Wednesday, March 2, 2011

SUPERGOD!!!!!! The Motion Picture Soundtrack: Rainbows, Piss & Meat



Well another February has came and went and that can only mean that now the deluge RPM Challenge albums will now start raining down from the heavens like hastily made indie manna. Here this years entry from me "SUPERGOD!!!!!! The Motion Picture Soundtrack: Rainbows, Piss & Meat". As you can tell from the title this is a soundtrack album to a movie I am currently working on. The original plan was to complete a short movie in the month of January, or at least get enough done so that I could start scoring, and then do a score during RPM month. This plan failed... It's not that I didn't get enough done to get started, I had about 15 minutes or so past the editing stage, I just realized fairly quickly that if I pushed myself to get this movie and score done by the end of February I'd just end up with a totally unwatchable movie with a shitty score. As much as it would've been awesome to pass in a finished DVD this year instead of a lowly CDR I didn't think it would worth it if it ended up looking like shit. So I swallowed my pride and just worked on getting some decent music down all the while thinking "cinematic" in my head. About 10 minutes or so of this album is actually scored to some scenes, which is trickier then I thought, but I'll leave it up to you to figure out what parts will make it into the movie or not.
This is without a doubt the most minimal SUPERGOD! album I've made yet, my whole focus this last year of music production has been trying to get more from less, while some parts are quite layered (there's about 20 guitars at the end of "Training bra stapled to a prison shed") most tracks have around 4 or 5 instruments instead of 20 or 30. I also took this project as an opportunity to try out some new software, I was sorta forced into this decision as I discovered that the software I've been using was giving me latency issues on this new computer I'm using with the fancier soundcard. This new program (I'm using REAPER by the way) took awhile to get used to but ended up winning me over with some nice features (or at least nicer features then my outdated version of Adobe Audition had) and it allowed me to come up with the loop studies on tracks 7, 9 and 16 that I'm quite pleased with.
I'm pretty happy with this years RPM, some songs like "A cage match with benefits" and "Don't listen too carefully to what the gunman says" got the atmosphere I was going for just right. Of course this wouldn't be an RPM without a few concessions: If I had more time I would've probably changed the vocal or pretty much all the lyrics on "Training Bra..." I'm not very satisfied with the transition between "The world is smiling now that I have no legs" and "A cage fight with benefits" even though I worked on it forever (the bandcamp player fucks up all the transitions anyway by adding the pause between tracks)  and the album as a whole could use more RAWK (although it has a bit here and there) and a bit more silliness. But y'know, deadlines make things happen.
I can't wait to hear what everybody else came up with this year!