Somehow in between all my procrastinating I have managed to come up with my ten RPM Challenge songs Duh duh duh duuum…..

1.  Don’t want to wake up (without you)

2. Long Road

3. Wasting time*

4. Lullabye*

5. Ragdoll

6. This world (instrumental)*

7. End of the world*

8. Second Best

9. Autumn Leaves*

10. Song for Dan (Instrumental)*

* Far too many of these songs are rehashed old songs originally written at least 3 years ago!  I’ve had writers block all month

Now that I have spent two days tidying and rearranging my workspace in order to maximise my work efficiency, I think I will actually start recording my final versions of these songs. 

Off Topic:  During my tidying and reorganising process, I came across an old Savage Garden cd.  Now, while I am ashamed to admit I was a huge Savage Garden fan as a teenager, I am almost more ashamed to admit that I can still hear exactly what I liked about them.  Bar the cheesy lyrics, and the sheer awfulness of Truely Madly Deeply, the songs on their self titled album are really kinda cool!  Don’t lynch me!    I just love all the synths and harmonies.  It’s neat music.

Musicians can get writers block. I get it all the time, especially leading up to a deadline (like now). Common symptoms include:

1. Repeatedly playing Stairway to Heaven or Nothing Else Matters on the guitar for no apparent reason.
2. Listening over and over to previous work just so you can pick out every single little mistake.
3. Listening to your favourite songs over and over, picking out all the clever bits that are so much better than your own work
4. Drinking Coffee and eating Toast.
5. Doing housework, running errands, catching up on paperwork, blogging…

The worst thing is when you can think of a hundred things to write a song about – but none of it just seems any good. My current ideas involve sick frogs, the IRD, and mismatched socks.

The other worst thing is when you give up on what you’re writing a song about and just try to come up with some good music and/or riffs. When you have writers block, everything always sounds too much like something else. Sometimes, it all just sounds crap. Sometime it doesn’t sound like anything because you can’t even come up with anything.

Cures for writers/composers block:

1. Actually having feelings or opinions to write about. (Rumour has it you can get these by giving a damn – harder than it looks sometimes)
2. Being almost at the deadline… and dropping your standards to write about things you originally thought were crap when you had a lot of time to think about it.
3. Finding God (Christian bands NEVER run out of things to write about )
4. Harnessing random fluctuations in the Time Space Continuum. (eg, open any random book at a random page and randomly point at something on the page and write about whatever that’s about. Also works quite well with like dream cards, the random button on wikipedia, or even your media player set to random. [I secretly suspect all those Christian bands just write songs by doing this with the bible!])
5. Doing housework, running errands, catching up on paperwork, blogging… Sometimes stopping trying to compose and doing something else for a little while can give your brain a little time to stew things over and come up with some proper ideas.

I think I’m ready to get back to work now

The RPM challenge is to record an Album in 29 days.  I read about this in a blog, checked it out, and was horrified to see that it runs for the month of Feb, and I’ve already wasted a week simply by not knowing about it!  Ahhhh.    RPM stands not for Rev’s per Minute, but in this case for  Recording Production Month.  I think it’s a brill idea and signed up right away.  You’re allowed to use pre-written material so that’s a big help since I’m starting a week late.  I’ll still have to do some writing too, but not a whole albums worth in two days   I’m trawling through a ton of ancient demos and lyrics to try and find what is easily salvageable or rewritable.  I plan to have ten songs really roughly demo’d by midnight tomorrow night.  So far since this morning I have five songs chosen for resurrection, have written two more songs, and still need to pull three more out of somewhere…    Deadlines are great motivators. 

If you don’t know what General Midi (GM) is, you’re missing out on something which is at the time time both very awful and very cool. General Midi is a specific specification for synths, that basically means the the default synth on your soundcard or operating system should theoretically have the same instrumentation as mine. So, instead of having to save a big audio file, I can save a little set of midi instructions, and your GM synth will follow these instructions and play back the notes of my song with the drum parts sounding like drums, squarewave sounding like a square wave, and the pineapple tasting like a pineapple, and of course the schnozberry tasting like schnozberry. It’s awful it really is.

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