Could 'A, Would 'A, Should 'A

• Readership Down
• Rained In Wednesday

It was steadily raining last night. I stayed in and recorded music, originally making a drum beat to go with "Candy Man," by Sammy Davis Jr., which I have Weird Al-ed into a song about the can man who picks up and recycles cans.

I really love the new method I am using of recording. I am isolating single lines of vocals, causing them to repeat while I sing over them, practicing until smooth, and then causing that to repeat while I practice harmonizing a second line to it. When I'm ready, I hit record and put the second voice down. Then, I can get these to repeat and am able to come up with a third part. It's very satisfying to be able to have 3 part harmony, like Neil Young does on a lot of his songs.

All I need is to nail it one time through, then I can trim away everything before and after it, then cause that to repeat, mistake free ad infinitum.

Then, there are parts, like the lead guitar and the snare drum, that I will just play along with the entire 5 minutes or so of the song; which lends just enough irregularity to it that I won't be accused of sounding computer-generated.

Well, the proof will be in the pudding; I still haven't put anything together for "release" on this blog. I haven't listened to the stuff in the sidebar in a couple years.

I'm So Much Better Now

I have always tended to discount anything that I might have done musically any length of time ago; thinking that I have gotten so much better since then that it is going to sound primitive to me.

I generally do feel like I could blow away any of the recordings in the sidebar; especially something like the Led Zeppelin song, "Dancing Days," that I recorded outdoors in Baton Rouge, using a 5 gallon bucket with a towel draped over it for the drum, a lesser guitar than the Takamine I now play, and having the prominent sounds of traffic going by.

Just like I lost interest in hearing about the bands that Travis Blaine had played in, which he wanted to tell me about (while I never got a word in edgewise) after hearing how inept he was at playing the guitar. Don't try to tell me the band didn't basically suck, now Travis...

The same would apply to this blog. The better the music is that I put in the sidebar, the more a person might care about my life as a busker, in a sense.

And, gosh, if I was drop dead handsome in the photos of myself I post, then I might indeed garner some bona fide fans!

Blog Traffic Slow
Recently, I have seen the traffic flow to this blog decrease. Especially noticeable is the lack of having any one post garner several times the traffic of the ones adjacent to it.
Every once in a while a post will do that, for reasons as mysterious as why it hasn't happened in almost a month now.
Unless You've Been Living In A Cave...
One of my posts has gotten almost 6,000 page views, while others are holding steady at around 40.

There is a reason for that, which involves the Google algorithm, and has to do with people linking to it, or checking it from a variety of devices, or sharing it.

I could also hold up my end by doing things like providing "alternate text" to any photo that I might pull out of a Google search and decide to use.

The alternate text might draw someone to my blog who is merely clicking on the same photo, if they were to "visit page."

And, I could go to my Facebook page and post a link to the post, so that any one of my 88 friends on there could get to the blog through it and might share it, etc. Google's search algorithm would eat this up, and it might get me back to having a post here and there that gets 200 or more "views."
Oh, and I could write a story so good and include pictures, cartoons, music, whatever so that it would be shared by people who would share it with people...

And...I could print up business cards to keep by me when I busk which would have links to my Soundcloud and this blog. Could 'a, would 'a, should 'a...



In the case of the 6,000 hit one, it is the post which was about "Caveman Guru," who was a colorful figure from the past, and who took grave offense at the post, which was my first-person, journal style account of meeting him, along with my thoughts and impressions.

The guru had accosted me in the street and demanded that I remove the post. I guess some of his disciples had come across what they thought was an unflattering portrait of him, and had notified him so.

I removed the post. I didn't delete it, it's in my "drafts" folder, I can always put it back up; but then Caveman Guru might indeed hunt me down and assault me physically or something.

Someone, most likely he, had been checking the blog daily, making sure that that post was still gone, I'm assuming. That soon accounted for a lot of the page views that the post got. That, and some of his followers perhaps sharing it with each other.
I think the guy did business under that moniker and people who were dealing with him online in that capacity were also seeing the link to my perceptions of the guy.

But, perhaps for the same reasons that the post had almost 6,000 views, the stuff I have been posting the past couple months has not been getting read by any more than the people whom I determined get the blog through some kind of feed reader, which counts for a page view whether they stop to skim through the post or not.
Peanut Butter Globs With Honey Extra Raisin Bran
It's Thursday night. I would much rather stay home and eat things, than go out and busk.
Last night, I had Raisin Bran, which I souped up by adding raisins and honey and using pea protein milk instead of the cow stuff; and, oh yeah picking up a glob of peanut butter with a spoon and then shoving it into the bowl then eating what stuck to it, carefully drawing off just the right amount of peanut butter each time, leaving the rest on the spoon, so that I got about a half dozen spoon fulls of cereal with each glob of peanut butter.
It's hard to explain how it is done. I might have to make a YouTube video...