Manic Monday #32

One Hour Challenge Nr.2

The first ‘one hour challenge’ took me 3 minutes so I guess I had some spare time on this one. The basic rule is to enter the studio empty minded, and come up with some form of a tune within one hour. And after a very heavy gig Saturday night I was very blanc mind you.
I’m very fond of micro-electro tunes, soundscapes and other eletronica, so my expectancy was that the end result would be something in that direction.

From here is a pretty detailed time-schedule of what happened (mom; you can skip this and just press play).

18.00 pressed start on my computer and while firing up Ableton-Live I glanced over a tiny casio keyboard lying besides my monitor(picture above). I pressed some keys, and that very bass line became the framework for the whole tune.
18.10 recorded a basic 4 bar drumloop
18.15 made basic framework for the first chorus
18.20 played entire melody-line (2nd take)
18.30 realized it would be cool to use the casio’s drums as well
18.32 recorded crappy drumloop
18.40 Changed microphone for the Ukelele
18.45 microphone is warmed up but the hour mark is approaching.!
18.55 recorded Ukelele suffering from a cramps in my hands due to difficult chords
18.57 recorded bass
19.00 recorded piano first take.

Break time!
So now I have one minute of full audio in Ableton. everything starts at 00:00 and finishes after 1:00
19.30 start editing the audio basically repeating the whole thing and chop the most out of it the first round.
20.00 applied a little eq to bass, drums, and piano
20.15 compression and eq on the ukelele
20.20 I cheated! Added one crash-cymbal shot at the beginning of the second round. FAIL!
20.30 a little compression, eq and limiting on the master bus and rendered the wave-file.

So the first hour was used to come up with some tune and record it.
The second hour is less interesting because in that time frame I just mixed and mastered the tune.

I wanted to do a lot more (record some extra rhythm parts and some additional instruments but the hour mark was very strict. Those were the rules and this is the tune. The most dissapointing thing about this is that I didn’t come up with a proper title for this. 🙁

Enjoy,

One Hour – 2:26
[audio:http://www.schnauzerstudios.com/audio/onehour.mp3]