The RPM Challenge Starts Today! (No Driving Required)
Are you a brave songwriter? Do you tackle topics important to you and society or protest whats wrong and politically damaged in the world? Thats really great, but we aren’t specifically talking about that kind of bravery here…we are talking about writing and recording brand new music in the course of 28 days. The shortest month of the year. February…also, it can be political if you want it to be. Its RPM Challenge time again so rev your writing engines (sorry, that was a terrible pun).
Its simple. Get out your pen and pad today and catch the muse that is floating through the air. Get it down and record it to your phone, on your home studio set up, or heck book last minute time in your favorite recording den and get this thing out there. I have personally benefited from the creative release that this challenge provides and while occasionally it bears some less than fresh and tasty audible fruits, its really about the process of having a deadline and getting something, anything, out there and pushing your creative boundaries to the limit.
Hit the website and sign up today folks because time is now ticking. More info from the RPM folks below:
The RPM Challenge: That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.
It’s a little like National Novel Writing Month, (NaNoWriMo.org) where writers challenge each other to write 1,700 words a day for 30 days, or the great folks over at February Album Writing Month (fawm.org), who encourage artists to write 14 new songs in February. Maybe they don’t have “Grapes of Wrath” or “Abbey Road” at the end of the month, or maybe they do—but that’s not the point. The point is they get busy and stop waiting around for the muse to appear. Get the gears moving. Do something. You can’t write 1,700 words a day and not get better.
Don’t wait for inspiration – taking action puts you in a position to get inspired. You’ll stumble across ideas you would have never come up with otherwise, and maybe only because you were trying to meet a day’s quota of (song)writing. Show up and get something done, and invest in yourself and each other.
Anyone can come up with an excuse to say “no,” so don’t. Many of you are thinking “But, I can’t do that! I don’t have any songs/recording gear/money/blah blah blah…” But this doesn’t have to be the album, it’s just an album. Remember, this is an artistic exercise. Just do your best using what you have in order to get it done. If you have a four-track, become a four-track badass! Use your iPhone, your ’80s cassette recorder, that program on your laptop, a Pro Tools rig, or just borrow something – use it. Do your best. Use the limitations of time and gear as an opportunity to explore things you might not try otherwise. If you can afford time in a studio, fine, but let’s be completely free of any lingering idea that “good” records can only be made in a studio. If that were so, then all the old scratchy blues records or Alan Lomax field recordings that have changed the world’s culture wouldn’t still resonate with us today. Springsteen’s haunting classic “Nebraska” was a demo he did at home on a crappy machine. That album is fricking awesome. What label would put those recordings out now? (See: who cares) There are a million examples of this kind of stuff, but the fact will always be: Well written, honest music is compelling and undeniable no matter what it was recorded on. So put it to tape.
