Friday afternoon - getting ready for the weekend and a kickstart of writing

As per normal, wife is already planning our activities w.r.t. work around the house. I have a few things though that I need to take care of - day job work stuff that I'm having a hard time getting into at work, so I need to have a change of scenery to kickstart getting completed before the deadline in just over a week.

That said though, I also need to get my head back into some music stuff - I think part of my issue with getting on my work stuff and lack of motivation for the home stuff honey-do list is that I haven't had any "me" time in a very long time. I have a long list of things I want to hammer out just finishing up my studio setup, plus I have a long standing commitment to my friend Dave Kerzner from Sonic Reality to record a cover song using bed tracks he supplied to me almost 2 years ago. Can't mention the name or band, but it'll be a bangin' tune when I'm done.

But even apart from that, I need to do some woodshedding to reclaim my chops and knock the rust off. It's been a long long time since I've done any serious playing - since the end of May 2011 and my show at the Mars Bar in Seattle, WA - and picking up the guitar a few times this week just showed me how sloppy and lazy my playing is now. This kind of layoff though allows me the opportunity to learn a ton more scales and shapes - try to really advance beyond the habitual stuff I had been doing for a while and stretch out in a technical sense while breaking free the seized up muscles of my hands/fingers. In the past, I've made tremendous advances doing this - hopefully the same will happen again despite my age.

Then finally - I've set up something on Pledge Music to help crowd-fund the production and manufacture of my three past CDs (Onion, The Sound of Thoughts, a fine line between...) after I accomplish retracking/remixing/remastering all three. The final products I hope to have done by April or May, and as mentioned in earlier posts use that experience to grease the wheels to write and record new material. Lyric writing is a bit tough right now - again, very rusty chops there, but slowly improving. I have ~10 songs worth of lyrics already from past efforts, but need to generate more to find the best stuff to form music around...

Ok, this last blog post is brought to you by our sponsors - IK Multimedia, who produce the amazing Amplitube 3 product that I use both to demo new material as well as appears on final product, indistinguishable from the real amps that it models.



IK Multimedia's Amplitube 3 for Mac/PC