So today I embarked on a songwriting challenge from a book that I have, that I very very highly recommend to everyone that has a day to spare. Take one day off from everything. Turn your phone off, pull your internet cable out. Spend 12 hours doing nothing but song writing. The "goal" is to get 20 complete songs. Not GOOD songs, just complete songs. So if you record 20 34 second long songs, you're good. And yes, you're allowed to eat and take a shit and whatnot, but not much else. Just straight songwriting for 12 hours. And as those last hours close in, you'll struggle and scramble to finish your 20 songs. I didn't get to 20 songs, but I got in the teens. The thing is, writing this much music so quickly you'll inadvertently write some good riffs/songs. I ended up with a few gems, and I'm posting them here. I'm going to fix them up and change a few things around, but otherwise I'm really happy with how these turned out. (for the record, yes I ended up with some shitty ones, too). And yeah for some I used a kinda verse/chorus/verse pattern for some but gimme a break, I was trying to write 20 complete songs it a day. I'll fix it later.

Note: there are no vocals or guitar solos on any of these songs. So they do sound a bit empty. I'll do that later (so I guess they aren't fully complete).

This one is a great scorcher. And I'm actually using jazz chords in this song (Emajor7) Just not sure how I'm going to write a guitar solo at 247 BPM, since I'm not a shredder. But still a headbanger:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72840986/SW1.mp3
This one isn't fully complete but god damn, at about 0:49 in it's so god damn heavy, I can't wait to finish it. I had a lot of fun putting some symphonic instruments in there (all free, just google) I'm sitting here at my computer desk and throwing up the horns. Hello epic beginning:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/72840986/SW3.mp3


Those are the best two from my songwriting session. As I said, who cares how many shitty songs I wrote today, I've got a couple winners, and in just one day, so I'm happy (plus I drank a shit ton of wine, so I'm happy).


If you can take the time to have one day absolute fully committed to your music I super highly recommend it. Try this challenge, you'll write quite a few shitty songs but in the end you'll end up with a few gems. Who cares about the 16 shitty songs I wrote today, I wrote 4 awesome fucking songs in 1 day, which is some serious progress! Everyone, do it! (with a bottle of wine)

Holy shit, SW1 is SICK! The jazz chord, trem picked riff arpeggiation of it, rhythms - killtacular. SW3 is also awesome, I'll definitely take a shot at 20 songs in a day. I really like how both of these have fleshed out drum programming with fills and everything, and neither are verse-chorus copy-pasted, and by that I mean even when you repeat parts there are different transitions each time.

That's the great thing about this songwriting challenge, it forces you to finish stuff no matter what. So you'll write some crazy riffs, and in each of those songs I did do some copy paste finishing, but I tried to avoid a too-obvious verse/chorus/verse song structure and just throw some good transitions in there. And you'll end up with some boring songs but you'll end up with some gems! Seriously, just sit down, hit record and play for 20 minutes straight(after a bottle of wine), you'll be amazed at what you can write! I'm just worried about how I'm going to write a guitar solo at 247BPM, since that's a lot of speed hahaha!

You could try what I do - slow the playback (without changing pitch) to a speed you're comfortable at, and write a solo. Then learn the solo and slowly increase the playback speed until you're at 100% and can record a good take. I use a similar method for when I compose something on paper and need to learn it at a tempo that sounds appropriate.

By the way, I would like to thank Fleshgod Apocalypse and Hideous Divinity. I listened to them each for about an hour before starting this challenge. It helps to get in the right mindset.

Yeah I'm going to have to think of something. My limit in soloing is about 200BPM because I'm lazy and would rather play riffs instead of practicing hahaha. I hate to say it, but I may end up doing a tremolo pick with the right hand, make crazy notes with the left hand kinda solo for SW1. It needs a tear-it-up solo. I guess I could also just get off my ass and practice hahaha. Ah hell, then I have to think of lyrics!

I should do this for Pentu since I have not been able to write anything lately. Definitely interesting to say the least. I may do this some day.

I'll give this all a listen later on. But I do this as a norm when I have vacation in dec. But I normally don't do the 12 hours but I'll do like 6-8 depending how I feel but normally i write over 20 songs a day. And not all short ones either. Just whatever hits my fancy that particular day.

For this challenge, you'd basically need to finish up 1 song every 36 minutes. Pretty intense!

This seems like it'd work well with my own approach to writing (I tend to have a lot of trouble tweaking stuff if I let it sit around too long, so I generally try to finish up the meat of a song in one go) so I should give it a shot sometime.

Since there aren't any vocals, and I can't really hear any bass guitar, I'm guessing the idea, at least in the way you're approaching it, is to just get the guitar+drums "meat" of 20 songs done in 12 hours?

Both Sounds pretty killer. Good job, glad you got some good usable material out of it all. I might do it this dec, like i said I usually can easily do 20 songs in 6-8 hours cause largely I'm already inspired then. the only thing I don't do at that time is vocals. but I'll record all instruments that day as well.

Pretty sick stuff dude. Liked that symphonic start of the second song especially. You said you just got those instruments off google? Are they just VSTI's? What are their names? I'm sick of the crappy ones I'm using lol.

Yeah just VSTis. The drums are drumcore 3 free, the strings are cellofan, and the piano is Tascam cvpiano. All of them are free. The guitars are LePou plugins, also free. The only thing not free is amplitube, which I use for the bass guitar.

So... what's the book?

'the challenge book'

i have the book its called the frustrated songwriters handbook, i've done a few of these sessions and always wrote my best songs from them, it was invented by a very awesome man called nicolas dobson who started it as a contest with his friend michael mellander who is in sleepytime gorilla museum and wrote songs like "the creature" from SGM during one of these sessions,

mine were mostly ridiculas grindcore songs, a few proggy opeth/ porcipine tree sounding tunes and hard rock songs about riding motorbikes, haha

haha sounds like a bunch of awesome nevertheless.

Looking good, might try this

yeah its totally worth checking out, and its brilliant when there is a competitive element between you and a friend doing it on the same day in different locations then meeting at the end to listen back and laugh at all the hilarious ones

It's a great book, really. I would love to do this songwriting challenge with like 5 other people, and we could call each other every hour to make sure we're on track and then share our music the next day, be it good or bad.

I went ahead and ordered a copy of that book myself, I want to take a look through it.

Okay, so I did this. Ended up with a lot of material. I'd say out of everything, these three tracks are probably my favorite, but there's also a couple others with promise:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3361389/sw/s03.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3361389/sw/s12.mp3

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3361389/sw/s16.mp3

It's very sloppy and slapped together, but I guess that's kinda expected. Almost all of the solos are just horrifyingly sloppy keyboard spasms that I just did on the spot, so my apologies if any of them make you cringe. No vocals. I feel really weird hyping up or really talking about my own music publically, so I'll just let the tracks speak for themselves.

I am really happy with these though. Would be cool to re-record them with actual drums, actual guitar amps, proper solos, vocals and whatnot later.

Dropbox kept giving me errors so I was only able to listen to the second one, but I liked it. It had an old school cannibal corpse vibe to me. Pretty badass, I'd love to hear it polished up.

Odd. They work on my end. Maybe try again?

and thanks!

I think it's the laptop I'm on at the moment. It's slowly dying on me.

I'm going to try to listen when I get home.