Product management and process tips
Last month I posted about FAWM 2018, which I was hoping to use as the basis for a new album. It went well – I wrote 14 tracks.
Following a bit of editing and reordering, I’ve put these online as my 11th album: “Singularity“. The album name relates to the one-word titles I’ve chosen for every track.
Not much more to say – why not go and listen?
Last year, I wrote 16 tracks as part of FAWM, an annual songwriting challenge where the goal is to write 14 tracks in 28 days.
This year, I’m a couple of days late posting my first tracks (compared to last year, anyway), but I’ve made a start. Here’s my FAWM profile with links to the new tracks.
I was really pleased with the tracks I wrote last year, which I used for a new album – “Ten“. That album is exactly as it was once FAWM 2017 ended. I didn’t add or remove any tracks, reorder the sequence, or edit any of the music.
When I got started this year, I was a bit rusty. It took a few tries to come up with the first track (Synthrock), which I wasn’t completely happy with – but with a time-based challenge, there isn’t a lot of time to procrastinate. So I thought it best to finish the first track, and get on with the show. I’m happier with the second track (Psionetrics) and this should help keep my motivation up.
I find that FAWM is a great way to write new music – I only wish I hadn’t had ten years away (between 2007-2017).
I’ve been tidying up my personal site, updating the layout to work better on mobile devices, and adding a bit of new content.
Earlier in the year, I did a big update to the site to move away from static pages and put some of the content into a MySQL database. I didn’t blog about it at the time, as the visible changes to my site were virtually non-existent. However, those changes made it easier to work on the updates I’ve been working on today.
In March 2016, I released a pair of albums – Symmetry 1 and Symmetry 2. Although I was happy with how these turned out, there are quite a few tracks I skip when listening to the albums now.
To solve this, I’ve selected 10 of my favourite tracks from the 22 on these albums, and created a new playlist: Best of Symmetry.
If you’ve ever wanted to see a complete list of all my tracks, well, look no further! I’ve added a new All tracks page that lists my tracks in alphabetical order.
I may improve this further by listing the album that each track appears on. For now it just shows the year of release. There’s quite a difference between the tracks I released from 2005-2009 and the tracks from 2016 onwards, so it might be a bit jarring to listen to the tracks in the order shown.
There are 172 tracks listed – I hadn’t realised there were so many. The list does include remixes, which will increase the overall total. I may do more in the future to highlight remixes or list them separately.
One other thing I’d like to is include new tracks that do not yet have an album.
In the past I’ve always followed the process of releasing tracks on albums, mainly because I don’t have a logical place to list the tracks that aren’t on an album. But that could be easily addressed with either a “New tracks” page or a “Non-album tracks” page.
There aren’t a lot of these tracks right now, other than “Top Brass“, which is on my Soundcloud page. I do have a few tracks in progress, and would prefer to share them as I complete them, instead of holding them back for an album.
For now, I need to get some of my current “in progress” tracks finished so I can share them. In the meantime, I might add one or two more playlists.
Tonight, I completed FAWM! (Here’s my original post, for context.)
Basically, I wrote 14 tracks in 18 days – I finished with 10 days to spare.
I might do a couple more, but for now, that’s the challenge done.
A couple of links to check out:
I’ve also refreshed my Music page. See below for a quick preview.
