50 Songs in 50 Weeks aka the ‘Final Five’
Whodeani, aka yours truly, has caught a case of the ‘muso’ bug.
Those close to me would know that I have long harboured a desire to be more involved in the music business, less so from a performance perspective and more to with the whole creative process bringing musical ideas from just that, ‘ideas’, through to being released commercially.
Back in the mid 90’s I was heavily involved in the nightclub industry moving from being a DJ to then designing and managing a very popular nightclub in the Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne known as Jooce.
As outlined in an earlier post (Anatomy of a Hit), I got together with a couple of friends of mine and created a jingle for this nightclub that was then turned into a full length club track that was quite popular in its day (climbing to the top of the club charts and breaking the regular top 50 here in Australia.)
Since then my musical aspirations have taken a back seat to more ‘regular’ pursuits. That was until mid last year when I was ‘inspired’ to bring to market a track called ‘Tweet Me’, a track originally called ‘Release Me’ and created with some friends back in the mid 90’s. http://blog.whodeani.com/tweet-me-by-whodeani
The release of Tweet Me was a lot of fun, enough so that I have decided to significantly expand my musical aspirations ‘and’ output with a project called ’50 songs in 50 weeks’ (or as a good friend of mine refers to it… ‘The Final 5’.)
As the project name ’50 tracks in 50 weeks’ suggests, my aim here is to produce 50 ‘release ready’ tracks in 50 weeks… ie 1 track per week for the next 50 weeks.
The inspiration behind this concept of ’50 Songs in 50 Weeks’ comes from Stock Aitken Waterman, the UK song writing and record producing trio made up of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman.
With great success during the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s the three are considered to be one of the most successful song writing and producing partnerships of all time, scoring more than 100 UK top 40 hits, selling 40 million records and earning an estimated $103.78 million (source: Wikipedia).
Their standard method for creating the music was to first write the songs, next they would record the music with extensive use of synthesizers, drum machines and sequencers and then finally bring in a singer solely to record the vocal track.
Their remarkable ‘production line-like’ output and similar song structures had the trio being referred to as the "hit factory".
My thinking is to ‘2.0’ their model using todays relatively inexpensive music recording and production technologies ‘and’ potential global exposure via Social Media.
I’ve teamed up with Paul Brandoli (from Psyked) who I met through his work as producer/arranger on the Tweet Me project. Since Tweet Me, Paul and I have worked on 2 more tracks and are about to start a 3rd.
Am extremely happy with his work and more importantly how we are working together on these new tracks. Enough so that I have committed to have Paul work as producer/arranger and sometimes ‘writer’ on all tracks in the project.
We’ll notify you as the magical tracks come to life week by week and from time to time release snippets of the tracks we are working on. Exciting times.
UPDATE: With the planned re-listing of The Swish Group gathering momentum (and my role as The Swish Group's Managing Director occupying the lions share of my time moving forward), I have handed over the day to day management of the '50 songs in 50 weeks' project to Paul Brandoli.
Much has been done in the weeks since announcing this project and I am extremely happy with the work Paul has been doing. The project is in good hands.
Posted by Whodeani on 03/10 at 04:29 AM
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