Once again I find myself just a week away a couple of days away from the start of this year’s RPM Challenge and realised I should write a post about recording last year’s album.
First, the annual reminder that the RPM Challenge is to record an album of original music during the month of February – an album being defined as 10 tracks or 35 minutes.
This year I was inspired by a track I’d done for a competition late in the year before where we had to limit ourselves to the sounds in one specific library (the rather excellent Alev Lenz “3” library from Spitfire), as well as audio from other sources. I found it quite liberating to not spend valuable time trawling through my many libraries looking for a particular sound. I decided that I would use the same approach for my 2022 RPM Challenge album, and that on each piece of music I would use only the sounds from one library. I would, however, allow myself to use percussion sounds from a different library, or from my drum software, and also the use of field recordings. In my original plan I was also going to allow myself one lead instrument (eg. piano) from another library, but in the end I was able to tweak the attack, sustain etc settings of some pad sounds to transform them into a passable lead sound (and vice versa too), so I didn’t need to.
With this in mind, I decided I would call the album “Focussed”. Keeping to just one library per track was certainly a good way to focus my thoughts, so the title seemed appropriate. I had a look through my photographs to see if I had anything which might make a good cover, and I came across a photo of a drop of water frozen onto a twig that I’d taken a couple of months before.
Day 1 came, and thankfully so did the ideas. I made a good start, and then later retired to the virtual pub (a bottle of beer in front of the telly)…
About a week later a delivery arrived with a new addition for the virtual pub, which thankfully didn’t hinder progress on the recording at all… A bottle of the first release of a new English whisky distilled not all that far down the road from me! It’s not bad at all 🙂
Things continued to progress nicely, and tracks started coming together, and on February 10th, Spitfire released a new sound library, Gaika – War Island with a video introduction and walkthrough on YouTube. I bought it and started trying it out, and ideas came quickly, which eventually became the track In Other News.
I had quite a few Spitfire libraries to use, but I wanted Pianobook to be better represented on my album too. The main problem here was that most of the Pianobook libraries were (excellent) samples of an instrument with not a great deal of variety within the library. One day I decided to look for some with a wider variety and found a wonderful one called The Synths, which has an excellent selection of sounds. I downloaded it and went through the different sounds making a note of which ones I’d like to use in categories such as bass sound, pads, leads. Then I started putting a track together with them, and it came together really quickly. In fact I went from not having the library to having a completed track in just a few hours, which inspired its title: All In A Days Work.
One of the Spitfire libraries I was keen to use was the felt piano from their Originals line. I had a few attempts at writing something with it and – while I quite liked the music – none of them felt right for the softness of the felt piano sound. One morning I was going for a walk before work. For the 3rd or 4th day in a row it was pouring with rain, and so once again I put waterproofs on, grabbed my umbrella and set out to walk around the woods near my home. Walking along, boots squelching on the muddy path and the steady sound of rain pelting the umbrella I started to get ideas. After I got home, I set up my little Zoom H1 recorder pointed at the velux window in the bathroom to record the sound of the rain. Meanwhile, I played a few gentle chords with the felt piano sound and then started a simple melody over the top. This then came together pretty quickly, and with the rain recording in the background became Another Rainy Day. I think this is my favourite track from the album.
On the 20th, with just over a week to go, I did a check of where I was up to. One piece was more or less done, and another 8 were on their way. It looked like I was well on course.
Then on the morning of Saturday 26th February, it was time for breakfast, and then to start the last weekend of the challenge.
By lunchtime I was up to around 25 minutes worth of music over 5 or 6 tracks all but done, and by the end of the day that was up to 7 tracks, and around 28 minutes. By Sunday evening I was within touching distance of the 35 minute mark…
Then on the evening of the last day I found myself with 10 tracks more or less ready, at just under 44 minutes. The music was pretty much done, but I was struggling to come up with titles for some of the pieces… Often a big stumbling block!
Eventually everything had a title, and all the tracks were uploaded with plenty of time to spare!
As always, the completed album is available on Bandcamp for whatever you would like to pay, even if that is nothing. I hope you enjoy it!