This year I have entered the RPM Challenge. I have entered under the name "The Irony Set," which Liz doesn't like. No matter. I will make my ambient dub metal album nonetheless. At least that's what I'm anticipating now. No telling how these things turn out, especially if they aren't well-planned, which this one is certainly not.

I missed the first day owing to the very dull Panthers-Ducks game last night. I might as well have stayed home, but I wasn't feeling great and wouldn't have gotten much done anyway.

I started work this evening after dinner. I was thinking I would start to put together some guitar riffs, record them and arrange rough demos on the computer. I realized fairly quickly that I had a couple of problems there. One being that I'm missing a fairly important cable for my recording rig, the one that hooks the tape recorders to the sound card. The other cables for the sound card are too short to reach from the mixer to the computer. I was planning to buy longer cables in August when I was setting up this room, but never made it. So, I need to find the missing cable and I also need to move the computer closer to the mixer. I also left all my microphone stands in storage, so I will have to go fetch those later this week.

I gave up on recording for the evening and instead picked my guitar back up and kept working. I put together pieces for two songs and notated them in my usual shorthand so I won't forget them (in theory). I tried dropping to D for a third song but quickly found I didn't much like it, so I started tuning the string back to E. I heard a popping noise and looked down to see the hook that holds the string in place on the bridge had broken. My guitar is a heavily modified Japanese Telecaster. I replaced the original bridge with a Kahler 2230 back in 1995 because the original System I bridge had worn out. This bridge was given to me by Marty, our lead guitarist and was about 7 years old at the time. I think mine is the second or third guitar to have this bridge mounted on it. I'm fairly lucky it happened now and not several years ago, as Kahler is making them again and repair parts are readily available.

I grabbed my backup guitar (the less said about this one the better) and went back to work. After a quick tune-up, I played around some more and worked up the beginnings of a third song. I had to leave to check the chile verde again, and that ended up being the end of my work.

I hopped on the internet and $61 later, I have a whole new set of string hooks (might as well fix them all), a pair of springs and set screws for the saddles. If I'm ordering, I thought I may as well fix some other parts that are showing their age.

Tomorrow, I will have to work in some cleanup and studio setup into the evening. That is provided the Panthers Season Ticket Holder autograph thing doesn't take forever. I have that right after work, then we'll head home and eat the chile verde. And then it's back to work.

I'm hoping to have rough arrangements of seven or eight songs by the weekend. If I can do two to three per night, I should be in good shape. I want to have rough demos recorded by the end of the weekend. Then I'll spend the week (Monday to Sunday) laying down drum and bass. Then the plan, such as it is, calls for guitar overdubs, then I'll work on lyrics, record vocals and then add whatever else seems necessary. Since I'm working on a DAW, I will be working up mixes as I record, meaning that I can hopefully mix very quickly at the end. I'll nail the plan down a little better as I go along. For now, I have three songs started and hope to get two or three more tomorrow.