The Lost Vocals: 3 Weeks to Finish the Album

I’ve spent the last three years in a bit of a standoff with my own voice.

I built a studio in my basement to finally learn how to sing without anyone else judging me, but I ended up becoming my own harshest critic. Every time I recorded a take, I’d find a reason to bury it—overanalyzing every breath and every frequency until the original spark was just gone. I have this folder of “vocal seeds” that have been waiting for me to finally get out of my own way.

This february, I’m finally ending that loop.

I’m using the RPM Challenge (which is a marathon where you have to finish an album in the month of February) to force myself to be decisive. The catch is that I have a trip to vegas in the middle of the month that I can’t move, so my “February” is actually split into two intense sprints totaling just 21 days.

The goal is to finally put the actual music around these vocals before I run out of time. I’m done over-tweaking or hiding behind the “process”—I just have 21 days to make some decisions and trust my gut.

I’m also using this project to try out a new performance environment I’ve been building called the Visual Engine. It’s a setup that links the music and the visuals together in real-time. When you see the sessions, you’ll be able to see the “architecture” of the songs as they’re being built—I’ve designed a layout that layers my DAW and a live camera feed with a custom 3D landscape that reacts to the waveforms of my voice and the data from my gear. I’ll also be using hand-tracking to interact with the visuals while i work.

I’m doing this because I really believe there’s more value in a finished, human project than in a “flawless” one that never sees the light of day.

I’ll be capturing the entire process as I work through this sprint. Since the schedule is going to be pretty unpredictable, signing up here is the best way to stay in the loop.

On March 1st, I’ll send you a link to download the finished album. I’m also setting up a “Session Vault”—an unlisted page where I’ll post the full stream archives and highlights so you can see how the visual world was built. And once the dust settles later in March, I’ll send out a custom sample pack of the sounds and textures I created during the sprint as a thank you for following along.

If you want to hear what it sounds like when I actually finish a project, you can check out my latest studio album, [Album Title], over on the main site.

I hope you’ll join me for this. It’s going to be a wild three weeks.

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