.  I’m gonna do some psychedelic nonsense.  No, probably not.  It’s just been so long since I’ve recorded.  This is the longest I’ve gone without regularly recording demos, in 8 years.  I’m so out of practice.  There’s gonna be a period of relearning.  I need to learn how to do something which used to come natural to me.

So, the new check-list:

  • Get my fingers used to playing guitar, like a guitarist, again.
  • Get my arms and legs back in drumming shape.
  • Practice playing to clicks again.
  • Clear last year’s demos.
  • Upload this year’s demos and clear those out.
  • Look for any good ideas I’d forgotten.
  • Program scratch tracks for all of the current songs.
  • Fix and set-up my guitars so they’re all back in service.
  • Record drums, bass, guitar, and additional arrangements.
  • Write melodies and lyrics for every song.
  • Record vocals for each demo.
  • Put the demos online and ask for feedback.
  • Put more work into the songs with the best reception.
  • Go work with an old friend of mine, for professional opinions.
  • Finalize the arrangements.
  • Record drums, bass, guitar, and vocals.
  • Find a piano and record the important parts.
  • Ask the same friend to clean up the tracks.
  • Program some additional tracks.
  • Mix a full album.
  • Take a month-long break to clear my head and get distance.
  • Remix and master the album.
  • Burn a copy and get as many opinions as possible.
  • Order a test copy.

I also ate pizza and lots of chips and salsa.  Tomorrow is my niece’s first birthday.  Exciting.

  1. saraslittleworld said: :)) you’re so great ;)
  2. ribbonthegreengoblin said: We didn’t get that context. And I’m pre-ordering that test copy…right..meow.
  3. bobdoom posted this