I Hate Mornings

I was in a quandary. I had less than two weeks left in the 50/90 Song Challenge, and 30 songs left to write. Times were tough. I needed a short cut, but I couldn’t bring myself to cheat. So I did something in between…

Limitations are your friend

Creative people often talk about the benefits of boundaries and limitations to your creativity. No designer will start a project without a well defined brief. A blank sheet of paper is a useless way to start writing. That’s one of the reasons why I took on the 50/90 Challenge in the first place.

I really enjoyed writing the 12seconds.tv song, and it got a good reception when I played it at the Oxford Geek Night. A 12-second song has to rely on humour, simplicity, clarity and great words. And when you need to write loads of songs quickly it’s a godsend!

A micro-songwriting process

I only had about 4 hours to write, film and upload 12 songs, so I had to be brutally pragmatic. Armed with a 10×10″ sketch pad, a Moleskine full of title ideas and a 2B pencil, I set to work.

I have had a title suggestion form on my website for a few weeks, so I had about 30 potential titles copied into the notebook along with ideas I have captured in the wild. It’s always useful to have starting points on hand when you’re pressed for time.

Because my mind works best with systems and structures I divided a page of the sketchbook neatly into 16 equal squares, room for 12 tiny songs and 4 bad ideas. That way I could afford to spew out ideas quickly safe in the knowledge that the crap ones wouldn’t make the cut. It’s never good to be worrying about the final quality when you’re trying to create. Nothing’s good until you make it good.

It didn’t take long to fill the grid with lyrics. Some came from the title book, some were picked out of the air. 4 of them were crap. ;o)

12seconds.tv

I recorded a song in iMovie, exported it as a MOV, uploaded it to 12seconds.tv, and recorded the next one. The music was made up on the spot – I would work out a good setting for a particular line, record it and move on. The whole recording process took about 90 minutes, by which time I had an entire 144-second album online. A couple of people were even watching the videos go up as they were recorded!

YouTube

That was almost a week ago, and although they have been online for a while (and viewable in the 12seconds.tv widget on my website) I know more people will see them if they are on YouTube (especially after the Twitter song shenanigans;o). So today I edited them all together into a 2″54′ video and uploaded it to YouTube.

And here it is – the shortest album I’ve ever made!

Thanks for the titles!

• Kenneth Okumura for “Zipper flies make me cry” (via Facebook)
• Lloyd Davis for inspiring “Mr Ukelele”
• Greg Lucas for cowriting “Walking down the middle of the road” in the late 90s
• Nick Gill for inspiring “Saw”
• Laurie Nevay for “Oranges or Carrots”
• Anna Speddy for “Not My Forte”
• Ellie’s boyfriend Steve for “Virgin Trains”