Once again it is only a couple of weeks, less than a week, a day until the start of this year’s RPM Challenge, so it’s time for me to once again write a long-overdue blog post about last year’s recording…
As ever, your regular reminder that the RPM Challenge is a challenge to record an album of original material during the month of February.
This year’s album would be a significant milestone, as it would be my 10th RPM Challenge album! I don’t know where all those years disappeared to – hence the title I chose: “Where Did The Time Go?“, a title which also references the unnerving speed at which February zips by each year.
Looking back, it occurs to me that it was also the first album I’d done in a long time with no general theme behind it.
Strangely, it all seemed to go quite well without too much panic. As usual, when I started writing this blog post I reviewed the tweets I posted over the month of February 2023 with the #RPMChallenge or #RPM2023 hashtags to remind myself how things went, and there was nothing much of urgency to be seen this time.
So, as ever, February 1st came along, and I set to recording as soon as I’d finished work (one of the benefits of working from home now is I don’t need to wait to get home from work to start). A good day was had, ideas were forming, and then it was time to relax with a beer…
Almost halfway through the month, I went to open one of my synth plugins, and opened the wrong one by mistake. It turned out that I had instead opened a rather nice Juno emulator that I’d apparently installed at some point, and then forgotten all about! I went through the sounds and started to put a track together using them. This eventually became the opening track of the album, Out of the Blue.
A few days later, things were starting to come together. A couple of tracks were all but done, always a good feeling at this point of the challenge!
And then the last weekend of recording came along, which meant there was also the obligatory “marmalade on toast” photo tweet! And a lot of recording work too, of course…
The weekend went pretty well, and tracks were really coming together
All continued to go pretty well for the next couple of days. Many tracks were getting close to being completely finished, all bar a little polishing, and I was confident that I would have enough to get me over the finishing line in time. There was still one difficult hurdle in the way though… titles…
… I often struggle with titles, especially on an unthemed album (a theme can usually help to suggest suitable titles). Anyway, eventually all the music was done, and titles gathered, and it was time to render the tracks out to audio files!
Then after the rendering was done, it was time to upload the audio files to Bandcamp, then sit back with a beer and watch a little television until it was time for the traditional after midnight pressing of the “Publish” button on Bandcamp. And then, that was it. Another album done, and my tenth one at that!
As ever, the finished album is available on Bandcamp, on a pay what you want basis (or pay nothing if you want). I hope you enjoy it!