How do you all stay sane and healthy while remaining creative and productive during the Covid-19 pandemic of early 2020? Do you have any special tips or secrets that help keep you going during this time of uncertainty? We’d love to hear ’em. Drop us a line and send us your favorite ideas. Stay tuned to see if they make the blog! Otherwise, here is an idea you could try to stay focused, creative and productive.
Song a day challenge
This is a challenge in creativity and commitment as the goal is not necessarily focused so much on quality of production as much as it is really geared towards training oneself to practice the art of production and being musical on a regular basis. Even highly productive and focused. For example, you could wake up in the morning, start a beat, pick a key and keep working on it until you’ve got a good groove, maybe develop a few different parts… By that point you may have gone on for a couple of hours and need some refocusing. Then it’s time to record your parts or grooves into the DAW or other sequencing software, program or workflow. Once you’ve honed the arrangement and part creation, you can focus more on fine tuning the mix and adding any final details or flourishes to the arrangement. Transitions, fills, automation, etc. And focus on the mix. Remember you’re trying to finish a song in one day.
Then, by the end of the afternoon or evening you’ll be able to sit back in the chair or listening sofa and truly take it all in, not focused on the screen but rather soaking in all of the sounds and textures that you just conjured up. Hopefully you’re inspired and excited by the creation, but even if not, the goal is moreso to create something and put you through the paces, focus you on stepping through the phases in a somewhat organized and directed way.
When the sun comes up the next day it’s time to rinse and repeat. Then you can start making a whole new beat, different style maybe? different key? Create a new groove based on how you feel that day. Maybe pick some different samples, make a new kit or evolve your previous kit or template… Make some new presets… Eventually, you may find yourself relying on the same tricks and tools, but by listening to the same thing over and over again, I’ve found myself challenged to evolve my technique, try different sound design experiments and ultimately keep trying to make interesting sounding, evolving and potentially sets of related parts that could go together. Listening and imagining is important, trying to create something in mind. Often when i approach things that way I am quickly redirected by the actual process into what does materialize, rather than specifically what I had been thinking about trying to make. It’s often close, but I do like to let the creative process be organic and flow into the various tangents or related spaces it needs to in order to hopefully finally reign itself into some sort of concisely constructed yet inspired art.