My dear friend Artemis has encouraged me to take part in Song-A-Day 2016. The goal: write a piece of music every day for the entire month of February. Or, more accurately, write, record, and post 29 pieces of music. I’m looking forward to the challenge and working to put a bit more discipline and routine into my composition. It’s time to build some new habits.
The idea notebook is started and I’ll be going over the studio this week to get some bugs ironed out. My additional goal for all of this is to have at least one album or two EPs up on Bandcamp and available for sale by mid-year.
A song a day? Did that involve final mixing and mastering? Mixing and mastering takes so much time for me to do. I personally prefer wearing the composer hat for several weeks and then switch hat to a mixing and mastering hat, so I don’t sit mixing too much when I rather should play the keyboards. When I start producing tracks and small mixing stuff too much then the creativity hat just gets lost. So one song a day for me would definitely not any serious mixing or mastering tasks except a limiter so all tracks have the same loudness.
The thing that the Song-a-day process helped me with *drastically* was getting me out of that twiddly “tweak it endlessly until the dough is overworked” place that I normally fall into. To paraphrase a comment from one of last year’s participants, it’s not production-a-day or performance-a-day, it’s song-a-day.
The ticking clock really strips things back and forced me into the composition space. It also helped me pull *way* back on creating overly dense arrangements. A lot of my pieces ended up being just some drums, piano, and maybe a bass. There’s still some mixing and very basic mastering to do just to post the track, but the focus is on the composition or song. For the most part, I got a rough mix set up, put a limiting compressor on the master track to get the overall level reasonable and tame down any spikes, and called it good.
I’m gearing up to do it again this year – I’ve moved and am currently getting the new studio set up. I’m in a quite different place both physically and emotionally, so I’m eager to see what shows up this time around!
Link?
The main site: Song-A-Day
My tracks only: Ray Toler at Song-A-Day