As you may or may not know (I feel like I’ve mentioned it a lot) I took part in a Recording-A-Day challenge for the month of January. The rules were simple, record SOMETHING every day. Doesn’t have to be good, just has to be done. An endurance challenge of sorts. Today, February 1st, I can proudly say that I succeeded. I recorded 31 things in January, and I learned SO MUCH about the process and myself. My main takeaways were these:
Get Your Reps In
Just like any skill, being creative takes practice. No matter what medium you’re working in, words, paint, music, clay — there are technical skills you have to master in order to be able to see your vision come to life. Gaining those technical skills takes repetition. I was honestly shocked by how many new techniques I gained in 31 days.
I learned how distortion works, mastered pitch changing, and got so much faster at editing. The stuff I’m putting together now is so much more layered and complex than it was a month ago, and that just comes down to practice and experimentation. The same is true for the compositional aspect of my music. I’ve gotten much quicker at finding tricky harmonies, and my decisión making has gotten much more decisive.
Expand to Refine
This month allowed me to really find my vibe. Recording something every day allowed me to experiment in a lot of directions without feeling like I was “wasting time”. Ironically, pushing myself out of my usual comfort zone is what ultimately helped me hone in on the sound I wanted to create. I think of it as spiraling around through a bunch of ideas, which eventually coalesce into the sweet spot at the center.
For me this meant working my way through country, choral, pop, Americana, and R&B sounds, noting the things that felt good from each genre and then experimenting with different combinations. As I share more of the things I made this month, hopefully you’ll be able to hear the blend of influences in the final product.
Creativity Begets Creativity
You can absolutely create creative habits, you just have to start. The coolest thing I noticed over the course of the month was how much more normal and necessary that daily recording started to seem. There were absolutely days when I didn’t want to do it (having an accountability-buddy was key here), but even on the days when my voice sounded like shit and I hated what I’d made there was always something about it that would make me think “ooh tomorrow I should try this thing” or “that rhythm was nice, I wonder if it would work if I looped it”. Those questions and ideas kept me excited about moving forward with new stuff, which would then spark new questions and ideas.
By the end of the month this had expanded beyond just music. Once a piece is done, it has to get posted… and to get posted it needs a visual. Creating the visuals for all of these has been a whole other project that has grown increasingly complex. Deciding what the photo should look like, setting it up, taking them myself, or finding someone else to help… All those steps have skills attached to them, prompting new creative directions.
Conclusion
This was hard, but I’m very VERY proud that I actually followed through for 31 whole days! Starting the year off with this sort of discipline (at least in one facet of my life) felt good, and it also gave me a lot of creative momentum going into the year. I’m looking at February as my posting-month. I want to create all my visuals, get everything up on Soundcloud, put things on Youtube… and of course work on a few songs that I didn’t get around to in January.
Overall, I think this sprint-style challenge really worked for me in terms of creative habit building. I’m so glad to be done with the enforced schedule and take a little break, but I’m also already thinking about when I should do this again. Yay for projects!
I’ll be updating y’all on where you can hear all the stuff I did this month (Instagram, Soundcloud, Youtube) as I post it. I’m really really looking forward to sharing all of this music, and I appreciate all of you who have listened to my stuff in the past.
Happy February, and thanks for being here!
xoxo,
Inspirational!!
Nice sticktuitiveness!