My first Album-A-Day of 2023 is finally here, but unfortunately, this is the shortest one I've ever done, and had by far the least amount of effort put into it. A lot of the composition in these songs had the heavy lifting done by sequence and arpeggiator presets, and there are even a couple drum loop samples here and there, because I didn't really have THAT many ideas for stuff to do on this album, I didn't want to spend too much time making each song, and probably not helping was the fact that I didn't really plan to do an Album-A-Day before the time that it had been made, hence the title.

Another thing that's pretty consistent about all of the songs on this Album-A-Day attempt is the fact that there's probably so much more potential for creative music making that can be reaped from their skeletons, but I just didn't put in enough effort to actually make it a reality. On a positive note though, the fact that there are only seven songs on this album that means that I can talk about them in some more detail here as opposed to just listing them off as opposed to my successful ones that had too many songs for that to be feasible. Or at least, I can try to think of some things to say about them.

Tracklist and post-production reflections:

I. Interstellar Wonders (0:00)

This track was basically me messing around with some presets I had recently dug up for Spectrasonics Omnisphere, one of my favorite VST plugins, which essentially inspired me to start working on this Album A Day attempt. It starts with some bass staccatoing before an electric piano plays some melodies. I really like what I had going on here and think this could make for a cool song that isn't bound by needing to be stuffed in a collection of short tracks to meet a deadline. Having some drums that were actually written and thought out would probably make it even better as well.

II. Run For Your Life (1:12)

What happens when I try to create a movie score? You get something like this. Crazy, fast, energetic. Featuring some chromatic notes around the middle, probably the most notable thing about the song to be honest. I don't really know what else to mention with this one.

III. Void (2:14)

This was basically meant to be the "Limbo" of this Album-A-Day attempt, not very musically interesting with barely any audible sound and just a means to profit for time. However, I got bored of writing it and cut it off after not very much effort, much like the rest of these tracks. I didn't deserve to have a song here that was so long with so little effort put into it anyways.

IV. Freestyle (2:51)

The beginning of this track is an idea for writing acoustic guitar that I've actually had for some time now, which I suppose is technically a violation of the rules for writing an Album-A-Day, but frankly, I don't really care that much because it's not like I actually got anywhere close to 20 minutes of material on this attempt anyways. After that is kind of a random sort of solo that I cobbled together that could've gone on for way longer if I had actually bothered to put some more effort into it. Oh yeah, and there's some strings too because I felt that one instrument was just not enough.

V. Driven to Insanity (3:39)

A musical representation of the burnout that I was experiencing having made four of these Album-A-Days over the course of the last two months of 2022. This is actually the song that I spent the most time on, ironically, although not for any reason that you might expect. Like in Sleepiness on my first AAD attempt, Feelings, I was frustrated that my guitar VST wouldn't play the correct pinch harmonic sound at the end that I wanted and I kept trying to unsuccessfully fix it over and over again before I reached out to my friend TheUnnamedPlayer, who is really knowledgeable about writing with virtual guitars, to see if there was a solution, and he delivered. It's a shame though that this is the shortest song on this AAD attempt, there's so much more that could've been done with it, which as I mentioned at the beginning, was sadly a running theme here.

VI. Acceptance (4:10)

I had a lot of fun writing the finale to my previous AAD More Ramblings titled "Endgame," a Drum and Bass song made in the same method as some of the other songs in the previous couple of AADs which, while lazy, does yield longer songs that sound really good, so I decided to make another one. Unfortunately, I think this one is far inferior. There is a goof that I made near the end because I had used a different lead in the middle of the song which was supposed to slide a bunch of notes right before it leaves the song, but I didn't like how those sounded, and forgot to change its polyphony mode to make it sound how I wanted to, so it sounds really bad. It's barely half as long as Endgame and it's not quite as catchy. Big shame.

VII. Subdued (5:32)

Once again, this is an idea that I had for quite a while, although it wasn't even involving anything that I had actually written myself. In the sample packs known as Vengeance Essential Clubsounds and Vengeance Essential House, there are these samples known as "Special Sounds," which are essentially melody loops that I believe are crafted with reFX/Vengeance plugins, and there are three of them that I wanted to use like I did here in a song but didn't really know how best to do so. I think I still haven't answered my own question yet if this track is anything to go by, but it's something at least. I do really like how I wrote the bass though, so much that I implemented the same kind of composition in "Freestyle," which I wrote after this one, contrary to where it ended up.