RPM Challenge day 11

Today marks the last weekday to get stuff demoed.  This week was marked with lots and lots of phone calls about potential jobs with friends and colleagues lining up for future dates, which is great and distracting at the same time!  Business is business however, and today we wrapped up Curing the Cure's final vocal takes.  This song is finally tracked.

Steven (left) and I (right) getting a good look

We had a lot of fun fooling around between and even during tracking the vocals!  Troy danced, Steven cracked jokes a lot of laughter kept the night moving quickly.

Troy getting his groove on

First things first, Setting up the mics and pulling up the track and reviewing what was needed on the final takes.  Steven was ready to go right away.

After just a couple takes of the main track we had a take we liked and reviewed the sound for the "corrupted" vocal overdubs.  I used plugins on the vocal track to test out a deeper voice manipulation effect that erred on creepy phone call status.

Troy getting a kick out of the voice manipulation effect

We goofed around for a bit while I dialed in a good setting on the effect, and got back to work on tracking the overdubs.

Just a few takes later we played more with the voice manipulation effect and reviewed the progress on the track so I could make mental notes on where to take it in editing and arrangement.  Since most of the song is done virtually aside from the industrial noises I sampled from found objects which were then processed, I'll go back over the track and start adding in various other elements to make the song sound fuller.

Discussing the final takes

After that, we took a break to go eat and Troy went to pick out some music from a retail store as research for another song we still have to write: the electronica song.

Steven's last look

We are still unsure of what we want to do for this one so afterward we wanted to go to the studio to get inspired.  However, with time constraints we ended up coming back to my place and just listening to bands like Celldweller to get inspired by the fusion of metal / techno / and industrial.

Troy at it again, dancing to Celldweller!

We really couldn't come up with ideas quickly enough, and he had to go for the night.  We discussed the songs we had left to do, and I decided to tackle the Fight song later in the evening.

The metal gods are not pleased...

I quickly got set up to record guitars and start demoing the Fight song.  Finding a good sound was hard because I didn't quite have any ideas solid in my head,  I played around for a bit to find the sound I liked and Troy commented it sounded very Metallica-inspired.  Thanks!

Schecter Hellraiser C-7 goodness

After a few ideas trolling through my fingers and out my amp, a few setting changes, and a good while, Troy finally decided to leave for the night, and I got on with tracking what I had.

I tracked the guitars and laid down a quick beat and then even laid down bass.  Most of the song was demoed, it still needs some more arrangement work but the core of the idea is there finally!

Tomorrow we are going to be super busy in the studio tracking all that we can!  Stay tuned for more!

RPM Challenge Days 7-9

Monday we started running into writer's block and the stress levels have been rising as it's already week 2 and we still have a lot of work cut out for us both!  Monday, after a lot of errands and chat and talks with clients and doing a few side jobs, Troy managed to get ideas down that he liked for the Pop Punk song.  While the album calls for a particular style that would be reminiscent of Blink 182 in their old days back around their first album release, he came up with a pretty cool riff that is more pop thank punk but still pays homage to the genre.

I've been having a terrible case of writer's block coming up with ideas that I actually liked to fit the bill for the progressive metal song.  While I cycled through a bunch of ideas and some that fit other song ideas, they were too rough and I couldn't seem to focus on one I liked until I hit the main riff that set me into motion on the intro to the Progressive Metal song.  It took me quite a while to dial in what I was hearing in my head that inspired the lick, but it finally got down.


Tuesday was our worst day of all.  Don't ever try to force musical concepts out from nothing when you simply don't have the ideas.  Not only does it sound less authentic, it simply sounds uninspired.  Troy eventually stumbled across some ideas he liked but nothing solid.

As for me, I tried to tackle the ambient interlude track that comes in before my alternative electronic song, but absolutely nothing was getting done!  All in all, we spent a lot of time discussing and clashing ideas and trolling through my vast sound collection with samples I've collected, made, and virtual instruments galore.  I think I found a decent start for the Alternative song I have to cover.  I managed to demo a basic idea for it, but both Troy and I were just too tired.  I exercise every day, and he swims before he works his part time job.  Tuesday just seemed a slow and uneventful day.

Wednesday we got a lot more accomplished.  During Troy's lunch we demoed his Folk Pop song idea

While Troy went back to work, I did my usual routine of hitting up the Gym and taking care of errands.  Later in the evening we resumed tackling the 2nd interlude track.  With a few minor interruptions from family and clients calling and booking more work (yay!) we started capturing Foley in my family's garage.

The interlude is a dark ambient track with a heavy foley base and will require a lot of processing and mixing.  We spent a good couple hours just setting up and getting ideas down for Foley, sound effects, and even voice work for background. 

I set up 2 mics in the garage extended from my snake and ran headphones out as well.  I quickly found a good placement for both mics and set them pretty far away from the sources of the Foley.  I let Troy go at it for a few takes and then I did my takes after.

 

We ended up with like 8 different takes, trying various ideas from bumps, impacts, and scrapes to vocalizations and guttural noises.  This interlude is already sounding a lot darker and more violent than I had originally imagined it would!

All in all, the energy we had yesterday made up for Tuesday's shortcomings and lack of progress. We're still on schedule and plan on keeping this pace up until the end of the project.

Troy making a point

Today (Thursday) we have more demo's to finish and hopefully by Friday we can tighten up ideas to take to the studio to track as much as possible!

With the 2nd week coming to a close very fast, Weeks 3 and 4 are going to be critical when it comes to tracking Vocals, heading into editing, mixing, and mastering.  Several other elements need to start coming into play too as we have to discuss album artwork ideas and schedule photo shoot time for ourselves, and I have started to work on the album design with Discmakers' templates for the particular package design we want to use.

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!