Sidingsound

On the Album-A-Day project

First news: I turned 35 yesterday. And now I've got that out of the way... ;-)

In the dim distant future, when I find myself with a spare slot in my ever-busy schedule, I would love to have a go at contributing to the Album-A-Day project (please excuse the URL—and for that matter, some of the language on the page).

In a nutshell, AAD is a challenge to the recording artist to be spontaneously creative—to see what you can come up with given a very restrictive brief:

• The mission is to compose and record a set of songs (at least thirty songs, or at least twenty minutes' total length) within a 24-hour period. (As the project's founder points out, this idea lends itself more to lots of short songs, than to longer pieces.)
• You can collaborate with others, but everyone must be working on the same song at the same time (i.e. no "parallel" working).
• Every song you start must be included on the finished album ("no outtakes").
• No ideas or songs from before the chosen day can be included (in other words, no covers or interpretations of existing material). It all has to be composed on the day.
• Finally, the results should be made available for free download, although it is OK to offer it for sale as well (presumably with some sort of incentive to make this worthwhile).

It doesn't take a genius to work out that the output from such a project would lack some of the polish of something worked on over a longer period. However, the project makes this a virtue—an express aim of concepts like this is to force the participant to stop procrastinating, worrying over quality, etc., and just get on with the act of creating. This, for one, makes it a useful exercise for breaking the old writer's block; something I myself am only too familiar with...

I've only listened to one of the efforts to date (John Governale's "Songs of the Oxford Hills"), which whilst obviously not as polished an affair as a more leisurely-constructed set of songs, has some pleasant moments (especially the wistful "Coming Home To Hebron") and almost sounds too coherent for how I'd imagine an AAD should sound.

Whilst I'd really like to have a go at creating an AAD myself, the major bar I can think of is how I could find a whole day to actually do it, with my family to consider. I think I'd have to include them in in it somehow (Joy on piano, and Naomi (nearly 3) on constant interruptions!), and make this a feature of the finished project.

Ah well, file under "for the future"—for now, I have a couple of other recording projects on the go, inbetween which I'm still trying to get together my original CD project. At this rate, I think I'll produce an AAD first.

(Oh, and I had a great birthday—thanks!)

Labels: album-a-day, music, recording

posted by Tim @ 08:47