It has been far too long, but I finally completed another Album-A-Day called Wing It! This album attempt didn't go very well for reasons I'll get to further down this article, but I'm still happy with the result. This album marks the first time I drew album art myself (Title Text Here does NOT count on the basis of it being just 4 lines and some words), it's very simple and I'm not great at drawing but I like how it turned out.
I also released some other music this month that I never announced. It's called The Scrapped EP and it's going to remain an exclusive album on Bandcamp. The story behind it is that it was supposed to be an Album-A-Day attempt and collaboration with one of my friends tz_scion. We really had to bend the rules to get it to work for us since we live in different timezones. We gave both of us 24 hours to make music, with time pauses allowed, functionally all this meant was that we had 48 hours to come up with a load of music. The project ended up getting abandoned about 2 months after we started, however recently I asked Scion if I could upload some of the songs I worked on for the album, which he allowed. The music released is what The Scrapped EP is.
Listen to Wing It!
Listen to The Scrapped EP. Read about The Scrapped EP
Listen to tz_scion's part our collab: Field of Feelings
I think at some point I need to update this site so that non AAD albums have their own page, because right now only the Beyondness EP has its own page.
If you've seen/heard the album, you'll notice it's only 10 minutes whereas the target goal for an AAD is 20 minutes. The reason I only reached half of the time goal is because of really poor time management and a lot of struggling to make things work. I really wanted the title track of the album to be more than what it ended up being, I was hoping to add lyrics, time signature changes, more verses, more instruments etc. I could not come up with any lyrics for the song and I certainly wasn't going to force any if they didn't add anything. Everything else I tried adding ended up not working how I wanted and just sounded bad. I was hoping to make the song at least 7 minutes long, but it ended up being just under 5 minutes.
On top of that, after I finished track 3 'Slapstickers', I wanted the tonal shift to the 4th song be as smooth as possible. After all, 'Slapstickers' is a fairly whacky song. What this meant in practice though was that I came up with a couple of different ideas for a 4th song, but none of them felt right to come after it so I abandoned all of my ideas until I came up with 'The Dust Settles'.
Speaking of which, the whole album only made it past the 10-minute mark because of the last song 'The Dust Settles' being extremely easy to compose, it took me about an hour to do it (the last hour of my time as well!) and it's somewhat simple and repetitive but I think it works well as an ending track.
I think what this whole AAD attempt proves to me is that I often get a bit too ambitious with these short albums and I should probably focus more on just making more songs, however I am ambitious because I feel like that's the only way to step up my game. Maybe next AAD attempt will be similar to Title Text Here in that I will intentionally make a "bad" album.