2025 Goals
- Finish album
- Do four collab songs
- Do 16w of this structure and assess
    - w1 songwrite
    - w2 imitate and practice (mainly vocals, some guitar)
    - w3 improve on arrangement and mix
    - w4 polish
    - w5 (optional) cover song (focus on prioritizing what makes the song)
    - w6 (optional) section of cover song (focus on high quality but just nailing one section of the cover song, can be the same song as w5)

note: covers can’t be uploaded here if I don’t get the copyright permissions, so I will do a mix of straight covers with copyright permissions payments as well as do creative liberties in lyrics and melody to make it a new 2nd version that I upload here.

2024 Reflection

What went well: I grew more as a musician and in my enjoyment of music this year than in the last 10 years. WB and the community are rad. Putting time structure to my creative hobby was something I reluctantly tried but to my surprise enhanced many aspects of the creative process. It’s not so much adding stress but just a constant “whatever you’re doing, prioritize to finish in a few hours” which was a great teacher. You can’t force inspiration, but you can force the environment that greatly increases the odds.

What didn’t go well: I often didn’t have more than two hours per week for this, various time intense competing factors were going on.

What I learned: My best songs of growth came from when I could focus and experiment a bit, as opposed to purely churning out a one take guitar chord basher. This sweet spot was about more than 2 hours for a full song or more than an hour for just a section. Choosing to squeeze something in with roughly less than that I don’t think did a ton for me as it wasn’t enough time to develop my skills, just a slapping down of what I already knew (which I know quite a bit of music relative to how little I’ve slapped down so it wasn’t too much of a bad thing)

What still puzzles me: Want to try something that encourages intermediate milestone progress and keeps the structured creativity strengths without causing the problem of falling off when “one hour isn’t enough to make a full song”. One hour is plenty to do something new and growth inducing if the scope and structure is further reduced.

2024 Goals

- Do 8-12 weeks of this (or more/less if it's serving the following goals)

- Try out things I haven't before, such as different DAWs and workflows

- Improve my listening, performance, and production skills

- Improve skills and intuition, settle into a handful of tools I like to get things done quickly

- w4 update: I didn’t realize it before doing this, but the quantity is forcing me to practice the full process rather than getting bogged down on a single thing which has been amazing for my development. If squinting, it’s lean manufacturing or lean sw principles applied to music. Mind blown. A little different in the sense it’s not iterating on the same song every time, but the end to end nature forces an organic prioritization and practice of the full process to happen that’s amazing.

Further detailed notes:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VH3 … PyPgY/edit

frogcity's Music