JoCoAlbMo 2019
New Jersey, USA
Check Out the Album
Original Concept:
TBD
Artist Post-Game:
I'm calling it a win with room for improvement. For the challenge Rules:
40: Every year, as happy as I am with what I produced, I've been WELL short of 40 minutes. This rule was my goalpost this year. I am happy to say I produced over 40 minutes of music. No cheats, no padding, artificial stretching. All music.
30: Nothing was done beforehand.
20: Ditto.
10: Everything is completely original.
0: My only miss was there was no concept, not even an attempt at one.
My goal was to hit 40 minutes hell or high water. Now that I've done that, my goal next year will be for a 40 min concept album. Nevertheless, I'm calling this year a win.
This year I used a spreadsheet to plan and keep track of things. Once I had what I call "seeds" in place, I noted the bpm and thus how many minutes I could get out of various clusters of 16 measures. This was invaluable to keep me focused and productive. If a song went longer than anticipated, that took pressure off the rest of the tracklist. If a song felt finished with fewer measures than I had anticipated, I tried to find ways to boost other tracks. Near the end I simply decided to create another short song. The whole process felt akin to outlining a book or storyboarding a movie. It is a method I will certainly use on future JoCoAlbMos.