I’ve finally started to really feel the time crunch. I had to cut a couple of tracks that were just too complicated — ones with too many instruments, or difficult parts, or that were otherwise hard for me to record. Even without a deadline I wouldn’t have the skill to do some of these songs justice, so I had no chance of getting them done by the end of the month.

I still need ten songs, though, and the clock is ticking, so I’ve subbed in some new ones which are decidedly…less ambitious.

Here’s a clip of a guitar solo from a blues-rock jam (we’re probably at the point where I can dispense with the work-in-progress disclaimers, but I suppose it’s possible that these could still change):

It’s not much of a solo, so I added a bunch of distortion until the sloppiness sounded intentional. It probably needs a few more tweaks (and takes) to sell it, but I doubt I’ll have time.

This is…I’m not really sure what this is:

I don’t even remember finding that guitar tone. It makes this sound like a riff from a power ballad, and it kind of gives it that bell effect that you hear in a lot of Queen songs. In any case, it’s in 11/8, so I’m into it.

I joked on Twitter that this song was called “the first six chords I could think of, fingerpicked”:

There’s no melody or anything — it’s pretty much two minutes of that. It guess it could work as an interlude, but this one is scraping the bottom of the barrel. If any better ideas come to me in the next week, it’s first on the chopping block.

Finally, here’s a bizarre little piano waltz that I’ve been writing in Sibelius:

I actually wrote the beginning of this back in 2008, but never found anywhere to take it. Tonight I randomly thought of it and decided to give it another go. I actually think this one is promising — I really like the abrupt shift into the parallel major — but, again, I don’t know if I have the time to get it right; it’s really just a sketch right now.

So: I now have nine “songs” that are mostly or wholly recorded, and I’m hoping to finish a tenth in the next day or two so I can spend the rest of the month tweaking and improving things. If nothing else, it will certainly be a good variety!

It’s not too bad in this clip, but the sound quality on this song is pretty abysmal right now. I recorded what I assumed would be scratch tracks for guitar and mandolin, and then started making all kinds of destructive edits while experimenting with different tempos and keys. Looking at the calendar, I wish I had just patched up my original take and called it a day; now the audio is full of warbliness and artifacts and will need to be rerecorded. Lesson learned!

Here’s a bit of a clarinet trio I’ve been working on (piped in straight from Sibelius! Which, to be honest, might be the final audio source too unless I get any better ideas):

I’m a little worried that I know just enough about writing this kind of thing to get into trouble, and I’ll end up having to spend a long time fixing “bugs” — hidden fifths, bad intervals, and so on — before I’m happy with it. (I can hear a couple of rough spots already.) I’m also concerned that I don’t really have time to do it right, which I will probably mitigate by making it pretty short. All that said, it’s a lot of fun to work on. Composing on staff paper is a breath of fresh air after staring at waveforms and MIDI rectangles for so long.

If you thought that was a genre outlier, check this one out:

Somehow I got the idea in my head to write a song entirely on my Korg DW-6000 synthesizer. (I got it for free in college; it’s a weird story.) I don’t know the first thing about writing electronic music, though, which puts me at a distinct advantage here: I can’t mess up if I don’t what I’m doing wrong! I’ve already done a bunch more work on this one since I recorded that clip, and I’m really happy with how it’s turned out. If nothing else, there will be enough variation on this album that no one will be able to enjoy it all the way through.

Big picture: the RPM Challenge defines an album as either ten songs or 35 minutes; I’m most likely going to hit the former definition. I have two songs that I would feel comfortable calling ”done,” and three more that are most of the way there. Then I have two songs sketched out but with minimal recording, and a bunch of stray ideas that haven’t coalesced into anything noteworthy yet.

I’m actually least worried about the last part — coming up with stuff to record has been the easy part! (The bluegrass one fell out of my head in maybe ten minutes.) It reminds me of the “ideas are a multiplier of execution” theory I sometimes hear from tech industry people.

Onward!

That’s from about 2 AM and it’s now 3 AM, so I have no idea if it sounds good or not. I’ll have to see what I think “tomorrow.”

A couple of observations:

• Putting a song to tape is a good reality check for my sense of when it’s finished. In the past I’ve sometimes referred to a handful of chords or a melodic phrase as “a song I wrote,” but trying to figure out arrangements and such while recording is making me realize how silly that is. I could argue that I have eight “songs” written already, but by a stricter (and more accurate) definition I only have maybe three. That means that I’m a bit behind schedule, especially if I want to leave time for mixing! (Not that I know much about mixing anyway.)
• There is an inverse relationship between how late at night I’m working and how easy the work is. Since I stop recording loud things (i.e. acoustic instruments) when my roommates go to sleep, and I’m most comfortable on an acoustic guitar, when working late I end up trying to write MIDI drum parts or play bass solos or other things that aren’t in my wheelhouse. Of course, that’s exacerbated by the more obvious problem, which is that I’m staying up too late!

Hopefully I can put a big dent in this thing over the weekend; I think I have enough material composed to work straight through without having to write as I go.

Here’s a little snippet of one of my songs (still a rough draft):

You can almost smell the elevator, right?

One of the interesting things about the time limit is that it’s forcing me to go with whatever comes out of my head. This is not a particularly exciting piece, but without anything better to work on I just hit record and starting banging it out. As things progressed I started adding in some fun little bits, like those 2+3 groupings at the end of the A section. It’s still nothing great, but I’m warming up to it. I’m hoping I can do the same with the other ideas I’ve had (which, incidentally, are less Musak-sounding).

I’ll try to update a couple more times over the course of the project.

We now know we have the power bend the law to our will, and to make legislators respect our values, if we can just coordinate our efforts and focus our attentions. But there are many issues which have to do with the soul of our nation that may not galvanize a redditor who’s only concerned with legislation that might interfere with watching movies online.

- Anil Dash, “The History, and Future, of Web Protest”

• Bastion, Supergiant Games
• Dragon Age II, BioWare Edmonton
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda Game Studios
• Portal 2, Valve Corporation
• Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, Capybara Games

Five albums from 2011 that I enjoyed:

• Artificial Heart, Jonathan Coulton
• The Harrow and the Harvest, Gillian Welch
• Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes
• Revelator, The Derek Trucks Band
• Rocket Science, Béla Fleck & the Flecktones

This is what it looked like outside:

And this is what it looked like outside in 2005:

I think New England is trying to tell me something.

(Click images to enlarge.)

Oh boy. Let’s see what we’ve got here:

• The game is, inexplicably, Backgammon II: a video game sequel to a board game that I had never played.
• One of the advertised features is “No Backgammon I!” Maybe I realized my cross-media sequel was a little strange; maybe I just liked the word “backgammon.”
• Backgammon II is a product of The Software Toolworks, an actual company. (They were the original developers of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and Chessmaster.) And it’s clearly a PC game, too; note the menu bar and arrow keys.
• The gameplay “screenshot” is completely mystifying.

An options menu. You can choose your font in this game, kind of like how you can choose the color of the text boxes in EarthBound. Here the player has selected “Out-of-Control-Whip,” which looks pretty good.

Aha — Backgammon II is a racing game! There’s only one car on the track, so this must be the time trial mode. No points yet, or bonus points, but it seems to be pretty early in the first “session.”

The two noteworthy elements on this track are the DEATH ZONE and the railroad crossing. There appears to be further DEATH on the railroad track, foreshadowing the dangerous train in Mario Kart 64’s Kalimari Desert.

Action shot of a sweet-ass jump. (Note the narrowly avoided arrow-tipped obstacle! I bet that’s the kind of style you need to earn those bonus points.)

In addition to driving, the car appears to be attempting echolocation for some reason. I probably stole that from Ecco the Dolphin, which I somehow never got the hang of as a five-year-old.

Man, I sure like to write the name of the game, don’t I? Here the B in “Backgammon” seems to have sprouted a beefy arm, Trogdor-style. Look at all its majesty!

I’m not really sure what’s going in the actual picture. Based on the arrow this is probably a top-down view of YOU driving — with art potentially inspired by Tommy Lasorda Baseball — but I can’t place the large object in the center. Something to stay away from, I guess!

This is where Backgammon II takes a turn for the WTF. It seems that we have abandoned the driving genre for a gruesome bastardization of Let’s Make a Deal. Here the player has been presented with two doors, EXIT and WEPONS, and must choose one. Here he has chosen incorrectly, and lies dead in a pool of his own blood.

I suspect my influence here was Alex Kidd in Miracle World, the first video game I ever played. The boss battles in Miracle World were literally just Rock Paper Scissors, and if you lost, you died. In retrospect it’s a wonder I didn’t give up on the medium right there.

Here the player wisely chooses EXIT over WEPONS, and seems to be leaving. There are also a shit-ton of arrows all of a sudden, one of which is pointing to…the reappearance of the title of the game! Man, this is so much better than the first backgammon.

An overhead map of a race course. Probably one of the later ones; those loops in the latter half of the track are pretty gnarly. (The two words are “GRASS” and “GRASS” backwards — God only knows what backwards grass does.)

These look like the WEPONS that kill you if you pick the wrong door. The sword is pretty standard and the “cracked gun” doesn’t look too threatening, but the slingshot shoots actual arrows! As does, of course, the Bow ‘n’ Arrooww, which is frankly a better name for a weapon than half of what I see in shipped games.

The combination of weapons and racing makes me think I was influenced by Road Rash, but the timeline is wrong; the first game I played in that series was Road Rash 3, and I would have been older by the time that came out. I’m left to conclude that adding weapons was my own idea, because shit just needed to get a little more real.

Finally, we have this — an exit sign, a sign with some palindromic numbers on it, and what appears to be an enormous half-buried volleyball, or an origami sunset, or maybe some kind of Tetris variant played in a semicircle. Who the hell knows. Maybe this is a puzzle you need to solve in between racing, killing stuff, and trying not to get WEPONed by doors.

On the first page of my fifth grade yearbook, below a disappointingly fuzzy class photo, is the heading “SOMEDAY I’D LIKE TO BE” followed by the best jobs our young minds could dream up: Olympian, President, architect, marine biologist. (Actually, now that I look, there are no fewer than five prospective marine biologists. I guess there were a lot of Seinfeld fans in my class.)

My ideal job, of course, was “make video games.” I wonder if anyone who saw this thing thought I had a ghost of a chance.