Following up on the 2021 make-music-every-day post, I’m declaring, once again, that I’m participating in the RPM challenge. What’s more, my daughter and my girlfriend’s son are playing along, too.
The RPM Challenge is a creative challenge to anyone to record music in February. We give you a deadline of March 1 to complete it by and then we host listening parties to celebrate. Any genre, any level of experience, anywhere. Thousands of records and tens of thousands of tracks have been made by people around the world as part of the Challenge since it was founded in 2006.
It’s fun, it’s hard, it’s rewarding, and it’s free to take part. What have you got to lose?
https://www.rpmchallenge.com/
To accompany the fresh new Website, RPM has expanded on the original requirements, which were to conceive and record an album in the month of February, start to finish. It doesn’t have to be good – just complete. Here, an album was defined as one 35 minute piece of music, or 10 songs. The new requirements are one of the following:
- Single (1 track or 5 minutes)
- EP (5 tracks or 20 minutes)
- LP (10 tracks or 35 minutes)
- Boxed Set (30 tracks or 100 minutes)
I love it!
I finished an album last year for the first time, and I reflected on that experience in the past 12 months. It was so valuable. I found new possibilities and ideas – and the constraint of having to complete the tracks really pushed me to find different processes, and think about how to produce material in a new way. I recommend this to anyone making music.