February 1, 2011

Month of Awesomeness: My 28 Day Song Challenge

My best friends – or worst enemies – for the next month.

I know, I know, I’m supposed to be a film guy. But all my life I’ve dug music – from the oldies in my dad’s car to my high school guitar days. But since high school, I never really made time for music in my life except for the occasional non-sober freestyle.

And even worse then that, I’ve always been too scared to actually write my own song. The fear of being unoriginal, stupid, or just downright shitty has always held me back. Well, not anymore.

I’m dedicating this month, February 2011, to my first official Month of Awesomeness. What is that you ask? Well, for the entire 28 days of February, I’m focusing this entire month on my passion for music. More specifically: I’m pledging to create ONE song a day, every day. And I’m going to document this on my blog, Twitter and Facebook so all y’all can hold me accountable.

Why I’m Doing This

Cause I’m sick of constantly telling myself, “Oh one of these days you’ll get back into music. One day you’ll try writing a song. One day…” No, I’ve been putting this off for years and years. It’s time to kick my ass into gear.
I’m gonna learn a lot about making music. I’ve always wanted to learn how to produce beats, how to create a song that actually sounds like a song, layer vocal harmonies, etc.
I’ll finally give music a good “try” and see how passionate I am about it. Maybe this’ll become a lifelong hobby of mine. Or maybe I’ll hate it so much I’ll never touch a guitar again. Only one way to find out.
Getting over my fear and self-consciousness of putting my work out there by posting it online every day. This’ll also force me to at least try and make something halfway listenable. It’ll keep me accountable and might even get me some helpful feedback from people who know what they’re doing.

The Rules

Create and upload one beat/song every day for the month of February. That’s 28 songs for 28 days.
A “song” can be a loose definition. That can include a partial beat with no vocals, or an unpolished guitar piece on webcam. As long as I make something that somewhat resembles a part of a song haha.
Publish one blog post for each day. The blog posts can be detailed or super short and as long as they’re posted before I go to bed, it’s all good.
This month, I’m also dedicating as much of my free and social time to music as possible too. So that includes going to more shows, taking dance lessons, listening to music instead of my podcasts. I’ll also note some of these on my blog posts too.

Alright, that pretty much sums up what I’m trying to do. What’s cool is that since I told others about this, a bunch of other people decided to take up their own Months of Awesomeness. My buddy Catherine is gonna spend every day this month finally editing her book, and my friend Joy is gonna create a new art piece every day. Awesome.

Okay now I need to run off and create a song…oh man, this is gonna be hard. But I’m stoked. Who knows what I’m gonna learn from this challenge? I’m warning you guys though: the songs probably won’t sound too pretty. But who cares, I’m finally doing this. Finally.

Update (3/4/11) : Holy shit, I actually made it through the challenge without missing a day or dying from lack of sleep! You can check out all 28 Songs on my Youtube channel or read about the 8 lessons I learned from this crazy challenge. And if you’re lazy, here are some of my favorite tracks from the challenge all picked out and embedded for you:

Sick (Day 7)