Rob Scallon has taken his annual First of October project to a new level by recording an album in a day inside an open Guitar Center.
It's been a yearly challenge for Scallon and his co-writer and co-conspirator Andrew Huang since 2018. It finds them writing and recording an entire album in around 12 hours, with their trials and tribulations all captured on camera.
Seven years into the First of October project – which, shock horror, takes place on October 1 each year – they’ve opted for their most public setting yet.
There are pros and cons to this, naturally. There’s the huge risk of having a creative meltdown in front of a store full of people, but there’s also a rather plentiful supply of gear to dive into.
“You can just grab a bass from behind you and choose a different one every time,” says Scallon at one point, a plot forming in his mind. Anything the pair saw that took their fancy was fair game – Guitar Center gave them free roam to use whatever they liked.
And, of course, there are umpteen pedals to try out. Prioritising some of the more “crazy” options available, Scallon builds a pedalboard that includes a chrome Morley wah, a Daredevil Chicago Rat, and Boss’s new XS-100 Poly Shifter, paired, conveniently, with his signature Schecter and a Fender combo amp.
But away from the adrenaline rush of the project, the day also carried a note of sentimentality for Scallon.
“This is my hometown Guitar Center,” he says. “I grew up in Arlington Heights. My friends and I would ride our bikes here as kids. This is where I first started really playing instruments.”
Speaking previously about the video series and his “one day a year band,” Scallon told Guitar World how its success has completely inverted their expectations.
“The First of October had a terrible first day,” he says. “We were going to make the worst album ever, and that’d be why it would be a really fun video, but we made some songs we really liked, and we found that making a ten-track album in a day was actually achievable.
“You can’t spend time thinking, ‘What’s my amp setting?’ When you get rid of that part of the process, you actually make better music. It’s like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.”
It's also a great advertisement for the value of brick-and-mortar stores in the online gear shopping age, and a shrewd tie-in for the store. Chatting business strategy with Guitar World previously, CEO Gabe Dalporto has said the business's future must prioritize premium guitar.
