Thoughts, Raves & Outright Beatings

I’ve been promising “fans” (or what I have left of them) a new CD for the last three or four YEARS.  I’ve had plenty of excuses: Job, family, tragedy, and now, now that I have a cool ass day gig and plenty of free time afterwards, it’s now all come down to:

Lack…of…inspiration.

I kept telling people “Stories From the Road” would be available in late 2007.

Here it is, 2008, and I think I’ve worked out song #4 specifically for the CD.   

I’m still trying to get an idea of what kind of music I want to track my songs in.  So far, a lot of what I’ve got down sounds like early 21st century electronica.  *sigh* I’ve also got all these songs I wrote when the hubster and I went bumming around SoCal and Arizona in the travel trailer earlier this century.  I want to include them on the CD, but, musically and lyrically, they’re all over the place.  I’ve got concept albums on the brain right now, so I don’t know if they’ll all fit together.  I’m afraid to touch the tunes, actually.  They were mostly composed on my palm pilot and guitar.  I’m afraid that arranging them in Fruity Loops is going to ruin them?!?!?!

So…what to do?

I was reading Slashdot, and came across this article about recording a CD in 29 days.  Which led me to this site, the 2008 RPM Challenge.  They’re holding a challenge where you sign up and promise them a full length CD of songs recorded (or written and recorded) during the month of February.   I’m thinking this is what I need to get out of my rut.  Put myself under pressure, and possibly come up with some super cool tunes.  I can post samples on my music blog.  Maybe I’ll actually make THAT my next official release, instead of Stories from the Road.  Who knows?

Anyway, it was mentioned in the Slashdot article that the recording apparatuses used in last year’s challenge ranged from 32 track hard disk recorders used in full tilt home studios to an Nintendo Gameboy (hell, if Calvin Harris can put together a best selling (in Europe) CD (supposedly) recorded on a Commodore Amiga in his folk’s bedroom, then anything’s possible, I suppose).   Since PC recording has been daunting for me lately (trying to utilize soundfonts and sample for effective arranging in Fruity Loops has been driving me batty), I’m going to have to, in the spirit of this competition, pull my high concepts back down and use other resources to put my tunes together.

Old timers at both here and my music blog know that this is how I normally roll when I throw together demos for preview and possible discussion.   But, for this challenge, for an actual, full length CD (!?!?!?!?!) I will be using the following:

with this installed:

playing along with this:

and possibly this (if I can find it in my junk, somewhere):

Recorded to my trusty old:

Wish me luck, peeps.  I’m going to need it.