Another

Got another "bedroom rock" track demoed last night. I'd had the verse chord progression sitting around for a while and a few lyrical bits. Hacked some lyrics together Tuesday evening.

A drawback is that it sounds rather too much like the earlier track. At work yesterday, during some downtime when I was caught up and nothing was happening, I scanned through some GarageBand rhythm loops to find something that felt appropriate. Damn if, when I laid the guitar track down over it, it didn't turn out that the rhythm and guitar patterns sounded WAY too close to the first. Slightly different rhythm, slightly different strum, but not different enough.

I think I've determined that my default strum tempo on an acoustic guitar, at this point, is 68-72 beats per minute. That's part of the problem right there: not enough tempo variation.

Gonna have to work on some different strum patterns, too.

And do more with picking and arpeggiating, not just hold down chords all the time.

I suppose the similarity of keys (one in C, the other in Em/G) doesn't help.

Once I realized this problem, I found another rhythm track that still works, but isn't quite as similar. Gives things a little different feel. They're still very close.

Of course, this is one reason to crank things out fast like this: find out where your default strengths AND default weaknesses are. It's still pretty cool that I knocked these things out so quickly. The sound quality through the little laptop mike, with the string muting and fret buzzing issues of my guitar playing (more obvious on an acoustic), and my singing so as not to peg the mike, give the tracks a quality we can charitably describe as "interesting."

But hey. Two years ago could I have banged out this much this fast? A year ago? No.