2025 RPM Challenge Song Idea number 13 becomes finished song number 16. Meh. Waste of a good guitar solo in the outro. Rhythm guitars are a Takamine F-400 S 12-string into a Shure SM57. The leads are a Gibson Les Paul Standard 50's into…

Glory's Gonna Shine Verse 1: I woke up with a feeling deep down in my soul, The world keeps on turning, but it’s out of control. Storm clouds are rising, you can hear the thunder roll, But I know my Saviour’s in control. Verse 2: Seven…

2025 RPM Challenge song idea number nine becomes finished song number 15. This one is not going to make the RPM Challenge album cut. That middle bridge section... what was I thinking? Laughably bad. The rhythm guitar in your left speaker…

2025 RPM Challenge song idea number 18 becomes finished song number 14. I like the song all right, but the performance could have (should have) been better. It's okay, I guess. Rhythm guitars are a Takamine F-400 S 12-string into a Shure…

2025 RPM Challenge song idea number 20 becomes finished song number 13. As the great Ian Gillian once said, can I have everything louder than everything else. This mix kinda got silly as every level kept going up and up and up. It's a fun…

What the hell's a djembe? No, me neither. So it gets an airing in the intro. Tried to hit a just-behind-the-beat edginess to fit in with the just-behind-comfortable intent of the song. Titles are hard. *Tech Corner* More clangs and thuds…

A bit of Frankenstein of a song, lyrics cobbled from old lyric fragments, with variations on bass and melody and piano motifs, like I couldn't make my mind up where it was heading. Something about it, so has made the cut! *Tech Notes* Hmm…

The song's about betrayal: about mixing with the wrong crowd, who then drop you from a great height. It's a love song. Maybe I should find a twee skirmish instead of relying on that Muse. *Tech Notes* Hmm. The usual set of twenty-three sound…

The song started life as more sonic doodles using the Numanesque 1979 synth emulators -- so if you think it's 80s, you're a year out! Was also working on transitions from verse to chorus (as I've listened to too many fawmers doing this rather…

TL;DR: more guitary than my preferred synthery. With production practice too. --- For a recent collab, I undertook collation duties: mixing received stems without (hopefully) losing their original energy. Those stems were played on real instruments…

TL;DR: it's got percussion in it. I had an idea for percussion-heavy song: that I found tough to articulate because it's not a usual thing for me. More practice required. I dialled back the bpm as the percussion became (even more) a wall of…

This started out from some sound design doodlery. A couple of the synths I've been using have some non-standard routing options, so I've been getting better acquainted. They're not modular, though the Reason hosted stuff does have visible, virtual…

I sold my upright piano earlier this year: it had been underused for a while and my head's been buried in the DAW for a long time. So played arpeggios into DAW instead. Then quantised them within a inch of their lives. More doodles with the Backbone…

Ditty with jangles, bass and celloish thing (all Halion) and plenty of triplets. [Drum sounds from Groove Agent; edited using the new Drum Pattern editor. New for Cubase that is ... but every other DAW has had for 20 years, I suspect.] Vocal synths…

Hmm. The trigger was to use a random Wikipedia page [via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random ] -- it gave me a 1990s Brazilian film I'd never heard of. Although it sparked a song, the verses that more obviously related to the film got…

I'd been recommended some free plug-ins for DAWs. One of these plug-ins emulated synths from yesteryear that were bizarrely nostalgia inducing. Which led me down a path to a sort-of retro style song. It's possibly anachronistic: I didn't check…

Not _entirely_ sure where this came from, probably the muted trumpet sound, that's only possible to play in the wearing-a-black-turtle-neck style. Other motifs followed suit. 'Tis mainly from Cubase Halion sounds ... Reason double bass, and…

TL;DR: the song's about waiting too long to do the right thing ... and then still choosing to ignore it when you get the chance. Last autumn, I spent too long polishing production & sound design at the expense of, amongst other things…

TL;DR: this is a synth-pop track about being true to yourself. For the last couple of days of January, I'd been listening to Pete Shelley's "Homosapien"¹, on repeat, like a deranged teenager. The idea was to overdose on a song I liked, so that…

A mention to freesounds.org -- a hole full of rabbits and, um, a Portland Ferry. The ferry's foghorn makes an appearance on this track: a love song. Elsewhere there's the usual synthery -- including Vocaloid vocal synth -- plus some orchestral…