RPM Challenge Day 1

RPM kicked off yesterday (yes I'm a night owl).  The first day may be pretty boring when the Video blog gets published, we'll see...  but we did get a lot accomplished.  We got a direction and a set of ideas we all liked and have committed to as far as the album goes.  We even went so far as to come up with a story concept for a fake film to base our "soundtrack" album to.

So why the soundtrack album?  I'll tell you why,  it works for us on many levels.  The first thing being that we're a studio primarily, and we want to showcase as many genres as we can.  Secondly, because we all wanted a challenge out of this challenge, and to span various genres would make a concept album very hard to pin in a commercial market.  Thus, the concept birthed many solutions, and a nice creative outlet to start honing ideas.

The back story is fairly simple, I mentioned that if we did a survivalist theme seeing as how these types of movies are very popular we can go for a wide ranging feel of emotions from the more upbeat to the darker and more sinister sounds we might like to explore.  We all liked the idea so we ran with it and Steven and Troy and I all came up with various ideas which amalgamated into this sort of stylized western zombie action survival story.  Without going into too much detail right now, suffice to say it gave plenty of inspiration for the various tracks we wanted to do that could "fit the bill" of a typical blockbuster movie of this genre. 

The next layer on the cake, was the production value, we wanted to experiment as a studio with recording techniques and challenge ourselves to just how far we could go to recreate the "iconic" sound of a particular genre, not necessarily going for cookie cutter imitation, but capturing what we feel is the essence of that genre's sound, and putting our spin on it.

The final layer to the cake, and is purely for the gimmick of making the soundtrack album sound more authentic is the matter of coming up with original custom voice-overs, foley, and sound effects to add into the various interludes as "sound bytes" from the fake movie concept we came up with.  One good example of an inspirational source is the Kill Bill soundtracks.  The songs that were cleverly used in the movie are sprinkled with interludes that were sampled from the movie itself, which was an idea i liked and wanted to go for on this album as well.  This added layer to our concept is going to also allow us to showcase our skills in these areas of audio production as well, not just that we know music, but know and appreciate all audio engineering; Sound design, ADR, Foley, and the like.

Obviously we've got big ideas for this project.  I came up with a rough day by day schedule to give us a good idea of the pace we need to be keeping to stay on track.  Basically here's what it breaks down to:

1. Week 1 - Pre-production
2. Week 2 - Demoing and Tracking
3. Week 3 - Tracking and editing
4. Week 4 - Mix, Master, and publish

As we have to move at such a quick pace, the schedule is just a guide, and can remain flexible.  But overall we need to be able to move swiftly through each phase of the project.  This will also mean that we may be working in a segmented fashion between Troy and myself.  While we may just barely get to tracking certain songs, others may already be in editing and mixing phase.

With a deadline of February 28th having to have the entire album published and online, we've got a lot of work ahead of us, and the clock is ticking! I'll try to post pictures when I can, and Check Neologic Studios on Facebook to see our latest status updates!