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Extreme Songwriting Experiment: 12 Songs in 12 Hours

January 7, 2014 Leave a comment

Some people are driven to do extreme things.

On Sunday I was working on setting lyrics to music for a client, and I wrote the music to three songs in one day, which was a record for me.

This reminded me a while back I had seen the ‘Song a Day’ YouTube Chanel by Jonathan Mann.

I considered for a moment writing a song a day for a year, but that had already been done before, so I thought I’d try something different.

Why not try writing the music to 12 songs in 12 hours?

I needed lyrics that would be easily set to music, so I chose William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, the songs of Innocence from the first half of the collection in particular.

songs of innocence I read that Blake composed melodies to these poems, but never wrote them down. In any event, they have a predictible meter and rhyme structure, which is exactly what you want if you’re planning on setting lyrics to music in a hurry.

I decided I would write the chords above the lyrics of each song, and record a ‘scratch vocal’ version of it with a simple piano arrangement (closed position keyboard style of course) and vocals sung all the way through. This is the sort of quick and dirty recording I would give to a client after I wrote the song so he/she could start learning the song ASAP.

I had the day off Monday, so I started around noon, and I was done before 11:00 pm.

‘Veni, vidi, vici.’

It wasn’t as difficult as I thought. I did intentionally choose the shorter poems, which helped.

The thing that surprised me is that I didn’t run out of musical ideas or write the same music over and over.

Maybe if I’m up for a real challenge I’ll try writing 24 songs in 24 hours.

Normally I wouldn’t post ‘scratch vocal’ recordings here, since they are pretty rough sounding, but they will serve as evidence that it is possible to write a lot of music in a short period of time, if you set your mind to it.

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