Hi there. I recently did a 30 day trial where I wrote at least one song a day. It was inspired by Jonathan Mann, who I discovered from an email a friend sent me. Out of the 30 days, I think I slipped up once where I wrote half a song instead of a whole one. It started out as a 7 day trial, but I decided to carry on for another week. Then after that week I decided to go for the 30. Here are some observations and things I learned from doing the trial:
- The first week was the easiest. I’d planned to write Monkey Majik-esque songs for a while, so this week was mainly made up of them. I wrote about 9 songs that week. Second week went downhill because I hadn’t planned for when I ran out of ideas, so I just mainly defaulted to slower, sadder songs. Third week I planned to write Country-style songs but that didn’t go too successfully either simply because I don’t know Country music that well. Fourth week I decided to go vague – upbeat, lively, possibly angry.
- The last song turned out to be about Doctor Who. I am surprised as you are.
- Fail to prepare, prepare to fail. Some days were tough, and it would’ve helped if I’d planned what kind of direction to take. My default mode of songwriting is to strum some chords, hum a melody, find some words that fit over the melody, write lyrics and go from there. When that didn’t work, I tended to be stuck for a long time.
- Related to the above point, I found myself being quite formulaic, particularly when I was tired because a song needed to be done, and the easiest way to write one was to do what I’ve always done. As a result, all songs fell into verse-prechorus-chorus structure, used similar chord progressions and most phrases were four bars long. So the trial improved my skills of production rather than improving my songwriting (any improvements were a result of chance rather than conscious effort).
- Songs that were floating around in my consciousness occasionally came out as songs. So there’s a fake Foo Fighters song, two fake Ryan Adams songs, and goodness knows what else. These tended to be the easier ones.
- Steve Pavlina did his own 30 day trial learning music, and his blog posts and tweets boosted me during the trial. He even inspired to make my first looped based piece I’ve written. You can listen to it here.
I didn’t feel an immense sense of achievement when I finished the trial. I felt normal and that I could write another song the next day (which I did). However, this trial revealed my limitations so I’ve been thinking about them since (how do I change key convincingly? How do I write a song not in the verse-chorus structure? How do I write non-four bar phrases?), which is very valuable if I want to write decent songs.
As for the songs, I haven’t decided whether to publish all of them (upload to Youtube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud) or just the ones I like. The thing with doing all of them is that I have to practise all 30-odd songs to a passable standard, rather than doing fewer songs to a better standard (Jonathan Mann writes AND uploads a song a day, very impressive). Now that I’ve stopped writing a song a day, there’s this hole in my life and I feel I need to fill it up with something productive. Probably practise and upload more songs, be it original or cover.
