A reflection on personal progress to date...
Right this’ll be a good few minutes of wasted typing if experience is anything to go by…
The challenge, in case you missed me mithering about it a week or so ago, is to write a 14 song album in the 29 days of February. The prize? Officially its simply beating the challenge – more on this later… I have time on my hands with Call me DIva in hibernation, other than a few jams with folk off this site and our drummist (which have been really good fun) I've not been doing anything much musically for far too long!
Feb 1st, got home 8pm, got to work. I had worked out I had an average of 4 hours per song – I have a life y’know – which meant I was back in the good old days of bang something down, get it nearly complete, come back the day after and have a brief review before banging it up on soundcloud or wherever rather than keep going back to it just to “get that one note transition perfect” which is the bane of anyone with their own recording kit.
A week in I think I’m doing quite well in that I have 4 completed to the quality I was expecting to get them to in the time (my "entry is at http://fawm.org/fawmers/snofi/ but the songs are hosted at http://soundcloud.com/snofi/sets/february-album-writing-month-1/ ) - not expecting the play count to rise any through exposure on this site, nor am I expecting any foolhardy enough to listen to feel that they have just spent 12 minutes enjoying themselves - but the main, nay only, thing is that I'm enjoying myself!
What am I getting out of it? A lot. Like many people with home gear I’ve found fallen into, and partially dragged myself out of, the problems which come with unlimited “studio-time”, not least the feeling that you can keep going at it until its perfect. There was a stage, about 5 years ago, when I suddenly realised I’d been working on the same 6 songs for about 5 years which is shit. There’s also the challenge of having to think of banging tunes out in a disciplined way rather than just noodling until something else takes your fancy. Hard to explain exactly what I mean by that, hopefully it makes sense.
As an aside I checked the site just before I left work on the 1st - about 7pm. Two people had already claimed they had completed the challenge – one of who was in the US so I could probably be convinced that they were indeed capable of banging out 14 sets of your typical 3 verses and chorus type lyrics in what, 26 hours. However, I’m a bit more dubious about the bloke in the UK who had knocked up 14 complete songs, inc music, in 13 hours (looking at the timestamps, all had been up since about 1ish). My doubts increased when I read his blurb which talked about the 48 hour session he’d completed them in ;-) Why cheat? You're only cheating yourself!
Anyway, I’ll waste a few more minutes banging out another update next week!