Know your limits, a huge personal challenge

In the February 2009 issue of Computer Music magazine there’s a letter that I found quite interesting called ‘know your limits’.

Apparently the guy who wrote the letter was having a few problems getting much done, spending more time trying out presets on his plugins and things like that. So he decided to limit himself to just kick, snares, hi hats and square waves on synths, and create a new track every day for a month.

I like the sound of that and have decided to do something similar myself. Instead of just creating a new track every day for a month, I’m going to try and create a new music video every day including the music. Each must be at least 2 minutes long, so if I do manage to get 30 done, that’s at least an hours worth of ‘entertainment’ 🙂

Since I made the decision the other day to start doing all my music using Vegas with both video and audio parts on the timeline, this should be a perfect opportunity to get that happening and familiarise myself with the whole process. Why do everything in Vegas? It’s what I know best. Plus, having used it since last century, I’ve just figured out how I can edit to a 1/64, 1/96, 1/128 and 1/192 grids on the timeline. And also reminding myself that Acid loops can be used in Vegas. Something I’ve never done before.

So what sort of music videos will I be creating? Who knows, but hopefully I’ll end up with some extremely unique sounding beats and edits. Musically I’ll be recording parts from the MPC500, along with my old Korg Poly 800, Micromoog and  Waldorf Pulse synths. If I get my old computer up and running with my old Reality soft synth, I’ll plug that in too. Scratching from the turntable, my shakers, kalimba, Emulator X2 soft sampler.

As for the video, well, anything I can make use of. I currently don’t have much drive space left which should be a good limitation to prevent me from adding too much new footage. Hopefully some 3d, any old DV clips, old HDV footage from the Sony HC1 I used to own.. Anything really.

I’ll be starting towards the end of May. Simply because I currently have 3 videos to finish editing, and need to do a few other things before then too.

If you’re reading this and are interested, please leave me a comment on the blog here.. That’s https://avene.org in case any of you are reading this as a note feed on Facebook. Or at least social bookmark it using the button below 🙂