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Global Collaborative Music Experiment
hephaist0s writes "Last year, 165 bands completed the RPM Challenge: to record an original album (10 songs or 35 minutes) during the 28 days of February. The idea is to get musicians to set aside the barriers that stop them from working on their music and simply devote a month to getting it done. This year, more than 300 bands from around the world — including two groups from McMurdo station in Antarctica — have already signed up at www.rpmchallenge.com, and this time the organizers of the challenge have built into the site the ability for bands to share samples with each other. If a band chooses to upload a sample into the Sample Engine, then any other participating group can use it however they like. The possibilities for global collaboration are vast!"
Agreed, this is great. I don't have the resources to produce the kind of album I want to record, but I have a diverse collection of half-finished instrumental stuff bouncing around in my head. It's also a good excuse to finally get a portable MIDI keyboard.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Have you ever been in a band? One of the biggest problems you encounter (aside from getting along with each other musically as well as personally over an extended period of time) is excessive time spent on perfecting your material. Musicians are perfectionists. If it's not one song they continue to work on for much too long, it's a new song they started, neglecting the old one. Songs never get finished, because they're still too busy trying to work out the right way to transition from this part to that or aren't happy about one riff or another.
The purpose of this project, and it seems to me like a great idea, is to motivate bands to have a definite time-line and a goal to pursue. When you are actually working towards something and are under pressure to finish it, when you have an actual end to your project in sight, then suddenly the band will pull together and work thrice as hard on it. Stuff gets done, and what do you know? It turns out that creativity doesn't need years upon years of perfecting.