Yesterday I notice the washing machine was grooving (with an audible beat), so I sampled it to use for an interlude for the album. Inspiration comes from weird places when there's a deadline.

I don't write lyrics, but I do this for music. I record all of my ideas regardless of how good I think they are at the time of creation. Some things sound better days or weeks later when I go back, or just the act of recording inspires more ideas.

My view (which is entirely subjective) is that an album contains a minimum of 10 songs, or is at least 40-45 minutes in length. This would cover early Beatles records (which were very short) or Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells (which is only two parts).

For this 'event', I'm trying to do things in a different fashion. During the lockdowns in the past few years, I've demoed about 45 'songs' (some in different states of completion) so want to tackle this differently. For example, I am considering sampling myself by using a part from another song and see if I can do something interesting with that. As a guitar player, I am going to try composing a song that has no guitar (and maybe no melodic instruments at all). Just voice and production. And if I get really ambitious, I may attempt a 'double trio' set up with two 'bands' in each speaker, but playing in different time signatures. I want to get creative and outside of my usual process.

There's a lot of great points made here and I agree with a lot of them. But I've always been a collaborator (see Dichroma; One Final Mountain), so for me the challenge (this time) is to force myself to finish things off on my own, instead of assuming that aspects I'm not as comfortable with (such as vocals and lyrics) get done by someone else. Just to see if I can do it, more than anything. But I might be looking for someone that can play theremin for an idea that I have.

A friend showed me a plugin that makes the most god awful distorted sounds etc., so I'm planning to run most of my ideas through it and make some of the parts not sound like guitars anymore (and in some cases -- no note definition either). I also may take samples of stuff that I've recorded previously to make collages of sound,