i've been meaning to spend more time on music. playing with a band again has been great (in addition to all the other music projects), but i want to do more composing and recording. seems there's never enough time!
ted, john and i, have been meaning play more music together for a long time. our new ethiopian jazz band has been a blast --but we wanted an outlet to work together in a more creative and focused process, and to work on our own music.
ted heard about the "rpm challenge" and decided to sign us up! there's definitely something about having a deadline. so ted, john, and i have been busy getting our new project started and writing music. i purchased some new gear to round out my studio too. nothing like a deadline.
the challenge is to write ten songs or 35 minutes of music in a month. it's similar to the writer's or poet's challenge to write a novel, body of work, or collection of poems in a month. we're focused on the deadline, but the goal has put our collective process in high gear -and we'll continue to work together after this month. i'm really excited, things are moving at a high pace.
we named the band over a round of beers, (after rehearsal, during our weekly geek banter i mentioned wanting headphones kinda like 'lobot' has)... voila.
it's really a play on words, i.e. lo-fi ro-bot. and just because it's a little ridiculous to be in *two* star-wars-theme named bands.
one = funny. two is just sad.
there's a lot of latitude in the name and we like it.
another novel approach for us, we are using a CVS style source code control to manage the collaborative process at a distance, since we have day jobs and different schedules. i'm really impressed it's making it a lot easy to shuffle files around, track changes, not worry about conflicts or overwritten files. seems a natural way to coordinate. i'd never thought of this application but it makes total sense.
i use code control at work of course --but it can do more than manage the engineering process. and even though it doesn't have a reasonable merge process for music data (that's just the nature of the system right now), at least it can handle all the other basic needs we have to coordinate our project.