You may have been wondering where I’ve been in the last month. Typically I would be dumping SXSW bands I’m into seeing this year or at the very least reviewing a concert or two down here in Austin. Welp, I decided to put my music where my mouth is and participate in the RPM Challenge. I beat it and with days to spare. So come with me and let me spin a tale of hard work and somewhat epic music making.
What is the RPM Challenge? Well, you sign up and pledge to do either 10 songs or 35 minutes or both worth of an album. The start date is February 1 and you have until the end of the month to send your tunes in. What’s the benefit? Do you get a prize? Nope. You get the satisfaction of creating a good chunk of music in the shortest month of the year.
Well I had all this expensive instruments and computer software lying around, so I decided to dive in. The sweat and swass built up inbetween my day job led to the birth of my first ever, 7 song self-titled album. There’s ups and downs, weird and wonderful, plus some happy little accidents. I did not take this serious at all for one second and chalked up these guys as a learning experience.
It’s not that I didn’t have fun (I did), but I was scared at first. It’s taken me more than 10 years to take a chance on creating something and putting myself out there and I finally did it. Oh, I collected various instruments and software but I was comfortable with just having it versus actually doing something with it. So when I began earlier this month, I had to overcome that fear of risk taking. I’d say I did that and ended out the month having alot of fun.
By all means it’s not perfect, but there were a ton of learning experience along the way. I learned just how well versed I am in music theory and guitar playing (not much), but I also learned that mixing and mastering music is not as intimidating. Also, I became much more familiar with how powerful both Propellerhead Reason and Ableton Live are, especially when they work together. So all and all the RPM Challenge was very much worth it and the creative dam may just have burst open.
[soundcloud params=”auto_play=true&show_comments=true”]http://soundcloud.com/hokey/hokey-kaos-on-the-dancefloor[/soundcloud]
Check out ‘Kaos On The Dancefloor’ and let me know what you think. I made that guy using Korg’s iKaossilator (which I also got very familiar with in the last month). It’s very dancy and not like any of the other songs on the album. At some point, I’ll release them all, but I’m coming to grips with how copyright/publishing works for music. It’s all fairly convoluted in my opinion. Be sure to check back here when I will have more news on that and you might as well come back because SXSW is coming up (as well as potential news, concert reviews, and heck why not throw in some software/hardware reviews). Keep on creating!