RPM Challenge

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Member Since: Jan 24, 2006

Anyone done this before. My friend did it last year and found it very useful overall. I'm givin' it a try this year. I tend to produce full band one man songs (perhaps over produce) so I'm gonna use this as a chance to record an album of acoustic songs in Feb.

www.rpmchallenge.com/

The RPM Challenge
This is the challenge: record an album in 29 days, just because you can.

That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.

It’s a little like National Novel Writing Month, (NaNoWriMo.org) where writers challenge each other to write 1,700 words a day for 30 days, or the great folks over at February Album Writing Month (fawm.org), who encourage artists to write 14 new songs in February. Maybe they don’t have “Grapes of Wrath” or “Abbey Road” at the end of the month, or maybe they do—but that’s not the point. The point is they get busy and stop waiting around for the muse to appear. Get the gears moving. Do something. You can’t write 1,700 words a day and not get better.

Don't wait for inspiration - taking action puts you in a position to get inspired. You'll stumble across ideas you would have never come up with otherwise, and maybe only because you were trying to meet a day’s quota of (song)writing. Show up and get something done, and invest in yourself and each other.

Anyone can come up with an excuse to say “no,” so don’t. Many of you are thinking “But, I can’t do that! I don’t have any songs/recording gear/money/blah blah blah...” But this doesn’t have to be the album, it’s just an album. Remember, this is an artistic exercise. Just do your best using what you have in order to get it done. If you have a four-track, become a four-track badass! A mini disc, a pro-tools rig, a Walkman, an 80’s tape recorder – use it. Do your best. Use the limitations of time and gear as an opportunity to explore things you might not try otherwise. If you can afford studio time in a “real” studio, fine, but let’s be completely free of any lingering idea that “good” records can only be made in a studio. If that were so, then all the old scratchy blues records or Alan Lomax field recordings that have changed our culture – the world’s culture – wouldn’t still resonate with us today as they do. Springsteen’s haunting classic “Nebraska” was a demo he did at home on a crappy machine. That album is fricking awesome. What label would put those recordings out now? (See: who cares) There are a million examples of this kind of stuff, but the fact will always be: Well written, honest music is compelling and undeniable no matter what it was recorded on. So put it to tape.

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I am not a crook's head
Member
Since: Mar 14, 2003


Feb 05, 2008 04:59 pm

If I hadn't already committed myself to work on my own album I might try somethig like this. This is the time of year when I get my recording motivation so I think I could get into it.

It fits with my model of songwritig anyways, which is "practice makes perfect". I can't just sit down one day and write a song out of the blue. I have to write for months and over time I end up with lots of ideas, bits and pieces of which get blended and used for other projects. I just think that making the habit of writing frequently is the way to go. It gets the juices flowing and makes the next song easier to write, and the next one, and the next one. On and on until I'm exhausted and don't write anything else for a year :)

Member
Since: Jan 24, 2006


Feb 05, 2008 06:11 pm

I'm kind of prolific (for a home recorder) in the first place but I am combining the RPM deal with the stripped back. The "work" of creating the fully produced home track kind of drains me and I tend to take a week or two off after each one. This idea lets me spend some time on each song but to just pump em out, hoping that at least a couple will rise above.

Many people in the challenge produce self admitted crap, badly recorded, badly thought out, just short shrift ideas. I can't do that so I still try and do a decent job.

Let me know when that CD is done we can have a show on it :)

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