Ready to do something amazing?
One week till 30 songs in 30 days!
There are 10 of us so far, that's 300 new songs birthed by the end of February.
At the beginning of the second week of February i'll set up a podcast. Amongst other things, i'm going to play snippets of songs.
As the week descends on us, it might be useful to make a working plan for the coming days. I don't know about you, but i have a day job. When
we talk about writing a song a day, i might be literally talking about one to five hours a day on weekdays.
Impossible? No way! But we probably aren't going for perfectionism this coming month. I encourage you to see this as an exercise in creativity.
Imagine we're in a Mountain Dew commercial, “Creativity Extreme Dude!”
Again to quote Chris Baty of NaNoWriMo:
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“The quickest, easiest way to produce something beautiful and lasting is to risk making something horribly crappy.”
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We'll churn out 30 raw goofy messy songs in February, we can polish them over the rest of the year.
As an example, my working plan is to start on melody or lyrics in the morning, before i get caught up in other work. Maybe get in a few breaks during the day to get some ideas down, and then start recording in the evening.
If i'm lucky, maybe i'll have a few two-song days, otherwise i'll have to see if i can knock out extra songs on the weekends. I think, for me, an essential part of this will be to build a small buffer of songs for the days that i just don't have a few hours for songwriting. As with all things, i figure my plan will change and adapt with the challenges and successes of the month.
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Some advice from alistar on the NaNoWriMo forums:
Don't write a song about the same thing every day, it gets really hard to think of yet another verse about the girl you like, or feeling sad, or whatever, once you've been going for a few days. Songs about noodles and bands that you like are recommended. 😉
Don't sit down intending to record a perfect take of any of your song's parts, or you'll be there for hours. If your song's four minutes long and has four parts, that's approaching twenty minutes' recording already. Even if you only do three takes of each part, you're getting up towards an hour of recording.
Everything takes longer than you expect it to. Start getting some lines down while you're eating breakfast, wherever possible.
Don't worry about using the same chord sequence over and over again. It didn't bother chuck berry, so don't let it bother you!
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I have to teach this weekend, but i told everyone else to spend the next week aligning their chi, kiss their loved ones goodbye, and dig in for some song writing!
See you in a week!
