Well, I succeeded in completed writing and recording, not counting mixing, a 38½-minute album within exactly two weeks. Had this been an official contest, I would not quite have had it delivered on time, because after recording the last vocal part by 9:00 PM on Monday evening, I did spend the entire night until 6 AM tweaking the mix, and then didn’t have the thing fully rendered, exported, and uploaded until noon on Tuesday.
Even if it was a “not-including mixdown and delivery” challenge, there would be one highly-debatable, borderline disqualifier: During final mix-tweaking, I did add a vocoder effect to a voice for Scribble Tablet, Doodle Pad, which required me to play a keyboard. Half of the jury is arguing that any use of a keyboard is a “keyboard performance”, and thus disqualifies me. The other half claims that vocoding is just an “effect”, and that I was only using the keyboard as a means of controlling the effect, thus it is considered post-production and not a performance.
All that said, though — woo-hoo! Fuckin’ A!! I did this thing!!! You can listen to it on this Soundcloud page. You can also download the full mp3 from that page (it’s the tiny “down arrow” icon at the top of the clip).
The most strange thing for me was that even though I had established the goal myself, I grew to feel like it was external, and that I absolutely had to do it no matter what. There was no part of my mind thinking, “eh, maybe I could change this to three weeks”. The pressure became “real” to me, and I felt a constant sense of urgency. I’ve read in Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art (highly recommended) that if you make the commitment and put in the time, inspiration will come on a regular basis, as needed. I’ve found this to be true in the past, and it continued to be true for this project. Nonetheless, I continued to be nervous and anxious each time the next step came along.
Some general notes:
Two of the instrumental tracks, “Quickie” (#3) and “Fortnight” (#12), were created from scratch on the last day, each done in about an hour a piece. I stole percussion from the other tracks, mixed, matched, sped up and slowed down. The organ bit in “Fortnight” was originally in the track #3 position, but I decided it sounded more like a second-to-last piece, so I moved it there, and then did “Quickie” as a two-chord Zappa-esque guitar solo.
“Spooky Techno Thing” (#4) was a struggle to find some kind of direction, and I just let it become this weird groove. Then I put sampled mellotron flutes on it, because mellotron makes everything all better. I added some piano, hoping for a kind of “vintage” sound, but then I decided the only way to properly make it vintage was to turn it backwards, hence the backwards piano. It’s an ambient jam – whatever. If I’d had more time I would have added speech synthesized vocals or something.
“Bath Water” (#8) and “Promise Not To Talk” (#9) both had incomplete lyrics, so I recorded what I had, and added a few bits on the final day to fill in the space. I never liked the lyrics I had for “Bullet” (#10), and they don’t really mean anything, but I didn’t have time to replace them, so I just left it as a “shouty” thing.
I found it completely impossible to come up with lyrics for “Meaningless Pop Song” (#11), but I didn’t want to end the album with three instrumentals in a row. So, starting around an hour and a half before my deadline, I recorded myself in “looping” mode singing random responses to the items in an unusual book. Then I kept whatever phrases were passable, and mixed and matched them so they would make even less sense. Because I didn’t really “believe” in the lyrics, I used a telephone effect on the voice to distance the listener from them a little. I think there’s something in there about keeping bleach in a closet, and also something about ducks.
The most difficult part was writing lyrics. If I could go into something like this with lyrics already written, even if the melodies didn’t exist yet, it would be a lot easier. I think when official two-week album contests are held, the participants are not required to write new material — I don’t have the rules to such a contest in front of me, but if that’s the case, it offsets the fact that my mixdown took place just outside of the two-week window.
The most fun and effortless part was recording guitar, especially lead and solo guitar. Although guitar isn’t the best instrument for me to improvise on cold, it’s a great instrument for me to improvise on over a backing track, such as a piano or electric piano that can be trusted to be in tune. I used the three-pickup Les Paul exclusively on this. I didn’t use the Frankenstrat at all, just because I didn’t have time to fiddle with two guitars — it was better just to have one sitting next to me, leaning against the piano the whole time, that I could grab at any time without getting out of my chair.
Some computer-related notes:
Instead of each song being a separate project file on the computer, I did it as one 42-minute piece with a tempo change at the beginning of each section. This way I could quickly jump from song to song, and even copy and paste elements from one song to another, without waiting for the computer to load a project each time. The end product is 3½ minutes shorter because of gaps between the sections.
Hard drive space was used up quickly. I frequently “rendered” tracks with a lot of edits in them, i.e. bounced them down to a new clip so that I wouldn’t have a zillion tiny edits on the screen (and thus the possibility of messing something up by accidentally doing something unintended to them). Each time I did such a “render”, it created a new file, and subsequently I got the “low disk space” warning multiple times, and twice had to stop everything to do a major cleanup. I finally got over my fear of using Tracktion’s “find orphaned clips” functionality to see all the old clips I could safely delete. Obviously, I was afraid this might not work correctly, and, well, you know.
In addition to all the rendering, I learned to make copious use of shortcut keys, constantly toggling things such as “snapping” and “looping” on and off. This became mind-numbingly habitual. I’ve also become quick at exporting a clip to Audacity to remove hiss (especially on vocal tracks) and then re-importing it back into the project.
Some statistics on how long it takes to make albums:
Fortnight was recorded in exactly one fortnight (1.00 fortnights). Let’s see how that compares to a few other choice albums, shall we?
The Beatles’ debut album Please Please Me was recorded in one day, or 0.07 fortnights, leaving them 13 days to party. However, their more ambitious Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band took 129 days, or a whopping 9.21 fortnights, enough that you can actually see a tiny little bar for it on the above graph. Aww, isn’t that cute?
Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy is a little confusing for me. I’ve read that the recording spanned about 10 years, or 260 fortnights. However, the writing began a few years before that, putting it at anywhere from about 350-375 fortnights. I used 364 for the chart based on an even 14 years.
This was beaten by Ca Ira (There is Hope), Roger Waters’ foray into legitimate classical opera, for which recording began in 1988 and was completed in 2005 (438 fortnights).
My own rock opera, Through Forbidden Black Doors, has been in a constant state of revision since around this time in 1987, putting it at 624 fortnights and counting.
This is beaten still by Brian Wilson’s Smile, started by the Beach Boys in 1967, and never released until Brian completed his own version in 2004 (1003 fortnights). However, apparently an official Beach Boys version is being completed now, so if you count that as the official version, the number will be higher.
In conclusion:
I highly recommend that anyone — except for those of you who are in a zen-like state of completeness, and content with everything — do some kind of intense self-challenge when you get the chance, whatever kind is appropriate to you. You probably know in the back of your mind what it is, but you’ve got a zillion excuses to put it off. Maybe it’s not time for you to do that just yet, but when it knocks on your door, let it in.
With that, it’s time for me to move on to the next thing. I hope you enjoy the album. 
