Thoughts on Song A Day For A Month
This month, I undertook a songwriting challenge aptly named “Song A Day For A Month” (SADFAM) for the second time. A quick Google search will reveal dozens, if not hundreds, of formal and informal songwriting challenges running periodically around the world; to my own small knowledge, January also sees “Jamuary”, challenge for beatmakers and electronic music makers, while February is known as "FAWM” - February Album Writing Month. Artists of other disciplines take part in “Inktober”, a prompt-based drawing challenge in October, or “NaNoWriMo” - National Novel Writing Month in November.
MY PREVIOUS HISTORY AND EXPERIENCE WITH SADFAM
I stumbled upon SADFAM a few years ago when a musician I deeply admire included some hashtags and references to SADFAM in her Instagram captions. Intrigued, I quickly discovered www.songadayforamonth.com, realized that she was participating in a songwriting challenge, and made up my mind that I would participate in one as soon as possible. The website is simple and without frou-frou, enabling users to upload audio & video and comment on the works of others. The “about” page is deliberately vague - rather than a history of the challenge and its creators, it provides only a simple quote regarding the daily writing habits of Bob Marley and Woody Guthrie, allowing users to interpret the challenge for their own creative needs. With a little digging, I have confirmed that the creators/moderators are hip LA-based musicians going by the aliases Rufus & Wally, and it’s been happening twice a year (in January and July) since 2014. Each session concludes with a SADFAM live concert somewhere in LA.
My first time participating ended up being the July 2018 session, a month where my computer was completely broken and my “transmissions” were either a) single-take audio recordings of voice and keyboard, or b) constructed simply using the GarageBand App on my phone. These compositions playfully limped along through minor experiments in drum programming, cute beats, and longer, more through-composed chord progressions than I had previously written. It was all in good fun and I was proud of my small accomplishment at the end, but the biggest impact of participating ended up being the presence and support of the other SADFAM-ers, who comment their feedback in a stream-of-consciousness style and post their own works, ranging from ukulele-strumming to MIDI-file big band compositions to wacky electro-acoustic experiments.
Through these interactions, I quickly realized that a number of the other participants had already completed several SADFAMS and had a good deal of respect within the SADFAM community. Not only that, but a little investigation revealed that certain individuals were actively involved in the LA jazz/pop/R&B/soul scene which I had been following for a short while! Getting a bit of casual but honest feedback from musicians who I looked up to was an incredibly motivating experience, and to be honest, SADFAM is one of the most supportive, safe and welcoming online spaces I have ever known.
ANTICIPATING SADFAM JANUARY 2020
Between then and now, I’ve worked on developing my producer chops significantly and I was really looking forward to going into SADFAM armed with a functional computer, way more recording savvy, and a list of songwriting & production ideas and goals that I wanted to achieve. On the flip side, I’ve never been the type of writer who has oodles of poetry spilling out of me at all times - I slowly toil over lyrics until I have enough to put to music, and I tend to pick away at songs over many months until they’re complete.
That being said, I knew there would be good days (where I uploaded something I was proud of), bad days (where I uploaded some BS string of chords on piano), and days that were complete write-offs (due to the demands of being human and working a full-time job with additional commitments on the side). So for SADFAM, I set my bar REALLY REALLY low - “A Thing” a day. One verse of lyrics, an instrumental beat, or even a four-chord jam. If, at the end of the month, I had a handful of creations that could be later elaborated into a few complete songs, I’d consider the challenge a success.
Wanting to set myself up for success in my attempt to not only meet the criteria of writing something new every day, but also to step outside my creative comfort zone, I did a bit of prep work in the weeks and months leading up to January. I started compiling a list of musical & production elements that I wanted to include throughout the month, including concepts like certain time signatures, grooves, and instruments or sounds. I kept up with my ongoing list of songwriting topics or phrases, and held onto those ideas in anticipation of using them during SADFAM. And over the holiday season, in order to streamline the whole process, I created an empty template in Ableton and spent hours loading it up with VST sounds. In the past, I have exclusively written songs using a Rhodes or piano sound, so I deliberately chose instruments that were appealing, yet a little intimidating in that they were unlike the usual sounds I rely on when songwriting.
REFLECTIONS ON SADFAM JANUARY 2020
My selection of VST instruments ended up providing the biggest musical challenge of the month. It really forced me to get creative and fire up my imagination while creating on a 25-key MIDI controller, using only patches that I would generally experiment with AFTER creating the form and bed track of a song using a piano or Rhodes sound. As a result, many of my creations were built “backwards” from my previous compositions - rather than beginning with a long, sustained bed of sound and adding additional layers on top (as would be my initial instinct), I laid down the first passes of harmony using a percussive, plucky sound, a moving pad, or a sound with built-in delay. I found that approach left more room in the arrangement and therefore shaped my choice of drum elements, influencing me to experiment with more clanky, jingly, noisy, or pitched samples in my beats than I would have in the past.
To briefly recap the month, I was most successful between January 1st to 11th, creating 11 SADFAM transmissions at home and mostly at my desk at work (once my work responsibilities had been taken care of, of course). From the 12th through the 25th, I had a number of deadlines and professional commitments pile up that took over most of my time and energy, but I managed to create 5 simple transmissions and write some further lyrics for a previous transmission. I expected to be able to jump back into more regular creation in the last week of January, but by that point, I found myself feeling pretty burnt-out in general, and was eager skip ahead and focus my attention on expanding a few of the previous transmissions that I was excited about.
In total, my January 2020 SADFAM worked out like this:
9 loopy beat productions
6 days where I purposefully took a break because I had too many other personal/life/work/teaching/rehearsal commitments
3 days where I had significant career-related commitments that took all my energy for that day - one gig, one music video, and one day of single release administration
3 productions with beats and lyrics
3 four-chord progressions on piano
2 days where I just wrote lyrics - one, a near-complete song, and the other, an additional verse to a previous day
2 days to brainstorm some career plans
1 lo-fi hip-hop production using samples taken from my morning commute and piano that I improvised
1 day where I revisited two previous transmissions in order to experiment/add on more music
1 day to reflect via this blog post : )
Wins of SADFAM January 2020 - Overall, I’m coming away with two songs that have mostly complete chords and lyrics, along with a good handle on the beat and production. There are also three of my instrumental beat productions that I am itching to expand with lyrics and more music, bringing me up to 5 new songs to finish and incorporate into my set (success!). The remaining beat productions I will consider “hours of production practice logged”, and the hours and energy I spent on other career-related activities I consider valuable as well.
Challenges of SADFAM January 2020 - Aside from falling off the transmission train a little harder than I expected (I was optimistic that I would be able to create something at least 20 days out of 31), I also wish I had included more sax, flute, and vocals in my productions, which ended up being mostly instrumental beats created completely in my DAW. Lyrics, as I’ve mentioned before, are particularly hard for me, so in the future I might embark on a self-directed LADFAM (Lyrics A Day For A Month) in order to get those wheels turning!
I would also love to have another crack at SADFAM during a time when I am not working a full-time day job, but that’s an idea for a later date…