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NJ, USA
Check Out the Album
Original Concept:
no concept yet either. really, I don't think about this challenge at all until Mar 1. :D
Artist Post-Game:
So I had a crisis of faith of sorts midway through. Do I push for a full 40 minutes of substandard product or do I abandon any hope of "winning" and just make whatever I can? I eventually concluded that I just can't release anything I won't stand by as a finished product. So I gave myself permission to just forget about the 40 minute goal. Also, I couldn't abandon this new idea I had for a workflow even though that meant a lot of time was gonna be wasted. I was worried about letting other people down if I produced less this year than last year, but at the end of the day I have to satisfy myself first.
Without going into too much technical detail, I decided early on in the month that I really like working in AUM, even though there's no timeline. I made sounds in synths, I made patterns in midi, and I feed one to the other. I made variations on the midi and then used other midi to switch between those variations. I used midi to mute parts. I found a way to use midi to trigger gradual fades and cutoffs. And to cap it off, I used midi to sequence all the above into a song. It was a bit of a crazy way to work, but I think it appealed to my programmer background - functions calling functions calling functions.
I also experimented with vocals for the first time. I recorded some lines, used midi to trigger those lines as samples, and put it through a vocoder along with additional midi to control the pitch.
I had this idea, which I haven't realized yet but I'm close, that I can have my song layer midi just be an abstract song structure and then replace the instruments and note patterns to make different songs. Again, kind of like top-down programming. If I can get that to work, I'll make a whole album of just that and we'll see if it flies. :D
So in the end I'm calling this year a win because I accomplished what I set out to do, which was push myself again in new ways to do new things. And while I don't think this year's product is a good as last years, I'm still happy with what I produced.