Tag: RPM2020

Musical Lessons

I learned two things while singing in the car this morning.

First, I am still a terrible singer.  If you were thinking I would have magically learned how to be awesome over the last two weeks then I’m sorry to disappoint you.  I still suck.

Second, I am still terrified of having people hear me.  Oh look at that guy walking his dog.  He’s two football fields away from me.  I better wait the 20 minutes for him to walk by because he might hear me.

The Stir Crazy Files – Episode 15

I keep notes on each day’s progress when I do the RPM Challenge.  I don’t know why, it just seemed like a good idea once and I never stopped.  That was probably five or six years ago.  In February I usually label each day’s entries as Day 1/28 or whatever.  This year it was Day 1/29, thanks leap year.

Now that we’re working on an April RPM Challenge I’m holding with tradition.  I labeled the first seven entries this month as Day n/31.

Just let that sink in for a second.  Remember, it’s April… Day n/31.

Yeah, I just fixed them all.

Dumbass.

“Studio”

I recorded the rhythm parts for one song this morning before work. Here’s a little behind the scenes glimpse into my April RPM recording “studio” which will henceforth be referred to as “The RPM Nook.”

220/365

RPM Challenge – April Edition – Day 1/31

Two songs underway. Both with a full song form. Both just bass and drums. One song has the bass riff in 7/4 time over drums in 4/4. Zaniness ensues.

The guitar gear plan is either the Les Paul or the SG into the Bassbreaker 15, just like the March project. This time I’m allowing one pedal, the Fuzz Face Mini. I also might mess around with two mics on the amp. We will see if that plan sticks or not.

April 2020 RPM

You thought this was over for a while.  No way, dude.  No way.

The RPM Challenge has a website and a Facebook group.  There’s a subreddit and a discord chat too but I don’t use those too often.  Every February the 300 or so of us pop over to the website and sign up for the year.  Lots of people post on the forums and some people write blogs.  On Facebook people usually just post links to their music including links to live streams and gigs and things.  Normally both places are nice and busy from late-January through mid-March.  Outside of that little time frame both are pretty dead.

A couple of weeks ago there was a post to the Facebook group suggesting doing a second RPM Challenge in April.  If we’re all going to be stuck at home anyway, why not write some music.  I responded by saying I was already planning on it so I was in.  I then went over to the website and checked the forum.  There was something about doing a mini-challenge but nothing much.

This weekend, as March was winding down, I went to both places to see if anything was going to come of that little discussion.  There was nothing on Facebook.  The forum had one little mention stating that something was in the works.  Cool.  Yesterday I took another look at the website.  There it was.

The whole front page had been redesigned.  That usually happens in January.  This time there was a link to a Google Form where you could sign up for April.  This time there are more options for goals.  Instead of just 10 songs or 35 minutes, you can alternately sign up to make a sing, one song or five minutes, an EP, five songs or 20 minutes, and a box set, 30 songs or 100 minutes.  I signed up for the usual 10 songs or 35 minutes.

There were a couple of posts on Facebook from the admins announcing that sign ups were open again.  I haven’t seen much from actual participants.  There are a couple of little comments.  My favorite being someone who was happy that he got a second opportunity to ask himself why he’s putting himself through it.

Like I said, I was going to do this anyway.  It still feels nice to think that at least some of us who are regular participants are going to use it as a motivator for social distance.  That’s a good thing.  We’re all going to stay at home anyway, so why not make some music while we’re stuck.

Now the question is, how many April 2020 RPM Challenge albums are going to have titles that include Social Distance, or Shelter in Place, or Quarantine, or COVID-19, or Coronavirus?  All of them?

One Last RPM Post

I am still waiting on the good folks over at RPM headquarters to mark my album as received.  It usually takes a little while for them to acknowledge everyone’s submissions so I’m not concerned.  There was also the issue they had with the site crashing on the 29th so they let everyone have an extra day to check things in.  I had all of that done before noon on the 1st.

Here is my entry on the RPM profile page:

2020 Album name:

I Only Believe in Truth

Received

–

Date submitted:

02/29/2020

2020 Preferred Track name:

We’re Coming for You

About this preferred track:

Simple (mostly) 12-bar recorded mostly live.

About this album:

My original idea was half electric and half acoustic. That went out the window quickly and I ended up with a mostly disjointed mess of songs that are not so bad.

Favorite moment:

I used to be a sax player first and foremost, but once I started playing guitar while I was in high school I became a full time guitar player. On this album I decided to see if I could still play the sax. I can. Not well, but I can still do it. That felt great.

Words of wisdom:

I lost a full week due to a family vacation, though I did mix a few of the songs while sitting in a hotel in Disney World (we stayed at the Yacht Club). I was able to find the time to get all of the tracking done in plenty of time. You can do it if you need to, you just need to be creative with your time management.

Lessons learned:

I can still play the saxophone. A guitar played through two amps just sounds better than a guitar part played through one amp. Writing out a melody prior to writing the lyrics or sitting at a mic lead to me writing much more creative melodies that were not only more fun (and harder) to sing, but lead to songs that overall seem more interesting to me.

I also wrote a blog post during lunch today to act as a sort of recap for the month. Everything I wrote had been written on this blog at some point or another (except maybe the bit at the end about wishing I could change my mind on the sequencing).

I did it.  That’s nine years in a row with a finished album by March 1st.  I know that in terms of the real world it’s silly and stupid and not important, but for me it’s a huge thing and the feeling of accomplishment I feel cannot be overstated.

The finished product doesn’t look anything like what I planned.  I knew I was going to lose a full week to a family vacation so I kept my expectations kinda low.  I wanted 10 songs.  Five arranged for an electric three-piece rock band, and five arranged for an acoustic group in a coffee shop: Acoustic guitar, cajon and hand percussion, alto saxophone, and vocals.

It didn’t take me long to change the 10 song plan to 14 songs (seven of each type).  That was simply due to me writing too much music.  Even the 7/7 plan went down the tubes as I kept writing electric songs long after I should have stopped.  I ended up with seven acoustic songs and 11 electric songs.

If that wasn’t overdoing it enough, as I was working on a couple of the acoustic songs I starting thinking that they would sound pretty good with a set of drums instead of just hand percussion.  Eventually all seven of them had bass, drums, and electric guitar parts added and I ended up with two different mixes.  One for the coffee shop and one for a rock band.  So now instead of 18 possible mixes to use for the final album I had 25.

I thought about doing a three sided album where side one was all electric, side two was all coffee shop (my coffee shop analogy is starting to get annoying, but I’m rolling with it), and side three was band mixes of acoustic songs.

I scrapped that idea too.  Instead I went through all of the acoustic songs and picked the mix I thought sounded best and then went through all 18 songs and sorted them into three categories: Good, Kinda Good, and Crap.  Two songs went into the crap bucket, and three into kinda good.  I decided to drop them all from the final album and just go with the 13 that landed in the good bucket.

Here they are… 13 disjointed songs that no longer fit to any theme or structure, but which were the least offensively bad of the batch:

I Only Believe in Truth

So what did that leave me with?  Seven alternate mixes and five outtakes.  Two of the outtakes were acoustic so I really had five alternates of album tracks, five outtakes, and two alternate mixes of outtakes.  12 leftover tracks.  I figured the alternate mixes of the album tracks were all still pretty okay so I packed them all together into an alternate RPM album:

I Only Believe in Alternates and Outtakes

The saddest part of all of this is that last night I was listening through the dropped songs and I really think I should have kept one of them.  If I had paid a little more attention during the sequencing I would have made a better decision and the final album would have been a little different.  I am afraid that when I listen to the main album I’ll decide there were things I should have dropped.

Oh well.  February is over.  As with all RPM Challenges it’s now time to figure out what I want to do next.

What do I want to do next?

So yeah… what do I do next?

My Final #RPM2020 Album

…and with that, it’s all done.

After all the talking about saxophones I only ended up using three of the seven songs I played it on.  Five of the seven acoustic songs made it to the album, but I used the band mix on two of them.

I needed 10 songs and I ended up using 13.  I still feel iffy about a couple of them.  Maybe I should have stuck to just 10.  The running time is supposed to be 35 minutes and I ended up with a little more than 43.  I never gave that much thought this year though as I knew I was going to have way more than 10 songs to work with.

Do I like this album?  As of right now, I kinda do.  Ask me again in a couple of days and I’ll probably vomit on you (figuratively).  Does it feel like an “Album”? No.  It feels like a disjointed mess, but I knew it would.  As soon as I came up with the idea of making the album one part electric and one part acoustic I knew it would feel sloppy.

Speaking of sloppiness, I lowered my standards for the minimum level of performance required for one of these projects.  There is a lot of less than wonderful guitar playing and some down right shitty singing.  The sax playing was going to be bad even at its best.  You can’t take seven years off from an instrument and then suddenly play like John Coltrane… not that I ever played like John Coltrane, of course.  I’m literally being figurative here, not literal.

Anyway, here it is in all it’s messy glory:

The Alternate/Outtake Album

I usually wait a week or two before uploading my finished RPM album to bandcamp, but I was up early today and figured what the hell.

Over the last few years I have been creating a separate playlist on alonetone to hold all of the songs that I cut.  Those songs usually don’t go to bandcamp.  Last year I didn’t cut anything and had enough for two full records, so everything went.

This year I had five acoustic songs that went on the final album and each one had an alternate mix that I think was good enough to use, and at one point I thought about putting them both on the final album.  Instead I decided to use them as the first half of the second playlist and to include that second playlist on bandcamp.

I uploaded those first so that the “real” album would show up as the most recent.

Here it is:

The first five songs are alternate mixes of songs on the actual RPM album.  The next five are songs that I dropped, three electric and two acoustic.  I put the preferred mix of the acoustic song first.  The last two songs are the non-preferred mix of the dropped acoustic songs.