January: One Track a Day, Again
Now that the other songwriting semester is done, I’m ready for January, which is one instrumental track every day. I did this the last two years.
Embarrassingly enough, I have a record from last year that I never released, which I need to listen through. I went with dub techno and some of it is actually really good.
The year before last I did kind of my take on a synthwave record, and I’m doing that again this year, but much more sparse. The theme then was riding my bike to the mall back in the day, and the idea was that I was somebody living within that time and capturing the feel. I still think I did a good job of that.
This year I’m going with AM black and white. I’ve been wanting to make a record of “reading music,” something pretty chilled out — great to listen to when you do not need to be fully mentally engaged. That’s what I’m going with.
I read an article in Mojo this weekend about “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis. I went back in and, man, there’s almost nothing going on. So I want to see how little I can do and still get the musical point across, both with chords and melody. I’ve got it all set up in the MPC ready to go. I’m really happy with my template and looking forward to it.
I’ll update on the blog with what happened and what choices I made for you music makers out there. It should be pretty interesting to see what happens in an everyday music-making context.