Rob Lambert.com

I decided to force myself to work on musical stuff for a year. So I made a commitment to myself to record two songs a week and publish them to YouTube for a year. So in a year, I will have recorded 104 songs.

Here are my general rules for myself:

• Live performances only
• In other words, no overdubs or editing (otherwise I’d obsess and never move on from a song)
• Loops are fine as long as I perform them live w/ a looper, although I really suck at this, I’ll probably do it on some songs
• One in four songs must be new original songs written by me. A higher percentage than this is encouraged.
• I’ll usually play just guitar, but other instruments are fine, as long as it’s just me

Why? To force myself to get better. Secondly to force myself to write some songs that will hopefully be pruned and re-recorded in an environment where multi-tracking and editing is allowed and put out a brand spanking new album in 2011.

I don’t expect to ever improve to the point that I can sing like Jeff Buckley or play guitar like Jimi Hendrix or write songs like Bob Dylan but my goal is to (by August 2011) sing better than pre-2010 Rob Lambert and play guitar better than pre-2010 Rob Lambert and write better songs than pre-2010 Rob Lambert!

For the cover songs, I am going to mostly cover songs that are not super-popular, rarely anything you’d hear on classic rock radio. For example, “Hotel California” and even Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” are not going to make the list. Even if it is a popular artist, I am going to try to dig into their albums and pull out songs that you don’t typically hear on the radio. This isn’t an absolute rule though, I’m sure there will be exceptions to this.

As of the time of this writing I’ve done the first two covers. I’m kind of embarrassed of the 2nd song I did…I am sure there will be other suckages, but hey, that helps me set the bar low to make it easier to win the “most improved” award!

So that’s it. Constructive criticism is encouraged, especially if you have specific tips on specific aspects of playing guitar, singing, recording, etc. that you see that I could use.

And here’s my first cover, Prince’s “Starfish and Coffee”, recorded last week as my first song: