Tag Archives: RPM Challenge

Facing the 2012 RPM Challenge

February is just a couple of weeks away, and as I have every year since 2008, I’ll be participating in the RPM Challenge.

What’s that? It’s simple: produce an entire album (10+ songs or 35+ minutes) entirely during the month of February.

My concept this year is a bit different than in the past. This time around, I will not be using any instruments… just my iPhone. I’ve assembled an interesting collection of music creation apps (which I will detail in a future post, but for now will represent with a pair of screenshots, below), and these will be the only tools I will use to generate sounds. I may sample my voice, found sounds and instruments using my iPhone’s microphone, and I’ll do final mixing and post-production on my MacBook Air, but as much as possible this will be an album produced on the iPhone. Given the nature of some of the apps I’ll be using, I also expect this album to be a lot more experimental/avant garde in style than most of my recent solo work.

I am tentatively calling the album i. And I am also considering producing a companion album, called The Way Out Takes, that will consist of unedited versions of the more experimental tracks that end up on i.

Stay tuned for more details as I think them up.

Group improvisation for one

In the mid-’90s, I was a member of a musical group called Bassius-O-Phelius. Working under a name based on an obscure Captain Beefheart reference, my friend Mark Bergen and I, occasionally supplemented by other musician friends, recorded a number of albums of free-form improvisation. Mark played organ, electric piano, and viola, and I played electric bass, woodwinds and percussion. It was all about experimentation and the power of music to convey mood and mystery. It was also kind of ridiculous, but we did everything with a sense of humor.

The Bassius-O-Phelius method was to use a 4-track cassette recorder, lay down an initial pair of tracks — typically on keyboard and bass — and then play the tape back and improvise another pair of tracks on viola, clarinet, and assorted other instruments. This led to some interesting results, as our improvisations were based not only on the live interplay of two musicians standing in a room together, but of those two musicians interacting with themselves via the prerecorded tracks.

For this year’s RPM Challenge, I decided to channel that spirit into a solo album, which I have entitled 222: Improvisations for 6 Instruments. Obviously the dynamic here is different: there’s only one of me, so I can’t interact with another player live. This difference was most apparent while laying down the first instrumental track: it was just me on the keyboard, with no frame of reference. My experience with Bassius-O-Phelius, however, taught me that it was important, among other things, to establish a steady, repetitious groove from time to time, anticipating opportunities for solos in subsequent tracks.

Another difference was the recording tools at my disposal: in the ’90s we recorded on a 4-track cassette recorder, but I recorded this album in GarageBand on my MacBook. The number of possible tracks is (in principle) unlimited, so I could easily lay down six individual instrument tracks without needing to worry about “bouncing down.” But there was another significant effect of using GarageBand: I could watch the waveforms of the other instruments as I played. Obviously this couldn’t totally allow me to “read the mind” of… well, myself… from the prior tracks, but it did allow me to anticipate major events. This might seem like “cheating,” but it actually felt more akin to the “two people in the same room” experience: while musicians are collectively improvising, it is common for them to make eye contact and give each other visual cues to facilitate group events in the performance.

Once the six instrument parts were recorded, I created 8 distinct “pieces” based on this single 8:38 track, by splitting up the instruments into different arrangements. For instance, the first track is just keyboard and guitar; the second is just Bebot and bass clarinet. Only on the final track do all six instruments finally come together and reveal the ultimate end product of my endeavors.

The inspirations behind Anagrammatic Pseudonyms

Anagrammatic Pseudonyms Influences and Inspirations iMixI am the first to admit that I emulate my musical influences. I’m pretty confident that I always manage to fall well on the proper side of plagiarism, but it’s impossible not to emulate the styles of the musicians I admire. In fact, emulating their styles is pretty much the point.

With that in mind, I compiled a list of the artists and songs that influenced me as I created Anagrammatic Pseudonyms just like I’ve done in the past with the album notes I post here.

This time I’ve taken it a step further though: I’ve created an iTunes iMix. You can buy it now on iTunes. Here are the songs:

“Pocket Calculator” by Kraftwerk
“Axel F” by Harold Faltermeyer
“Get Up Offa That Thing” by James Brown
“Let’s Work” by Prince
“White Mountain” by Genesis
“Inertiatic ESP” by The Mars Volta
“Out of Town” by Zero 7
“With Jupiter in Mind” by Joe Satriani
“Nobody’s Fault but Mine” by Led Zeppelin
“Anchor Drops” by Umphrey’s McGee
“Your Most Valuable Possession” by Ben Folds Five
“Hold the Line” by Toto
“We Own the Sky” by M83
“Clocks and Clouds” by National Health
“Down by the Sea” by Men at Work

Note that the songs in this iMix are in the same order as the songs on Anagrammatic Pseudonyms that they influenced (although there’s not a 1-to-1 relationship: some AP songs have more than one representative here — “Candor Stetson” has four — and some have none).

This iMix has a total running time of 73 minutes, which means that it’s a great set to put on a CD if you decide to go buy it (or if you’re as crazy as I am and already have all of these songs in your iTunes library).

Anagrammatic Pseudonyms is done. I mean, “done?”

Room 34 - Anagrammatic Pseudonyms (front)I finished my “mastering” process, such as it is, a few minutes ago, and now I’m listening through to make sure there’s nothing egregiously wrong with any of the tracks. I’m also going to burn a CD (only the 3rd one for this project) to listen to in the car, mainly to make sure my track-to-track transitions work, since this is the first time I’ve done a “gapless” album.

I tried to make most of the songs blend relatively seamlessly one into the next, or at least to transition directly with no silence in between. Kind of makes up for not having a really cohesive overarching concept.

Mastering… whew. This has always been a weak point for me. I read through some of the mastering threads, and it made me realize how much I don’t know. I think I’ve managed to get pretty good with my recording quality, but I am definitely still an amateur, and when it comes to mastering, if it’s good, it’s just a matter of getting lucky.

I feel like I really screwed up the mastering of last year’s RPM album, with too much compression and some bad clipping on some tracks, but I think I’ve improved a bit since then. The Bee LP! turned out pretty good, but I think that was just dumb luck, and the fact that all of the tracks were fairly similar in instrumentation and sonic quality, so what I got out of GarageBand was already pretty close to “mastered” already — I just had to apply some normalization.

The tracks on this album are way too varied for that though, so I had to experiment a bit to get a mastering “configuration” (as it were) that worked.

I should probably get Ozone, but for now I’m still using my OLD copy of Sound Studio (version 2) to do my mastering. It lacks a limiter, which is all I really want, so I end up having to futz with the dynamic compression filter instead to get what I want.

Probably my other biggest problem is just a necessary limitation of how I have to work in a house with kids. I’m almost exclusively recording with headphones — in fact, with the “step-up” Sony earbuds I use with my iPhone. I should probably devote some of this year’s “music budget” (yes, this year it looks like I may actually have one!) to some better recording gear and not just new instruments. But, anyway, there it is.

So, a big thing I have to do in mastering is strip out anything that’s in the sonic ranges I can’t hear on my headphones — I don’t want a bunch of rumbling bass or high pitched whines that I can’t even hear to be in the mix and then bring it over to a decent sound system and wonder where all that garbage came from!

So… I run a high pass and a low pass, then I adjust the overall volume a bit if necessary, and then I apply dynamic compression. Not too much, just cutting off the peaks really, and boosting the overall signal to just below the saturation point.

Now I’m listening to the whole thing to make sure there’s no (well, not a LOT of) clipping. And to make sure there weren’t any glitches in the mixdowns from GarageBand. I already caught one of those and had to redo the mixdown out of GB tonight.

If all goes well, I will post the entire album as free MP3 downloads here tomorrow (and update the streaming tracks to the final versions). Stay tuned for the big announcement!