We're officially half-way through the month of February, which means that I and my fellow participants have exactly two weeks left to finish our albums for the RPM Challenge.
I've been trying hard to spend at least a little bit of time each day working on the songs I'll end up submitting, and so far I've been fairly successful despite the inevitable distractions we all face. At this point I have five songs in progress, zero completed. I've decided that my RPM album will have nine songs (go figure), so given the parameters of the challenge I'm on the hook for about four-minutes per song; this isn't necessarily the way I'd prefer to think about composing, but it's hardly a normal situation so I'm giving myself a pass.
One decision I made very early on was to try to minimize my internal editorial process as much as possible while coming up with ideas for each song. In practice this has meant that as soon as I come up with a chord progression or riff or beat that seems reasonable, I commit to it as the foundation for a piece and immediately start building on it; I spend very little time wondering if my initial idea is the "right" place to start, and instead I just go with it. Since my songs tend to evolve away from the seed idea that started them anyway, it feels right to devote as much time as possible to writing parts instead of nitpicking decisions that are likely to be thrown away anyway.
Next, I've taken a lesson from Ill Gates' "Ill Methodology" and started creating arrangements very early in the writing process, often before I've written more than three or four rough parts. Sketching out a skeleton of how each song will progress from start to finish has been helpful in forcing me to think about the big picture early on and keeping me from spending an inordinate amount of time on details that might be tossed with the next broad stroke. This being electronic music (and more importantly me being me) I've still caught myself getting sucked into detail work, but I'm trying hard to be cognizant of my workflow and save the small things for last.
Finally, I've decided not to try to finish anything until I have ideas and basic arrangements for all nine songs. I know myself well enough to be convinced that I could easily spend ten times as long on a project of this scope (I have, and more); I also know that it's very likely that I'll be working on these songs until the very last minute before having to mail in my CD. It's unlikely that I'll be entirely happy with the outcome of all the pieces I ultimately submit, and I don't expect to feel like they wouldn't each benefit from more work. But damnit, I'm going to submit something, and so I'm focusing first on breadth and leaving the detail work for iterative refinement as time allows.
Music (and art in general) is an interesting endeavor precisely because there is no universal right or wrong. I could send in a CD-R with nine four-minute tracks of perfect digital silence and, had that been the realization of my particular artistic vision, I would have successfully completed the challenge. On the other hand, one might argue that I could find myself on March 1st with fifteen five-minute songs full of elaborate arrangements and stunning detail, but if I myself felt that they had somehow fallen short of my vision or intent, I would have failed the challenge. This latter argument, of course, is exactly the kind of mentality that the creators of the RPM challenge are trying to combat, and I wholeheartedly reject it. The point of the challenge is not to craft your magnum opus in four weeks, but rather to constrain a precious resource (time) and force yourself to make shit happen. That shit might live up to its name or it might be brilliant, but either way the effort is its own reward.
Assuming I successfully complete this challenge (which, given the caveats I've started I know that I will), I'm most interested to see if and how this experience affects my usual unconstrained and mollasses-like writing process. I have not (and don't expect to) reject my tendency towards detail-oriented music, but I'm becoming more and more convinced that truly great work and truly efficient work are inexorably tied to one another.
I'll try to check in again at least once more before the challenge ends. Wish me luck!
No comments:
Post a Comment