RPM Challenge 2009

Yup, I am all set to record another album… In the 28 days of February 2009 I will record an entire album consisting of either 10 songs or 35 minutes of material for the RPM Challenge 2009.

I’ve been thinking about what I want to do, but I don’t think I’m going to reveal anything until the album is completely done. Perhaps some snippets of songs, but I don’t plan on doing what I did last year. I basically started the process of writing and recording all at once, and finished each song within a few hours, and then uploaded it, calling it “done!” which turned into a really weird collection of songs… which is, you know, an album, but this time I am more interested in a cohesive piece of work.

I’m going to borrow a guitar (most likely from Milton Zorro of Trademark fame) as mine is just too much a total piece of crap that can’t be tuned properly. My bass sounds good, so that’s fine… as for drums, I actually do have my drums set up in the recording booth at work, but they need some loving (new heads, tuning) and they aren’t mic’d so I might not use them at all. I may end up using existing drum loops again. (Drums are always the hardest part!) I’ll be trying a Firewire audio interface to see if it works well for guitar and bass input, where last year I used the cheap “USB Guitar Plug” so hopefully things will sound a bit cleaner.

Ultimately I want to produce an album that I really like. If no one else likes it, that’s cool… Oh, it will also be released under a Creative Commons license, like most of my music, photos, and video…

Check back in February for updates, or in March for the conclusion. Rock on…

(Oh yeah, Matt Gauger is the guy who told me about RPM last year, but he didn’t get to participate. I’m really hoping he can do it this year.)