Album-a-Day (2001-2008)

One thing I like to point out is that not everyone has the same toolkit or approach to learning as you have. They may have no framework at all and just a desire.

Contrived practices like this help people jumpstart a routine they otherwise don't really know how to start.

It doesn't work for everyone, but it works for the people it works for :)

I tend to view challenges like this as the songwriting version of doing "freewriting" as an author. The purpose isn't to write perfect songs that you would want to commercially release. The purpose is to get out of the "perfection" mindset and just write anything without judgement.

One of the primary ways to get better at songwriting is to write a ton of songs. Challenges like this help you do that. The best part about writing a ton of songs is that when you decide you want to truly release something, you have an arsenal of songs to choose from.

If you feel too much pressure to do an entire album in 24 hours, then make your own challenge. Write a new song every day for a month and see how your songwriting skills improve. Or maybe just write and record one song in 24 hours. Make the challenge work for you, stretch your skills, and utilize Parkinson's law to actually complete something. The majority of amateur musicians that I know (myself included) rarely finish songs, and that is what makes these challenges useful.

Good art demands time, but good art also demands practice and experimentation. I'd put challenges like this in the "practice and experimentation" category.

• 24-hour (or shorter) challenges may help you identify needless churn in your art process.

• Restricting your toolset (e.g. removing colors or editor-plugins or instruments you're most comfortable with) forces you to learn more about your craft without your normal crutches.

• Creating artificial size-constraints (e.g. Alan Kay's "t-shirt computing") can guide you toward the essence of your art.

The first two sentences describe the intent very simply and clearly:

> Album-a-Day is a Crap Art project. That means that it's a set of constraints (the rules below) which are meant to help you be creative.

It's just one of many many different ways one might choose to spend one's time. Choosing to not spend your time this way is abundantly understandable (heck, I'm on a 12,000+ streak of consecutive 24-hour periods spent not doing this challenge), but I'm having a difficult time understanding why you would hate the idea.

The author goes into the reasons why here it looks like: http://crapart.spacebar.org/

Art doesn't have to be "good" or take time. Art can be whatever you want it to be, even if that's just a way to have fun and mess around. I think the authors view is that art is actually for the artist, not the viewer.

This is waaay too ambitious, and you are right, it would lead to poor quality works. If you wanted to write, record, mix and master something meaningful, even one song a day is stretching it.

However, for writer’s block, I’m part of a discord server for Jake Lizzio’s Signals Music Studio where we have weekly “Musical Games” - you are given a prompt with some restrictions (key, tempo, signature, etc) and then share it with the group. Most of it just in good fun, but you get to explore different aspects of songwriting, whether it's working with polymeters, different modes, or getting to work with your DAW in different ways.

But one album a day just seems more like a factory than exploration.

To me, these things are a way to improve process. Making thirty works in thirty days will identify points where there is wasted energy or where unfamiliarity with tooling exists or where insufficient consumables are an impediment.

A person making thirty songs in thirty days will get better at setting up gear. Turning on the recoding device will be normalized. Not keeping enough blue gel pens at hand will become obvious.

And it can all be in addition to time spent on a master work progress.

Or maybe while everything is ready to go, it becomes easy to lay down a take of the master work.

Working little things end to end is a good way of developing a habit of finishing. A perspective that is less precious. A catalog of experience. And questioning absolute links between effort and quality.

> Art takes time and thought

According to you, yes. But not according to some. One could claim the ability to make something without time nor thought is art in itself.

Art also takes practice.

https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramic...

Can't you make a half baked album and then refine it later ?

Music is just an hobby for me, but I love making as many rough drafts as I can and then coming back later to them.

If you want to write a song every day, fine. If you want to write a song and hack on it with your ensemble every day, even better! Those are awesome challenges!

Forcing yourself to sit there and do post-production without taking a nap is not creative (unless you're an EDM producer), it's just torturing yourself. How many of you have spent much time in post-production? Or even actual production? There are really fun and inspiring ways to achieve what we're aiming for here; this just isn't a good idea as stated.

> Art takes time and thought

No. _Your_ art takes time and thought. Others can and do work differently.

One of my favorite makers of music is a guy with an extremely customized sampler and effects interface plus one microphone. He makes sounds with his mouth and then loops/modifies/distorts those sounds into spontaneous real-time electronic music on the fly. With just the right amount of swearing and surreal comedy thrown in to make it interesting. No pre-prepared sequences or samples at all. He has performed to sold-out gigs, clubs, and festivals and isn't a household name but has a decent following. It's not everyone's cup of tea I'm sure, but anyone who says it's not "art" would be just plain condescending not to mention wrong.

> These constraints will just force folks to release half baked works.

The whole point is to force folks to release half-baked works, because half-baked is better than not baked at all.

There's something to be said for being prolific. I have 180 songs on Soundcloud, and on average someone new hears something I wrote every hour. Some of them even like what they hear!

The page is from 2003, I think, so I'm surprised it's even available, I bet most of the links live in archive.org because this site was picked up by major news sites back then.