February 8th, 2009
One week of February is officially in the can. And that means one quarter of the time in this year’s RPM Challenge has passed. For those who don’t know, the goal of the RPM Challenge is to record a full album (either 10 songs or 35 minutes of music) during the month of February. I signed up my “band” for the challenge, and felt pretty good about things going in. I began working on recording the first song just after midnight on February 1st, and things went well for the next couple days. On Monday night (the 3rd), Jen and I recorded the vocals for that song, and it seemed like all was well. But later, when I started mixing the tracks, I just couldn’t get it to sound right. After spending way too much time (see: hours) trying to “fix it in the mix,” I finally gave up and realized that the vocals would have to be redone. That’s not a huge deal, but it was a disappointment. I debated on whether or not to release the song in its current incarnation. But that just doesn’t feel right. Since then, I’ve recorded most of the tracks for the second song. I’d like Jen to record some vocals for it before Id consider it to be finished. Beyond those two songs, I don’t have much. I’ve got a couple other songs I’ve started but haven’t been able to finish. For the sake of the Challenge, I could reach back and pull out some older, completed songs that I’ve never recorded before. But even with that, I won’t meet the minimum requirements of the Challenge. Regardless, this isn’t a declaration of surrender. More of a “declaration of being stuck.”
On a related note, it’s definitely been interesting to get back into the whole “music thing.” I had spent most of my life, from the time I was a teenager, up until when I moved to California, in the pursuit of a Life In Music. I didn’t necessarily have any plans on that changing after the move. But Real Life, being the cold bitch that she is, came in and put a serious smackdown on my Life In Music ideas. This last week (especially those obsessive hours spent on mixing), has dredged up a lot of emotions that I had clearly pushed very far down. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it was unexpected. I may write some more about these feelings over time. I suppose if I were a true artist, I’d turn ‘em all into songs.
I’ve also been posting updates to the blog (scroll to the bottom of the page and click the “blog” link) on the RPM Challenge site, if you’d like to read more about this last week’s worth of music creation efforts.
February 8th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
[...] “RPM Challenge, week one” [...]
February 9th, 2009 at 11:27 pm
Shawn, I’m sure you can work your way around this, and personally I think two songs nearly finished in only nine days (think about it; that’s just more than a week) is definitely an accomplishment. I imagine most artists take at least a few weeks with a song after it’s written so I think you’re being way too hard on yourself to consider recording TWO songs in 9 days (nearly finished) a failure by any means. Something you said in this post really resonated with me. I completely understand the thing about not wanting to call a song (or an album, or any project) complete until it’s just right. I too am a perfectionist and I’m always reluctant to call a project finished because I’m worried that I’ll want to change something later. I’ve found that this reluctance has even made me hesitate in starting a project, because I know I won’t be able to be finished with it until everything is completely perfect – and the problem with that is, it’s never finished, so I end up with the mindset that any project I start is going to be stuck with me for a LONG time. By the way, I completely agree about the Death to Autoplay thing (from your headline on the MySpace page); what I don’t think many MySpace users realize is that most people, myself included, don’t browse linearly. We open new tabs, switch between them, close them, branch out, new windows; it’s organized chaos! There is nothing more annoying (well, there is, but it’s still annoying regardless) than stumbling upon a video you want to watch and turning up the sound on your computer to find that about ten different pages are all playing music/sound of some sort. Then of course you can never tell which page the noise is coming from, so you end up having to close them all. And then it’s nearly impossible to find them again when you need them. I really hate that. I definitely wish there were a setting on Mozilla to not allow pages to play sounds without your permission, although I’m sure if that were possible it would already be doing that. By the way, your duet on there with Jen sounds great. It’s spectacular. I can’t wait to hear your finished album! Good luck! I don’t completely understand how the contest works but I’m sure you’ll do wonderfully.