(Wednesday, 30 April 2008) Written by Strummindude
April 30th is traditionally celebrated as "Valborg mass" in Sweden. It's not at all a christian event, but a surviving heathen rite. Everywhere around the country really huge bonfires are lit, to celebrate the official arrival of spring, and to burn any straggling local witches still hanging around. Most of them fled though, riding their brooms to a place called The Blue Hills, or "Blåkulla" in Swedish. It is also generally the night most adolescents have their first taste of vodka, as well as... (102 more chars)
(Wednesday, 23 April 2008) Written by Strummindude
I'm putting my old band together again. To me, that's a pretty big deal. We haven't been playing together for eight years, but now we're in touch again, and working on new material, via the internet so far, but we're set to have sessions including the whole band. To celebrate this fact, I've put a couple of our previous recordings on my personal website, at strummindude.com . Since you are among my most valued and prescious peers, I bid you a warm welcome to have a listen to these recording... (230 more chars)
Good Friends! I have the pleasure and the great privilege to announce to the world, or at least to anyone kind enough to be reading this blog entry, which means the world to me, that myself and fellow RPM'er Colin Garvey of Liverpool, England, have jointly produced and put forth a piece of music that we have decided to call by the name of "Padre". It is in fact an operatic piece of music, with Colin supplying lyrics, in what I'm led to believe is Italian, and a stunning performance on ten... (580 more chars)
The internet has broken in half! My provider, Telia, one of Europe's main network operators, is apparently in a serious fight over peering with Cogent, one of North America's largest network operators. This has world-wide implications, as it's basically shut a lot of domains, the count is in the thousands, on opposite sides of the Atlantic completely out of contact with each other. I didn't think that was even possible, that the internet was basically designed to handle just this type of thin... (279 more chars)
The List Of Participating Artists has now been updated to include... - Sister Savage! Congrats Tess! (Now photograph your lyrics sheets and put them up on image shack or something and everything's perfect!) An Extra Happy Easter weekend, everyone! Jana
(Wednesday, 19 March 2008) Written by Strummindude
This is a request. A bit of an unusual one, to be sure. But nevertheless: I included a song on my album that in the end was adorned with the title "Good Night Daddy". It's the final song on the album, and an instrumental piece. But I really would have liked for it to be a song with vocals. And for some strange reason, that I cannot entirely fathom, I would REALLY prefer the lyrics to be in Italian. And sung by someone with an opera tenor kind of feel to the voice. You know, Paul Potts-like..... (985 more chars)
How about that. I play only one instrument, the guitar, and the guitar only. I couldn't play the piano to save the lives of my children. Natural keys on the guitar are like G, A or E. Heck, even C. Still, I play my own album and I find that it starts off in the key of Bb. A pretty unnatural key for the guitar. But not only that. I find that, furthermore I also conclude the album in the very same unnatural (for the guitar) key of Bb. It´s the final chord of the album. Howzat for a supernatu... (37 more chars)
My, commonly, for a drummer, very well informed, percussionist friend, Steve, informed me tonight of the fact, that I have chosen, as a profile song for my album, a ... [wait for it...] ... TANGO! Wow, that blew my mind! I actually wrote a tango... Wish there was a Tango genre in here - I'd jump straight into it! S. Dude (It's #4, Try Again)
The fruits of Strummindude's Record Producing Month have now been posted on my website , for all to browse through. My personal website is otherwise Swedish speaking, but I made an exception for the RPM album. I wrote some hasty commentary notes on each song, in what passes for English in my neck of the woods. Congrats to all finishers (and commiserations to the rest of you), I can't wait to hear your albums when the Jukebox starts updating. I need a holiday. S. Dude
(Friday, 29 February 2008) Written by Strummindude
I mixed in the headphones. There's way too much bass on every song. :-\ Well, I hope you like bass, guys, cause I ain't remixing it. Gotta spend the remaining few hours conjuring up some cover for the darn thing. On the bright side, I'm pretyy happy with a couple of the songs, even with the extra heavy bottom. I guess that means I didn't spend enough time anal-lyzing in the mixing. But, what the heck, I finished, didn't I? Peace! S. Dude
(Wednesday, 27 February 2008) Written by Strummindude
I'm learning things as I go along, like at least some of you. I never attempted to do such a grand thing as an entire album by myself before. Apart from the odd moment of brief experimenting, all I've ever done previous to this is simple demos containing guitars and some vocal overdubs, as kind of a private audio notebook. And this drums programming part is fracking killing me. I gotta do midi drums for six songs in very short order, since my friend the drummer who was originally gonna do it u... (946 more chars)
(Saturday, 23 February 2008) Written by Strummindude
In my last blog entry I was raising the alarm flag, and I was quite certain I wasn't going to make it. Then, after regaining some composure, and a lot of it due to your cheers and advice, a miracle happened. I wrote and recorded two instrumentals yesterday. One of them was originally intended to have vocals, but I decided the melody was strong enough to hold its own. I put them both in my profile, but I don't expect anyone to have the time to spare to go listen to them this late in the challen... (753 more chars)
(Friday, 22 February 2008) Written by Strummindude
I'm not going to make it. I have six songs almost in the bag, and I might get a seventh done. But since they're all around 4 minutes, I need at least nine songs to meet the challenge. There's no way I'll accomplish that in a week. I guess I could include a couple of "karaoke-versions", or ad-lib a really long instrumental piece just to fill out the space. But even with that, I'd probably lack the inner sense of accomplishment and self-satisfaction. I think it would make me feel like I kinda c... (287 more chars)
(Saturday, 16 February 2008) Written by Strummindude
Five songs in the bag now. I figure that the limited time will not affect the core of my songs, just the amount of glitter I'll be able to put on them. The latest arrival is called " The Homecoming". I'll post it in my profile: http://www.rpmchallenge.com/component/option,com_comprofiler/task,userProfile/Itemid,296/tab,getmediaplayertab/ If you don't hate it, please let me know! S. Dude
(Friday, 15 February 2008) Written by Strummindude
Half the alloted time to make the album gone already, that was fast...
I have four songs pretty much done. They still need some more
instruments, like some bass and drums, but aside from minor things like
that :-) they're pretty much in the bag.
I'm a little behind schedule. Well, a great deal behind, really. But
I'm really not all that worried or stressed out over that fact.
Considering that all of the initial issues I had starting out have been
resolved, I'm expecting the latt... (505 more chars)
(Tuesday, 12 February 2008) Written by Strummindude
There's been no news for a couple of days now, and the simple reason as
to why is that nothing much has actually happened. I spent most of the
weekend recovering from a head cold and really didn't start recording
anything until yesterday evening. And that was more like experimenting
with the setup, to make it work right with the new external sound card.
It sorta works now, but with the monitoring routed through the
Cubase program and back, which means an 11 ms latency that is quite
noti... (851 more chars)
(Tuesday, 05 February 2008) Written by Strummindude
Installed all the software I'll need onto the laptop now, and it went smoothly, which is kind of a relief. Tomorrow evening I'll clean out the sauna and arrange my stuff in there. (See previous post) It'll be hot! :-P Maybe I'll name the album "The Sauna Tapes" or something. Hey, and I also wrote another song today, lyrics and all. It's about this experience , and I think I'll call it "The RPM Song". Heh! Until later, S. Dude
(Monday, 04 February 2008) Written by Strummindude
I haven´t started recording yet, I'm still in the planning stages. In
fact, I haven't even fired up Cubase once in these four days. Not once.
I've been focusing on the lyric writing. And I'm more than one third
through with it, which is pretty nice going, in fact more than I'd
hoped for.
I've decided to set me up with a temporary studio. I'll use the sauna,
which in fact isn't used much as a sauna, but more like a storage
facility for dirty laundry. It's a pretty big sauna, we've actu... (1144 more chars)
(Sunday, 03 February 2008) Written by Strummindude
When I entered this challenge, I somehow subconsciously thought that once I commit to this, come Feb. 1st, all the creative juices will start flowing. Boy, was I wrong. Yesterday was hell. The harder I tried, it seemed the more paralyzed I became. Then despair creeps in, and you start having negative thoughts, and guilt, and you really feel the pressure. "Damnation, I'm losing a whole Saturday here!" I ended up finishing a whole bottle of wine, but instead of conjuring up some inspiration, I ... (2785 more chars)
(Friday, 01 February 2008) Written by Strummindude
First day drawing to a close, only ten minutes left of it. Didn't get whole lot done today. I managed to steal away about an hour's worth of contemplation towards the end of my workday, and as a result came up with the lyrical theme for two songs. I was at home for about an hour after that before heading out again, and in that time I added a bridge part to an existant song idea, which looks fairly complete now as far as melody and arrangement goes. Goody! The evening was spent with my 14 year... (457 more chars)
(Wednesday, 30 January 2008) Written by Strummindude
Well, it wasn't for lack of tryin. I did try to involve the whole band,
my old buddies from the Tumbleweed Trailing days, into the process of
making February Album Producing Month. That would've been such a nice
way to do a comeback. But, unfortunately (or, not really for him
though), Roger (guitars, lap steel, banjo) will be touring non-stop until sometime early March, so
that makes it entirely impossible. Still, we'll likely start the
process of doing some new recordings anyway. We just ... (67 more chars)
(Tuesday, 29 January 2008) Written by Strummindude
I've decided to stick to my desicion to do the blog stuff at LiveJournal instead of keeping it here. I had some bad experience trying to get Joomla to work properly at my own site, doing all sorts of things like blogging, media streaming, photo gallery and community stuff. It seemed it (Joomla) was half-assed at a lot of things but really good at nothing. Plus it got really slow sometimes. Maybe that's a mistake and I'll miss out on a lot of the community stuff going on in here during RPM-mon... (59 more chars)
