Personal takes from 50/90 and FAWM

15Oct10

For the past couple of years, I’ve typically been writing/composing one or two songs/instrumentals a month, mostly for the monthly KVR music contest. It’s been a good pace for me, letting me be creative while still fitting in daily life.

This year, I participated in the February is Album Writing Month (FAWM) challenge, which involved trying to write 14 pieces in 28 days. Since the most I’d written before that was 4 pieces in one month, it was a daunting task. I was quite pleased with the results, as I ended up liking most of the pieces I produced. One or two of them rank among my personal all-time favourites.

Still hopped up on that success, I decided to participate in the 50/90 challenge too: aiming to write 50 pieces during the 90 days between July 4th and October 1st. It’s an even faster pace than FAWM, and long enough to feel like a marathon. There was some additional challenge in that I got married in July (which took about 2 weeks out of my song-writing time), and I travelled to my brother’s wedding in the US (which took another week out of my productive space). I felt like my average quality was lower than FAWM (to meet the deadline, I did push out quite a few bits that I normally would have shelved), but I did get quite a few really nice instrumentals that I intend to release as an album.

One of my fears going in to both challenges was that I would be unable to maintain a decent level of quality. There’s a sense I’ve had sometimes that creativity is a limited resource, and that you can ‘run out’ of it. I think I put those fears to rest with these challenges; while it was a grind producing so much music, I found there were a good number of pieces for which I was very pleased with the quality, and that they were spread out through the challenge (ie. they didn’t all bunch up at the start; even some of my later productions were quite good, in my mind).

One thing became pretty clear to me, though: I definitely need more time to polish my tunes than I could take during the challenges. There are a couple of songs from FAWM that need a complete re-do; the songs are strong, but the production and recording are too rough for my liking. Many of my better instrumentals still need some tweaking before I’m ready to ‘officially’ release them.

So I think my goals going forward are to spend more time on my productions and learn to polish them properly before releasing them. I know for certain now that I can write/record/produce songs/instrumentals very quickly and steadily if I wish, so that’s not something I need to focus on.

Also, I think I’d like to be more discriminating about what music I make available to the world at large. I’ve had a habit of posting almost everything I make somewhere on the Internet. That means the quality of my released work varies quite a bit, from rather poor to excellent (on my personal scale, anyway). From now on, if I don’t feel a piece is at a certain level of quality, I think I’ll keep it to myself (even if it means skipping a month in the KVR contest, for instance).

We’ll see what the future will bring.

Filed under: 50/90, FAWM   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: challenges, composing, songwriting