This is a sonic collage made up of a fragment of sound from every album submitted to RPM HQ in 2012. This works out to close to 600 source tracks. I used a custom Max patch created by Varun Nair (http://re-sounding.com/) to help automate the slicing and dicing. Special thanks to RPMer's Mosfet and What Could Go Wrong? for the help in ripping source tracks. Please to enjoy

Our brand new RPM 2012 T-shirts are now available to order! Behold the irrefutable RPM flow chart designed by participant and bandleader Elling Lien from The Scope in St. John's, Newfoundland. Same sizes and price as last year, and any proceeds will go to support RPM (though mostly the price is just to cover the cost of the shirts plus shipping).  And if you already own a shirt from past years, we respectfully submit that there are seven days in a week and each of these is equally deserving of RPM-related threads!

Sizes

Men - Small Men - Medium Men - Large Men - XL Men - XXL Women - Small Women - Medium Women - Large Women - XL

If you don't already own a shirt from past challenges, you might find your size in our vintage collection....

The magic of RPM rolls on! Now that you've had a few days to consider the impact of your newly created music on the world, we'll play a few tracks and remember how to enjoy the company of others.

Up next: St. John's, Newfoundland: At The Ship, 265 Duckworth St., St. John's, Thursday, April 12.

Portsmouth, NH: On March 24, RPMers near Portsmouth gathered at the Music Hall for opening ceremonies, then enjoyed nine hours of local music among local musicians at listening rooms hosted in The Founders Lobby, RiverRun Bookstore, The Red Door, and the Press Room. Musical ambassadors arrived from afar! Representing: Letter Seventeen (Georgia), Bog Stomp (San Francisco), Keith Landry (New York), Dexter (Connecticut), Winterstar (Detroit), and Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys (Boston). It was most excellent.

If you're not near a listening party, plan one of your own! Grab a few friends, a few CDs, and hang out! Give us the details (Location, Address, Date, Time, RSVP link) and we can slap it up here!

The Jukebox Uploader is active so you can put your 2012 songs in place!

The 2012 Jukebox is ready to go! Help us load it with your music, so everyone can check it out. It’s easy and fun:
1. Log in to http://RPMChallenge.com, as usual
2. Go to http://rpmchallenge.com/cgi-bin/jukebox.cgi
3. Edit your band info, if necessary, then click on “2012 Album”
4. Change the album name, upload your tracks and album art, and voila! You’re in the Jukebox!

There are more detailed instructions & guidelines after the jump, and we HIGHLY encourage you to take a minute to look them over, as there are many useful tips, explanations & features explained therein!

That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.

It’s a little like National Novel Writing Month, (NaNoWriMo.org) where writers challenge each other to write 1,700 words a day for 30 days, or the great folks over at February Album Writing Month (fawm.org), who encourage artists to write 14 new songs in February. Maybe they don’t have “Grapes of Wrath” or “Abbey Road” at the end of the month, or maybe they do—but that’s not the point. The point is they get busy and stop waiting around for the muse to appear. Get the gears moving. Do something. You can’t write 1,700 words a day and not get better.

Don't wait for inspiration - taking action puts you in a position to get inspired. You'll stumble across ideas you would have never come up with otherwise, and maybe only because you were trying to meet a day’s quota of (song)writing. Show up and get something done, and invest in yourself and each other.