The Song Fight Bulletin Board

"Fun-A-Day" is an event somewhat like FAWM in which people work on a project of some kind every day in January. More info here: http://artclash.com/

I'm going to try to make some kind of piece of music every day this month for it. I'm going to post them to SoundCloud. Here's what I did today.



Even if you're hearing about this on the second day of the month at this point, don't let that stop you from participating. "Fun-A-Day" is how Jonathan Mann got started doing his song a day project, which by the way is still going strong. He just finished seven years and is starting year eight! I helped work on a little Web site that shows his current song and songs from past years for the same date as the current day.

http://songaday.org/

looks like soundcloud broke our BBCode-- the embedded player seems to now require the number after "tracks", rather than the easy URL. You can find that number by going to the "embed" tab and copying the iframe code, then extracting the number from that code. For this soundcloud item it's 240049340.

I don't think it's SoundCloud's fault - phpBB isn't even attempting to do the text replacement. Dunno what's going on.

you're right-- when I previewed that post the embed totally worked, and now it's not showing. sommat broke.

Yours was showing up earlier but then I looked at the BBCode settings and then it stopped showing up. Argh, what the hell is going on here. Fucking phpBB

And now it's showing up in the preview but not in the post argh wtf phpbb

So I used this as an excuse to finally upgrade to the latest phpBB, which adds a bunch of features, but doesn't fix the fucking bbCode problem. Sigh.

Okay everything seems to be working now. Yeesh.

Another day, another piece of music.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to wrap up a cover of St. Vincent's song "Psychopath" that I started today and post that...

I didn't finish the cover on Sunday, so I made this instead.

I did finish that St. Vincent cover, with a little help from Erin, in case anybody here is interested:



I've managed to make or work on some music every day and have two weeks left to go. It's been fun but I've mostly wound up just cranking something out at the end of the day. I decided two minutes was a good length for an instrumental bit of music and it seems like it's been taking me about one hour to make each two minute track, which is in my opinion a pretty poor input/output ratio. I've been trying to mix up the styles and instrumentation to keep things interesting for myself. It's been an interesting experience, and I'd recommend it as a fun thing to try. A month is a pretty long time. Maybe tackling two weeks would be a bit less grueling. I don't know how Jonathan Mann is still going writing actual songs every day after seven years.

I like that cover!

Jonathan is doing it full time though, right? So a lot of his life revolves around the Song A Day thing... some kind of portion of his day dedicated to making the song, since they are his product.

JB

True. Beyond just finding the time there's also something about doing it every day. I already feel like I "have to" do it rather than want to do it. I already can't remember what I did yesterday, let alone two weeks ago. I think it would be difficult too for me not to want to zero in on a formula to follow.

I would think that it becomes like any other creative profession. A painter, for example. They have to produce the work, then sell it. Or a graphic designer-- they come in and sit at a desk for 8 hours and just "be creative" applied to whatever their subject is-- a UI, a poster, a website, an illustration, etc.

Yeah, I agree about the formula. You'd need mechanisms to keep it fresh, like an Oblique Strategies deck and other stuff. Still, you'd wind up in "default mode" a lot and have to be self-aware enough to realize that and break out of it.