Son Lux on the RPM Challenge

It turns out I wasn't alone in my effort to write an album in February- Son Lux, a musician for whom I have an enormous amount of respect, also stepped up to the plate, and NPR followed his progress through the twenty-eight day process.  It's a really interesting read, and his descriptions (and audio clips) of the writing process are really informative.

Son Lux on the RPM Challenge

RPM Challenge: Finished!

Quick recap: I wrote an album entirely in the month of February as part of the RPM Challenge.  And here it is:

Nonagon - Verdigris [Aug 2012 release]

UPDATE: After a year and a half of good intentions, I've touched-up and tweaked (and in the case of "8.0" largely reworked) the original nine tracks from the album and had them professionally mastered by my trusted go-to Chris Leary at Melograf Mastering. The resulting "official" version is now hosted on Bandcamp, and is no longer a free download.

That said, if any reader of this blog would like to have a copy but would rather not go through the process of entering credit card info, I'm happy to send a free download code your way- just shoot me a message.

One of the nine tracks for your streaming pleasure:

Cipher Test by nonagon

RPM Challenge: Update 2

Six days left until the end of the challenge.  I finished the outline for my ninth and final track today.  So much work left to do!  Time constraints are breeding new approaches, which was what I'd hoped would happen... we'll see how it all turns out soon!

RPM Challenge: Update

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!

RPM Challenge

Today I signed up for the Record Production Month (RPM) Challenge.  The goal is to write and record 10 songs or 35-minutes of material during the month of February with no head starts (i.e. previously unfinished work) allowed.

Given my track record of re-re-thinking every musical decision and spending hours fiddling with minutia, writing an entire album in three and a half weeks seemed like a ridiculous idea at first.  After giving it some thought though, I realized that it was actually the best idea ever.  I am officially giving myself permission to write music quickly.  There have been a handful of occasions in recent memory that I've written what could stand as a finished track in one day, but couldn't accept that it could possibly be finished in anything less than three weeks of full-time work, and so set it aside or ruined it with unnecessary tweaks.  I'm hoping RPM will by my psychological escape from that kind of thinking.

So what am I going to write?  My number one goal for the RPM challenge is to foster spontaneity.  Instead of wondering if a direction is "correct," or whether I'm moving closer to some ideal "perfect" piece of music, I'm just going to churn out ideas and fit them together.  I'm not going to allow myself to deadlock.

A few other guidelines I've set for myself:

1. Focus on creating with few musical elements, but with depth and evolution involved in each.  My tendency is to combine a great many relatively static (i.e. unchanging) sounds to create motion and depth in my music.  I think this is a useful approach, and I like the results I can achieve using it, but this month I want to try to focus on modulating and manipulating individual sonic elements to change their character over time instead of relying on dozens of component parts.  I'm not convinced that this will be a time-saver, but it'll be a good exercise for me.
   
   
2. Value emptiness and silence.  This is something I've been working on for some time.  When there are no limits to the number of layers you can pile onto a track (which practically speaking there aren't), I have a natural tendency to increase complexity, even when it ultimately hurts the musical statement I'm trying to make.  I want to recapture the power and drama of silence.  If there was a theme to my as-yet unwritten RPM album, I think this would be it.
   
   
3. Leverage the performance techniques and workflow I've developed.  I am a very different beast on stage than I am in the studio.  If I've prepared properly, I can really get into a zone when performing that leads to (I hope) really interesting and spontaneous musical discoveries that I almost certainly wouldn't have come across during production.
   
   In a live context I can't go back and fix mistakes, so I don't dwell on them.  I also feel much more connected to time and how the music I'm creating moves through it.  This probably comes off as an odd statement, but consider that most production software presents music as a "chunk" that you can (and almost must) absorb in its entirety with your eyes.  The beginning and end of that eight-minute epic sit just a few inches from one another, and you can skip between them in half a second.  The psychological effect this has had on me is interesting, and something that I'm only now really beginning to understand.  I'd like to write more about that someday, but for now suffice to say that I'm going to try to bring the spontaneity I feel during performances to the production table this month.

Success in this endeavor is far from a certainty, but I know I'm going to finish it.  Meet me back here on March 1st for the results =).