Why I can't make songs from scratch within a day or two
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I've just stumbled upon various online music challenges.
5090 by
FAWM. As the name indicates, it's about 50 songs in 90 days.
Jamuary. One song per day for the whole of January.
National Solo Album Month. Exactly what it says on the tin. Good thing it's "national" and obviously not German.
None of them really sound like fun to me. I'd never take any of them. That's simply because I couldn't produce music at this rate, at this
speed, even if I tried to.
I mean, it'd be easy for a singer-songwriter with nothing much more than a guitar and some recording device. But melodic electronic music isn't done when it's written and composed. Even the composition is complex, but on top of it, there's arrangement, there's sound design etc. In general, electronic music is not done before the stereo mixdown. Depending on your style and your requirements, "done" even needs to include mastering.
Sure, these challenges aren't about fully polished productions. They're practically about drafts. Now, the difference is that in acoustic music, a draft recording is rough around the edges. In electronic music, especially such that isn't entirely based on looped sequences, a draft made in such a short timespan is
incomplete. It has parts missing. And these could be key parts.
In my case, a song may require weeks, maybe even months, until it has vocals. And even only recording vocals for one song may take hours. No Auto-Tune here, no Melodyne, all 1980s-level recording craftsmanship that requires loads and loads of takes. I don't even generate harmonics, I
sing them.
I still remember spending several hours in my hotel room during Hearth's Warming Eve 2020, recording the vocals for
my cover of Aviators' "Constellations", unfortunately the last song I've released so far. It didn't have so much to do with my Italo Disco treatment stretching it from the original five-and-a-half to a whopping six minutes. It had more to do with me not singing one take, auto-correcting it, humanising it and then automatically rendering the six backing vocal parts. Instead, I sang them all separately, one by one, in multiple takes each.
Taking into account how much time one usually has per day, the above challenges basically expect you to write, compose, arrange and record an entire song in that timespan. It may be rough, but it's at least expected to be fairly complete.
Even one full album per month is crazy.
Oxygène was produced in six weeks, and that was fast, even considering it's only a bit over 40 minutes long.
Music Weeklies Challenge gives you more time: one song per week. And you don't have to churn out one song per week
each week over a pre-defined timespan. The catch: The theme is pre-defined.
And even a week wouldn't be possible for me. I don't expect myself to be able to record vocals on weekdays. Because reasons. Even if I were, one week would only be doable with a song that I've already got in my head or even partly written down as sheet music from the very beginning.
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