This one is a coffee shoppe arrangement but as soon as I had the guitar parts down I thought it would sound good with drums and bass. As soon as I had that thought I decided to do two versions of each acoustic song. Verse 1 There’s got to…

Long story... or, What the hell is a cajon anyway? I listen to a podcast about cover bands. One of the hosts is a drummer and he plays in an acoustic group. He said he played his cajon at the acoustic gigs. I thought, what the hell is…

I setup a drum loop and started playing and this is what happened. The verse is a 12-bar, the chorus is the V chord section of a 12-bar. There were a lot of punch ins for both the rhythm guitar and the bass, but there was no copy and paste anywhere…

This is an alternate mix of an RPM2020 song. I'm hoping half of my album will be arranged for acoustic guitar, hand percussion, and saxophone. I also want to do an alternate mix of each of those songs with the usual three piece rock band arrangement…

The first RPM2020 song. For this song I setup a click track and just started playing. There are only two phrases and there are punch in's everywhere and many of them are just plain bad. I don’t believe what I want to believe I only believe…

I just finished an album in a day project, based on this: http://crapart.spacebar.org/aad/ This was the first song I worked on. I was kinda thinking of it as two songs smushed together. It’s not terrible. Maybe if I come back to it with ears…

My first impression was this one wasn’t very good. As the day wore on though it kinda grew on me. Now that I’ve made it track two I think I’m starting to not like it again.

This one is okay. Nothing too special, but it is in 7/8 (assuming I’m writing about the track I think I’m writing about. Who knows).

Look at me getting all like The Edge and using a delay as a rhythm effect.

This one is kinda crappy.

This song kinda sucks. Okay, it really sucks.

I needed to make sure I was over 20 minutes so I recorded about a minute of noise.

I restricted my guitar gear to just three effect pedals. They included an overdrive pedal, but no fuzz boxes. Any other year I would have fuzzed the holy hell out of the rhythm guitars here, but it still feels okay with just a cranked overdrive…

The 10th and final ghost story song for this year’s RPM Challenge. I think it needs more wah-wah pedal. Maybe. Not sure if I like this or not. I might. Or I might not. I can’t decide. The guitars are all Gibson SG through a Fender Deluxe Reverb…

You can’t have an album worth of ghost story songs without at least one haunted lighthouse song, right? I have no idea what I was going for with this song but it doesn’t sound anything like what I had in mind. It sort of fell apart and then fell…

The third in a series of songs based on New England ghost stories. This is the last one I have right now, but there are still a bunch of songs that need lyrics. I wonder if I could pull off the double album idea this year with one album being…

I waited until RPM Challenge song #20 before I used a 12-bar blues. This was a guitar noodle that happened when I finished everything I had planned to work on that day but wasn’t quite ready to stop playing. I like that feeling. The lyrics are…

Songs in 6/8 time should be faster, shouldn’t they? This one is slooow. I think in previous RPM Challenge projects this would have been a sludgy metal song. Not this year though. The lyrics are about a ghost town in Connecticut where things started…

My ears are turning to mush tonight. I’m not sure if this sounds okay or not. It’s another ghost story song. This time about a house where the ghost of a previous resident made friends with the new kid in the house. I struggled with a lot of this…

The second of three (so far) songs for the 2019 RPM Challenge with lyrics inspired by a ghost story. This time a woman who was executed for witchcraft (yup, I live in New England) who cursed her accuser. Years later his family built a memorial…