Carlos & Charlie’s – I LOVE YA!
Fun show at C&C’s on Saturday. Much love to Lee and Ned for rocking it out. Felt like crap the next day but totally worth it. Made me realize I’m pretty good at this singing and playing stuff.
More fun to come…
TMS
Bought a guitar synth – took it back
It was a fun but frustrating little ride with the Roland GR-55 and GK-3 pickup, but it reminded me how little time I have to mess with stuff these days. So it went back.
I still haven’t completed any more new songs for the record. I know we’re four months into the year, and I set my mind on completing it this year, so I still figure I’ve got plenty of time. I just need to take time to write and hone what I’ve got into something worth properly recording. I know I want to find a way to play my songs live, so maybe the first step will be hitting some open mics and doing a few tunes and then talking to my musician friends and seeing if I can convince them to do a show with me at some club somewhere – do about 25-30 minutes of my stuff. I think that would be cool. Not sure who I’d get, but I have talked to some people who I really like and respect about it and they seemed interested, so…
It should be a good year, though. Got new gear-haulers (wife’s new 2010 Scion xD and my new 2011 Toyota RAV4), so I’ll always have reliable and capacious transportation to gigs. I just have to have some booked!
Speaking of which, Roman Holiday ROCKS Carlos & Charlie’s this coming Saturday. We are ÜBER-excited about it. Well, at least I am. We haven’t had the email frequency we enjoyed with past lineups of the band – everyone seems pretty distracted and busy these days, which is kind of a bummer. But I’m looking forward to putting on a tremendous show for the C&C crowd on Easter eve. 🙂
If you live in Austin or are going to be around, make the trip up there – it’s a fun time! 🙂
TMS
New Toy…hopefully it inspires creativity…weird gig
Played a private party down in Gruene. Nice crowd – not much energy – but it was fun. They asked us to play longer and paid us for it, which was cool. Not much more to say about it except that it was a LONG show.
On to the real part of this topic. I got me a Roland GR-55 guitar synth…and I’z excited!
Except that I don’t have an AC adapter. I think it got nicked at the music store, so I’ll go see them tomorrow to work that out. Of course, it could be sitting on my desk at work, but I find that to be a rather unlikely scenario, since I didn’t take anything out of the box. You never know, though…I’ve been stupider.
That’s about all for now. I hope that when I get the synth going I can get stuff set up so I can play some piano and organ parts and really flesh out my non-guitar-sounding ideas on an instrument I don’t completely suck at (like keyboard).
Peace!
TMS
Starting to get the creative juices flowing…
New song based on a neat melody started today…need to make it better, but it’s on its way.
I’m going to rewrite the lyrics to some of my better musical ideas and then I’ll be able to get the song list together for recording. I’m excited!
Roman Holiday plays Carlos & Charlie’s in a few months, so that’s cool. Played a beautiful Carvin LB75 today…might be my next bass when I have money to get one. Perhaps it’s time to thin the herd and sell the ones I won’t use.
Yamaha RBX-A2 5-string for sale – great condition…no case – $250 obo to my blog readers…going on Craigslist for $300 obo 🙂
Peace and democracy in the middle east…
TMS
So, no new work on the album…
But the dead band came back to life this past weekend, and we had a great show.
It’s kind of amazing that we could go four months without playing together and sound better than we did the last time we had a show. Weird…but seems to be par for the course.
I was just happy my voice didn’t give out and my hands made it through the show.
Love to all – hopefully more to come on album #1 here soon. I’m kind of inspired, so let’s see if that translates into some new songs that are better than the crap I originally wanted to put on the record. Pieces!
TMS
Haven’t been doing much musically…
Aside from burning a practice disc of songs to sing in the car, I really haven’t done much at all to advance the album project. A lot of thinking about doing stuff, but not a lot of doing stuff. I’ll get there.
Roman Holiday is still showing signs of life, but we’ll see what happens there.
I’m desperate to play a show, though…it’s been WAY TOO LONG. The last show I did was the weird one in the backyard with the replacement guitarist Johnny (who did a good job). I’m at the point now where I think I want to play just to play because it’s been too damn long.
All for now. Station!
TMS
No news…
It’s been a very uneventful week on the album front. I think I needed some time away from obsessing over it so I could decide exactly how I feel about the project. Definitely going to go over the songs again and decide if it’d be better just to write a bunch of new ones and do a specifically-themed project or to maintain the weird diversity I was hoping to include when the idea was hatched to make an album. I think even though it’s bound to be musically diverse, I want it to have a general theme lyrically – everything should tie together. I’ll even be doing that with textures – songs with different feels will be knitted together with similar timbres to keep it an album instead of a collection of songs.
Can you tell I’m kind of ambitious here?
It’s still all in my brain, though…nothing committed to ones and zeroes yet. We’ll get there.
Until next time…
TMS
So maybe the reports of the band’s demise were premature…
As we just got contact from a few opportunities that we didn’t expect. Hmm…maybe things will be better than I thought! So that’s good.
On the album front, I’m starting to have issues with doing my record, because I really am not satisfied at all with the majority of songs I have picked. I don’t know if it’s self-editing ruining things again or what, but I really don’t love my music very much right now. That might change, or I just might have to write some songs, because everything seems kind of “almost there but not good enough”. Why can’t I just suck it up and let other people decide if it’s good? Artistic integrity is irritating.
Time to go see if I can write a song. 🙂
TMS
So there’s this little sad thing that happened today…
Roman Holiday disbanded. After four mostly fun years (you can read about all the fun and not-so-fun stuff if you go through the archives of this blog), it’s over.
It’s been a fun ride, Ned…and much love to all the Roman Holiday members through the years. We went through drummers like Spinal Tap!
- Lee – it was too short, but it was a blast!
- Greg – thanks for all the silliness.
- Rachel – sorry it was so short, and sorry the end was messy.
- Rob – you NAAASTY (and a genius).
- Luis – we will play together again!
- Mike – thanks for keeping it fun and LOUD.
- Patrick – thanks for all the fun and singing.
- Casey – thanks for leaving your drums at my house for almost two years…if I had only had the space to enjoy them…
All the great shows, all the great fans (none of whom really stuck with us, but that’s okay…people have lives), lots of great memories. We’ll gladly regroup for private parties…so send your friends to www.romanholidayband.com – you never know.
In current music news: Finally got all the songs arranged and printed and in a notebook…rehearsing them, fixing lame or clumsy lyrics, and figuring out the best arrangements is next. WHEE!
TMS
No new site, but the blog is now here
Or is it nowhere?
Kidding…anyway, haven’t gotten much done, but have discussed Roman Holiday doings with Ned, trying to figure out where that band’s headed for 2011 since we have nothing booked. Going to print out and put all the songs for the record in a notebook that I will take to work everyday and play on my lunch break to really get inside them and see what changes need to be made. Also going to make acoustic-and-voice demos of every song that will be on the new record, which should be interesting for the more “rock” songs and the ones that generally require more production. Just need to get the structures and phrasing down. Once those are done I’ll post them here (over on the main page).
Pieces!
TMS