International

Concept

Album

Month

This project will rely on a liberal interpretation of the rules. I'm keeping it under wraps for now.

So, this project wound up not being music. Instead of creating 40 minutes of music, I leaned into my expertise as a visual artist and created 41 Album Covers. Making the album cover has always been one of the highlights of my project in the past anyway.

Despite the liberal application of the Rule of Zero, I accomplished what I set out to do on March 11 (the date that I realized the music was not happening this year). All of the work (save the "Bonus Track" #41) is wholly original, either from my own photo library, or created from a blank canvas. It was almost all created during March, except for one series that stretched to April 2.

Tracks inspired by the color blue.
Or something.

The Rule of 40:

I didn't make it to 40 minutes again this year, but I got closer. This is 10 tracks that add up to around 30 minutes of music. I'm pleased with my progress, and maybe will get closer to the full 40 next year.

The Rule of 30: No more than 30% of the album can be written before March 1

Most of the rule-breaking involves my last track Blue Jean Blues, which is a cover, therefore written before March 1. It may even have been written before I was born. Some of the other stuff had some disparate ideas, riffs, chord progressions prior to March 1, but I'm not counting any of it as 'written'. 30% of 30 minutes is 9 minutes, and BJB is a 5 minute track, so I'm going to call this one a win.

​The Rule of 20: No more than 20% of the album can be recorded before March 1

I also used Blue Jean Blues as my test piece to make sure all my gear worked before March 1, so I could spend time making music and not fighting with my DAW. I get 6 minutes, and only used 5- still a win.

The Rule of 10: No more than 10% of the album can be a cover

Same tune, but I only get 3 minutes here, so I broke the rule of 10. I was hoping this was going to be a bonus track, but the rest of the month had other plans. There are also a bunch of 'borrowed' riffs in Blue Dog and Lucille Rocks! I'm not sure how to define those two tunes- cover'ish', I guess. If you're gonna go down, go down in flames.

The Rule of Zero:

Above is my fess-up. I'm glad for the rule of zero.

Multilayered sonic environments, some probably musical, others maybe not so much.

I included a pretty exhaustive writeup on the website with the music, so I encourage you to take a look at that there. From the challenge point of view, here are my results of the 'rules':

The Rule of 40

Yup- I missed this one. My album runs about 34 minutes, which is 40 if you round up to the nearest 40. At this writing, I have a couple days left in the challenge, and could conceivably add a couple tracks to get closer, but I'm really happy with the flow right now, and don't want to mess with it more.

The Rule of 30

Exactly 0% of this album was 'written' before March 1, so I think I can confidently say that I hit this benchmark. I set down the first track in Audition on March 1, 2021

The Rule of 20

The math is hard here. Portions of "Time", "Move", and "Water" were recorded last March when I was going to take my first stab at this challenge. Then everything closed, and we all had to rewrite how our entire lives were organized, and I stopped. The pre-recorded material landed in the final compositions as overlaid tracks, and I have no idea how to put a percentage on that. I'm going to declare that I think I met the spirit of this rule.

The Rule of 10

Again, I'm not sure how to quantify this. Many of the samples that I used existed in some form elsewhere: BBC's Sound Effects Library was immensely valuable to the project, and as soon as the Mars Rover sent back actual sound from the 4th planet, I knew I wanted to use it. That being said, I electronically manipulated almost everything, and remixed the existing sounds into an original composition, so I'm declaring the Rule of 10 a success as well.

The Rule of 0

This is my favorite rule. Thank you, Joe, for putting together this challenge. I would not have made this record without it.