International

Concept

Album

Month

Finish a couple of complete songs (at least to demo-quality)...  the concept, for me, is a creative challenge: can I write some lyrics and sing some vocals.  Maybe a unifying conceptual theme will develop, maybe not...  I just want to overcome what feels to me like my biggest hurdle in music, writing and singing lyrics without being too self-conscious about it.

Rules are already broken because I have music ideas in my head and on the hard drive already; but I want to finish a few things to call my own and hopefully be proud of them.  I may drop in a cover or two if they come together.

April 8: Uploading one song per day.  Will post a link when everything is up. This collection of music is not what I intended and not a proper INCOALMO project, but it is stuff I am working on. Work, wife, kids, and other projects got in the way, but that's how things go.

April 14: Finished some mixing and last upload and calling it all done...

Tracks 1 and 2 were mostly done in March
Tracks 3 thru 7 were recorded previously and were supposed to get lyrics written and vocals recorded in March, but that didn't happen
Tracks 8 and 9 are some things my son and I have been working on to supplement his trumpet lessons
Tracks 10 and 11 were mostly recorded prior to March, but my friend's vocals and my guitar solos were recorded first week of March and I think they represent the capabilities of what I can do in the Loft these days

Due to real life, my participation this year will probably break many of the rules again... but I hope to create some content worth tuning-into... maybe some music, probably some video documentary...  maybe some photography.

The concept is wrapped around the attic renovation I am working on, which is relevant to INCOALMO because part of the attic will become "The Loft" studio (replacing what is now "The Guest Room Studio")!!!

I knew this would be a tough month splitting my time between an attic renovation (including a home studio space) and making music (and real life).  The attic has come a long way and I managed to record some stuff that I really like.

I would estimate that about 50% of the music was in my head before March 1.  Probably 25% was already recorded before March 1.  So those rules are broken but I had a lot on my plate and part of my goal this month was to finish some stuff that deserved to be finished.  One big win: 0% cover tunes this year... this is 100% me even though it is only about 25 minutes.

A month (or so) of music.  Cover tunes will be played, unfinished projects will get almost-finished, the band is working on an expanded repertoire, jazz band rehearsals will be ramping-up, I want to produce better/more efficiently...  rules will, of course, be broken.

enormous expectations will soon be tempered by reality...

This was originally going to be a month of band practices (which, thanks to our lead singer, would all be live, played in a room together and multi-tracked as vox, bu vox, 2-3 guitar tracks, bass, and stereo drums... yes, he has a lot of expensive toys), brought home to my daw to cherry-pick our best run-throughs, fine tune the mix, and put together 2+ hours of music to represent where we are.  For several reasons, that just became impractical and I lost my aspirations to work in that direction.

So, this is a month of side projects.  Actually, "Side Projects" was a possible title at one point.  This is all very intentionally NOT what my band is doing because I decided to keep that separate to avoid inevitable frustrations.

I had actually "put the daw away" for a while there since November (long story) and was looking forward to INCOALMO as a good motivator to get moving with things.  The other motivator was my friend/band-mate, Doug, who suggested he and I do a little side project together... which is the last track (What Is And What Should Never Be, our singer won't do Robert Plant style, but we have some singers in mind to finish it and I am open to nearly anyone throwing a vox track on there for snickers and giggles), it is the only track with someone else playing, the only track I consider unfinished, and full disclosure: started the last weekend of Feb.  I still consider the bass line a scratch track and Doug thinks he has some better takes in him, but it is a cool Zep cover and we will polish it up when the time is right.

As for the other four songs, they represent "silly stuff I do with my daw once the kids are in bed and I can go put the headphones on and play for a bit before my bedtime".  I had a lot of fun with those and behind the scenes, I am continuing to improve workflow, automations, and all kinds of other cool stuff.

Big advances from last year:
1)  A better Drum plugin, better drum routing in the daw, better compression, gated snare (sometimes) and other percussion such as claps, tambourine, etc, better eq control on drum channels, better dynamics and more humanized sound (hopefully)
2)  Better guitar eq, delay, etc... some with my cool new pedalboard, some in the daw... all items recorded direct and had amp/spk simulation added after, also loop-style recording is now something I programmed as a custom action
3)  Bass tracks now have things like analog-style saturation and compression sidechained to the drums for dynamic control
4)  Master tracks (busses) are run through one master limiter that is pretty easy to tune, along with some other nice master track plugins.  A reverb bus is used which puts everything "in the same room" instead of having several different reverbs.  I have tuned-up things like delay times and reverb dwell to fit songs/tempos better.
5)  Automation Envelopes... wow, what I have found out can be automated has continually blown my mind over the last few months.  I will spare you all the details, but EVERY parameter of EVERY plugin can be manipulated and automation is both a creative tool and a problem-solver.  In particular, the tempo envelopes for The Wall Trilogy and What Is And What Should Never Be were critical!
6)  Templates for tracks and templates for full projects make getting things moving so much faster.  I have a template for guitar that already has a high pass/low pass eq and amp sim inserted and the template is set to record from the first input of my daw where the guitar always gets plugged in.  I have a bunch of very user-friendly templates now, along with plugin chains and plugin presets...

So that is a bunch of nerdy stuff, but I think I need the nerdy stuff to capture the creative stuff.

I had a lot of fun last month and appreciate all the work and inspiration from the INCOALMO community.  Thanks for the listens and the feedback.  Thanks for giving me a good excuse to listen to music outside of my usual taste.  Thanks especially to Joe and Jeff for the effort and organization involved in all this!