A few days ago, my friend Colin (aka Slighter) sent me this link:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2014/01/52-tracks-52-weeks-starting-2014-producers/
It’s a challenge. Like the RPM challenge referenced in the title, Weekly Beats challenges musicians to make music. But unlike RPM, it’s challenging you to do it all year round.
I love RPM. I’m still incredibly proud of my 2011 entry, Wasp, and the remix album I released the following fall WASPREMIX — which was the first time I released something on Amazon, iTunes and Spotify. I’m proud of all the albums I’ve made in various Februarys over the last several years, but that’s just the thing. I release them in March, then I go into hiding for the rest of the year and don’t make any music (or hardly any, at any rate). RPM is good for kicking you in the ass for 28 days, but then you’re suffering burnout through March and end up carrying that momentum of not creating anything through the rest of the year until December hits and you say “oh shit! RPM is in two months!”
I need a kick in the ass all year round. Hence Weekly Beats.
So here is a resolution for 2014. By the end of this year, I will have made at least 50 new songs (52 if I stick to the challenge). That’s 40 more songs than what I would have made if I did RPM. So, no, I probably won’t be doing RPM this year (unless the songs I make in February happen to add up to 30 minutes in length), but, hopefully, I will have a lot more to show for it.
Since my Kickstarter bust for The Signal in 2012, I fell into a rut. It took a lot out of me emotionally, and I wasn’t entirely happy with the result (the experiment was interesting but, ultimately, I think I fell prey to my own ambition). I stopped making music; I started playing FIFA; RPM 2013 came and I just wasn’t up to doing my own album (I did work on a collaboration called Noise Floor as well as the 2013 Blind Chaos entry). Once you lose the momentum, it’s hard to get it back and you stop finishing things. Part of my blamed the fact that my PC finally died and I needed to get Mac versions of all my music stuff I had accumulated on that, but that was just an excuse and I never fully believed it. My hope is that an arbitrary requirement of one song a week will kick me into action and get me in a year-round habit of making music rather instead of a once-a-year habit.
You can check out my tracks here on Weekly Beats. When it’s all over, I’ll probably collect them (the good ones, anyway) into an album that I release on BandCamp.
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