Blackhouse.nl

No, I haven’t posted about this before, but yes I’m working on NaMuWriMo as well and quite successfully so far. As a challenge I’m trying to compose all on my guitar and not from my computer, this gives me the advantages that I get to pick up on my guitar skills, my knowledge of chords, etc.

Anyway, I got the basic chords down for both verse as well as chorus and even the melody is starting to come along nicely. I’m still working on the rhythm and the lyrics, but I suppose I could have that done before the end of the month.

Biggest problems so far is to write a lyrics. What the fuck do you write about anyway? Most lyrics are about love and death, agreed, but I don’t have problems with either, so I’m looking in to other things that annoy me, so far still no luck, but we’ll get there.

Another problem is that I only work on the music when I’m alone. For some reason I feel terrible insecure about it so far, so I don’t want to share too much until it at least has some shape or form and before I can actually play it. *sighs*

Oh well, I think it’s a great exercise though

Learned a little concentration exercise at drum lessons yesterday, which is really easy, but pretty tricky to keep doing for a while. Everyone can have a go at this, as long as you have to hands, a surface (can be a table or your legs or anything).

Tap the following with your hands:

Right, left, right, right

Then:

Left, right, left, left

And over and over again and try to increase speed. It’s called a paradiddle and you can keep saying that doing the exercise to keep on track.

If you want to make a little tougher on yourself hit the first hit a little harder so:

RIGHT, left, right right, LEFT, right, left, left

And if that bores you do a paradiddle diddle:

Right, left right, right, left, left, left, right, left, left, right, right

I can assure you, unless you’re focused you will loose track pretty quickly

Yesterday we had our first ’song writing session’. It came down to extending the few chords we already have to something that sounds almost decent. And although we don’t have a full fledged song just quite yet, I think it was useful and incredibly fun, so we might do this more often.

And I can’t believe we actually did a SWOT analysis of the band

I’ve decided that I wanted to practice more on a real drum kit, so I’ve found myself a little jam place near where we live. This is just additional to my electronic kit and probably just temporary until we have our new house and I can play whenever I want. At the moment I have to start working very early to play maybe an hour in the afternoon.

Anyway, the jam place is tiny, they have about 2 practice spaces and it’s rather a big wooden shed, but it serves the purpose I guess. It has a drum kit but they don’t provide the cymbals, so I bought my own set, which is nice, I can use it to jam with the band as well

The guy who runs the place is an absolute weirdo. I think he’s about 45, long, very skinny, big smile. He talks 120km/h, was absolutely plastered and stoned. I ended up listening to him for about 40 minutes, since I really couldn’t get a word in between But he was happy and gave me a discount on the costs, so for 3 hours I payed 10 euros, which is fair.

So I’ve been listening to the new Metallica album. From what I heard this is a more gradual evolution from Garage Inc. than St. Anger (which I didn’t dislike btw, it was just very out of character for Metallica) was, but I can’t help but thinking that Unforgiven III doesn’t fit in the line of its predecessors. Personally I would have nominated ‘The Day That Never Comes’ as Unforgiven III. It fits better with chords used and with the dramatics in that song, but that’s my personal opinion of course

That’s all folks.