It is February again so it is time for daily RPM Challenge updates.
Not much yesterday (Day one, Sunday), just one song idea noodled out in GarageBand for iPhone while sitting in a hotel room near Orlando, Florida waiting to check out and fly home. Hopefully I’ll get to a little more than that today.
The bags are packed. We are ready to check out of the hotel and go find some breakfast. Our ride to the airport isn’t until around 1:00pm so we will have some time to kill. I think we will explore on of the other resorts a little bit.
On a totally unrelated note, the first song for this year’s RPM Challenge has been started. It’s pretty lame. We are underway once more.
It is 12:01am on February 1, 2025. In other words, the RPM Challenge is officially underway once again!
Now that it is time to start writing and recording new music… I am going to bed. I’m totally beat.
Breakfast at another hotel tomorrow. Check out from our hotel. Take a bus to the airport. Fly home. The Challenge for me this year will probably start on February 2nd.
Good luck, everyone!
Do do do, just whistling past the american graveyard again… still… do do do…
I’ve been listening to King Crimson’s Red album quite a bit over the last few days. Crimson, in their original incarnation, had a sax player. First it was Ian McDonald, then it was Mel Collins. When band leader Robert Fripp shook things up and hired a whole new band with a drastically new sound in 1972 the saxophones went away. For a while, at least. By 1974, when they were recording the Red album, they were down to three band members, Fripp (guitar/mellotron), John Wetton (bass/vocals), and Bill Bruford (drums/percussion). Fripp was the only soloist in the lineup… sort of… the other two guys could have cranked out leads with the best of them (because they pretty much were the best of them) but instead they brought in a bunch of session musicians to help fill in the gaps. Among those session musicians were two sax players; Ian McDonald (alto) and Mel Collins (soprano).
Collins plays on the album’s centerpiece, “Starless” and his playing is wonderful (as always). McDonald also plays on “Starless” as well as “One More Red Nightmare”. His playing is out of the fucking world amazing. He wails, especially on “Starless”.
Listening to this record quite a bit lately has me thinking… is the sax playing inspiring me a little? The RPM Challenge is less than two weeks away and it’s coming up on time for me to start recording some new music. Do I suddenly find myself wanting to play the saxophone again? I haven’t taken my alto sax out of its case since I finished the 2020 RPM Challenge. Five years. Is it time to break it out again? I think it might be. I know I can still play even if I am only about 1% of the sax player I was when I was a music major from 1989-1991 and sax was my primary instrument in school. Guitar was a hobby I played on the side, even though I spent nearly infinitely more time playing guitar than sax… which contributed to me leaving school before I graduated.
So I guess what I am trying to say is, if throughout the month of February you start hearing about me writing songs in the key of E flat or B flat instead of E and A, and you start hearing me complain about severe pain in my lips and jaw (due to not having practiced at all in the last five years), then we can probably go ahead and blame Mel Collins and the late Ian McDonald. Just saying.
Okay, it’s March 9th which means this post is about nine days late. Here’s my final mention of the 2024 RPM Challenge.
Two playlists. One is the “album” I submitted to the RPM Challenge website. The album is called The Potato Situation, after something Jen said to me about making dinner that was really funny and I decided would live on forever in album title form. 10 songs. One or two might be better than crap. The rest are meh at best.
The second playlist is also 10 songs and officially qualifies as an RPM Challenge win in it’s own right, but I did not submit it to the website. Why? Because these are the 10 songs that weren’t good enough to make the final cut. As meh as the official album is, these are worse. There are some really boring stinkers in this pile, but the point of the challenge is to ignore your internal censor and just make stuff happen. In that respect, this playlist is a winner.
And there you have it, folks. Two, 10 song playlists representing two sides of the same project coin… or something like that. Another successful February. I wish the quality were a little better, but I’m happy with the win. I’ll take it.
Now I can get back to the Quarantine Tunes Volume Seven that I’ve been picking away at for a couple of years. Maybe I’ll mix a song or two this weekend. We’ll see.
Well, the RPM Challenge is complete. I just submitted my “album” which is really just a collection of rough mixes of shitty demoes of shitty songs. It’s just not very good this year.
I don’t have a playlist to embed yet. I’ll put that together tomorrow sometime. I do have the “album” all uploaded and sequenced with cover art and all over at alonetone.
I feel good about being done even if I don’t feel terribly good about the results. I’ll figure out a sequence of the leftovers “album” tomorrow too. For now though… I’m spent.
Happy Leap Day, everyone! February 29th! IF today’s your birthday then you’ve been waiting four years for this day. Congratulations and make the most of it!
Leap Day means it’s the last day of February which means the RPM Challenge ends today. I have mixed two of the remaining six songs this morning but I have to put off the rest of them until after work tonight. I also have to finish cleaning out the kitchen so that everything is ready for kitchen demolition day tomorrow. I also also need to setup a little kitchen-esque space in our bed room, just in case we decide we need to cook something.
The mixes have been very quick and dirty and rough at best this year so I am sort of plowing through them with the minimum amount of time and effort. I’ll get the last four in tonight without too much of a problem. The question is whether any of them will be good enough to use on the final album.
I have 20 songs. I need 10 to submit an album to the RPM Challenge website. I will pick the best 10 songs and bundle them into something that resembles an album. I will take the remaining 10 pieces of dog shit and bundle them into something that resembles an outtake album. I’ll submit the 10 good songs and not submit the dog shit. Unfortunately, there are probably only four or five songs that I think are good enough to submit… so some shit is going to make it’s way into the submitted album. Oh well. That’s normal for me. I just have to decide what songs to include.
Here’s one I just finished. It will probably be included, though in a better year it would not have been. Oh well.
Four songs left to mix, then I need a cover image and a sequence. That’s all that remains for this year’s RPM Challenge. Almost there, folks. Almost there.
Happy Leap Day.
Here’s a quick update on the RPM Challenge as the penultimate* day comes to an end.
I mixed three songs tonight. All three of the songs are pigs and should never be listened to again.
14 songs finished. Six more to go. One day left. Almost there.
*I am such a pretentious hack.
I just did a quick and terrible mix of song number 11 for this year’s RPM Challenge. We’re officially into the second album’s worth of music. This one might make the final submission. It might not. I can’t decide yet.
Nine more songs left to mix and not enough time to get to it all. I’m pretty sure I’ll finish them all, I just won’t have much time for anything else.
The goal for the RPM Challenge is to record either 10 songs or 35 minutes of music all within the month of February. For me, personally, I don’t consider a song finished until I have a decently listenable mix down.
Earlier tonight I finished mixing my 10th song of the month. I checked the running time for those 10 songs and it’s a smidge more then 37 minutes.
By the terms of both RPM Challenge goals, I have successfully completed the project once again. I’ve completed the challenge every year since 2012.
Of course this year I am shooting for two albums. That means I still have 10 songs left to finish and only two days remaining in the month. I betcha I get it done by the skin of my teeth. I might try to sneak another mix in tonight before I sleep, but it’s almost 10:30 and I am exhausted after dealing with the inventory of the 70,000 IKEA boxes that were delivered tonight. That figure is a slight exaggeration, but it sure feels accurate to my back.
Anyway… another year, another February album in a month. Cheerio, me maties.
Inside the Red Head's Head 