A Month of Songs - Song 21

I don't do a great SRV, but at least I didn't have to put much thought into what style would work with the backing track.

Texas Shuffle

A Month of Songs - Song 20

Trance

BT has drums, bass, and synths. I'm playing bass and guitar and added the percussion and Rhodes samples.

A Month of Songs - Song 19

Some mellow slow blues with lousy midi trumpets, recorded on a relatively clear Tuesday evening.

Stormy Monday

A Month of Songs - Song 18

Saturday Funk, recorded on a Saturday afternoon.

A Month of Songs - Song 17

I love percussion.

Red Hot Mama

A Month of Songs - Song 16

Porn

Recorded over lunch.

A Month of Songs - Song 15

Back in the saddle again. Not the liveliest effort, but it's Monday.

Mr. Magic

A Month of Songs - Song 14

Big Arena Rock, unfortunately filled with clams.

Live With Me

A Month of Songs - Song 13

When the Lights Are Low

I'm not really feeling it with Red Ant playing "jazz" piano. On the other hand, my "jazz" guitar is nothing special either.

A Month of Songs - Song 12

Note for note is harder than it seems.

Josie

A Month of Songs - Song 11

Trying hard to be jazz ....

Herringbone

A Month of Songs - Song 10

The next song on the list is Footprints, but I've recorded a cover of that fairly recently (Walking In The Footprints, May 2008), so I skipped ahead to Gong.

I'm playing the organ and guitar. No song tomorrow, I'll be out of town.

A Month of Songs - Song 9

I'm sure this story originates in Africa (as all human stories do) but to make things short I'll start with James Brown. James Brown wrote a guitar riff, which was copied by the Average White Band in a song called "School Boy Crush", Eric B. sampled the first five seconds of "School Boy Crush" and Rakim wrote some new words and they released a song called "Microphone Fiend", Rage Against the Machine took the words written by Rakim and wrote some new music and released a cover of "Microphone Fiend", Red Ant took the music written by Rage Against the Machine and recorded a version without vocals, which was covered by yours truly.

What a trip.

Microphone Fiend

A Month of Songs - Song 8

Feel So Bad

with completely gratuitous James Brown outro.

A Month of Songs - Song 7

One week down....

Defunkt

A Month of Songs - Song 6

Come Dancing

This was the most complete backing track so far - drums, bass, electric piano and guitar. Finding space was tough. Plus, I am just not good enough at this point to solo for 32 or 64 bars at a stretch - I need more riffs. I really didn't like the guitar work by the time I got done, so I threw Camel Space over the top to try and cover it up.

A Month of Songs - Song 5

This weekend was brutal - with all the July 4th stuff, getting everyone ready for West Virgina, driving there and back - I had very little music time. Hopefully this week will be better.

The Chicken

A Month of Songs - Song 4

This one was tough. The sound quality on the backing track is lousy to start with. It's just bass a drums - they play two choruses, but on the second chorus the bass player tries to slap and pop and he totally falls off the rhythm. In addition, I'm pretty familiar with the original, which is built around a resonant filter/wub wub synth bass and has all kinds of crazy old school synth parts.

Chameleon

A Month Of Songs - Song 3

Born Under A Bad Sign

This one was a little more in my wheelhouse than the last two, plus I wasn't starting after a full day of work and kids.

If I can make it through the next couple of days I should be able to make it to the end - but I am traveling Sunday and Monday so I need to cheat ahead a little bit today and Saturday.

A Month of Songs - Song 2

Wow, I didn't expect the suck to set in so early. I hope these days start getting easier.


Atomic

A Month of Songs - Song 1

For the month of July I'm going to be doing a song a day as part of the "Month of Songs" (along with Chicken Monkey and smurfco). Some people are writing a new song each day, which is cool, but at this point I think I need to work on my musicianship more than my songwriting, so I'm going to be adding leads on top of a set of 30 jazz/funk backing tracks created by RedAnt (of the Harmony Central Guitar Jam Forum).

I'm going to post all of the songs at soundclick as The Woodshed Tapes. So, without further ado, here is song number 1.

Acid Zappa