On December 13th, I took part in something special. The community at
alonetone set us a challenge. To produce an album in a day. The rules were simple, with no prior planning, make 24 minutes of recorded music in 24 hours. Sleep optional.
For me this would be particularly difficult as I had myriad other things to be doing all of which were beginning to sound like excuses...
I started at 10am and by lunch I had my first track. I started with some electric piano and a couple of chords. Then I started looking for some drum sounds which I ran through various beat repeaters/slicers. Then in a fit of tradition, I added a synth bass. Not really being happy with it, I took a sample from a talk by Suzanne Jeffrey entitled "
What Makes You Working Class". Time did not permit me to really listen to the talk, I was just looking for a texture... Having found it, I reversed it and put it through Live's Beat Repeat effect... The result had the perfect devilish incantation quality... A bit of arranging and and an un-reverse at the very end. Hmm, drums sound like crap. Perfect! That's the title, "Would You Think Less Of Me... [if I told you I can't program drums to save my life]"
Then the interruptions began. Take one kid here, take another kid there, do some shopping. Before I knew it, 5 hours were gone and it's dinner time. I was screwed but I pressed on.
Still hung up on the electric piano sound and pressed for time, I played around with some chords that have been bouncing around my head since I was a teenager... Then I grabbed some drum clips I had kicking around to get a groove going. Then I changed the chords a bit, created a bit of melodic part over top. Surfing around for samples, I found some vocal samples on a
Computer Music DVD (an excellent UK magazine that comes with a DVD full of samples and other goodies). I sprinkled then in here and there. Arranged, effected, automated, and generally rushed until I was "done". I named the track after one of the samples, "Baby".
To this point, I had resisted using my new favourite toy,
Elysium. But it was 8pm. The pressure was sapping my MoJo. So I broke it out and created a pattern that I fed into a guitar-ish sound. I recorded it into a long loop. I had record quantization on because it doesn't have any MIDI sync ability. But I failed to press stop at the right time so as the loop recording came around out of sync I got this weird syncopation which actually sounded cool... Now I fleshed that out with some synth pads, some more choppy synth pads, some drums. Nice! But was missing something on the low end. So I found an arp-y bass synth sound. Yeah baby yeah. One I get a good groove going, it's always fun to spend a little bit of time wanking/jamming over top with a lead synth sound. That wankery gave birth to the lead melody... The only thing left to do was to arrange it into something resembling a song (a major weakness for me). Still not satisfied, I slowly brought in an autofilter towards the end of the Elysium part of the track which forms the ending... I had no idea what to call it and no time to dwell on it so "La La La I Can't Hear You" is what I settled on. Maybe I was talking to the voices telling me that this whole exercise was nuts.
I was now at 16 minutes and it was 11pm. I had to be done that night. I had to be up early... I was done. And I said so. Somebody in the chat room that we had set up for participants told me to just jam for 8+ minutes before giving up. That was the pep-talk I needed.
So in response to the happy vibe that was La La La, I decided to go dirge-y... Seem to fit the time of the night and the desperation of the situation (can't believe I just wrote that). Not much to say here. Just lay down a couple of chord progressions using a dark pad sound; solo-ed on top. Sprinkled drums in. Sprinkled effects. Generally made noise. The soloing got a little plaintive so I glommed onto the title "Sorrow". Dramatic, perhaps but it was 1am and I was done!
This was a great experience for me. For many reasons that I'm fully able to express. You'll understand when you try something similar. To be sure, I'm not totally happy with my results. I am totally stoked at the process. I look forward to the next one. Developing as an artist is no different from developing as an athlete. It's a journey and in our low attention span, quick to judge world that's easy to forget.
