Written thoughts: The "Making A Song in an Hour" Challenge
Written thoughts: The "Making A Song in an Hour" Challenge
Hey hey there internet!
So far, I've been mainly using this blog as an addition to the #ShibbCast. - Season 1 of it is finished: read more here. I have been doing the first few full-text posts whilst taking on the #Trailblazer challenge: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Video Release.
I think it is about time to really use this blog as a blog as well if that makes sense. Written thoughts. And for the first post I will be writing about something I have been coming across on YouTube quite late actually. But it fascinated me and I have been telling my friends about it so why not write down my thoughts on this topic? Here you go:
Making A Song In An Hour
...meaning: As a musician you have 60 minutes to compose, write, arrange, record and produce a full song. No pre-written material allowed (I think) and after the 60 minutes have passed, you are not allowed to make any changes then. The first video of Making A Song In An Hour was this one:
Skip to 12:09 if you are only interested in the result. :)
Well. In my opinion, Rob Scallon is one of the most talented so called "YouTube-Musicians" around at the moment. However, he even introduces this video as "something that might be a huge mistake". After having watched it I do not agree entirely. I mean for sure - this is by far not the best/creative thing he has done but I don't think it's bad after all. The result of the challenge for Rob Scallon is a pretty nice and chill song with awesomely awkward lyrics. "Everybody knows that I'm a better singer than Roomie". I strongly recommend downloading that song and having it on a chill-playlist, so you won't pay attention to the lyrics. For that, I think it would work out pretty well actually!
What's interesting to me here is to watch him at first struggle with getting ANYTHING. Even when he chose a tempo, he decided he didn't like it and changed it. And over the duration of this challenge I think his acceptance of choices he made grew bigger and bigger. As time was running out, he was more and more like "I'll take it, I just have to move on now." Nonetheless, time was eventually running out in the end and Rob was not able to finish his planned vocals on time. (As far as you can label these vocals as "planned"...)
Overall, I think he did very well overall. He created a full song having different parts conveying a nice vibe and having entertaining lyrics. It's enjoyable. It's cool. I like it! I'd say: Mission accomplished Rob!
However, he was calling out the musician Roomie with this song BUT... See what happenend next:
Skip to 11:00 if you are only interested in the result. :)
Andrew Huang, another great YouTube musician responded first to Rob's challenge. At the time seeing this video I didn't really know who Andrew is. I have seen him in a few thumbnails while browsing YouTube but to be honest: never clicked one. So I dived right in and Andrew opened pretty competitive by saying actually that he wanted to make it more competitive so he restrained his time to 59 minutes instead of 60.
Since I haven't seen any other videos of Andrew at that point, I was pretty excited about seeing his approach of taking on this challenge. He set his tempo by a random number generator and got his chords from a twitter poll (smart move if you have many active followers). Of course he still decides what chords he uses, but to me this felt like he wanted to give some of the creative work away and give himself some more structure to work with so he doesn't get lost in a creative space... Since the rules apparently did not say, that you are not allowed to get help from social media I'll just take it...
The very simple but groovy beat was made pretty quickly and with the help of the twitter users, the main chord progression (if you wanna call it like that. It's only two chords...) was made quickly as well. After adding the bass he spends a lot of time on very little details and that raised a question in my head: What is he actually going for? Since I was not able to track the duration of his song on the screen and I've heard only the same beat and chords so far (countdown was down to 36 minutes then) I really started to wonder.
When he moved on to the next part he did something very interesting: He picked up the guitar and tried to add some "because it's something to do and hopefully gets the ideas flowing". This is an approach that might be even of use for me. When getting stuck, maybe just try putting in another instrument - to get the ideas flowing. Funny thing: The notes he has been playing on guitar were cool, but he didn't like the sound of them on a guitar so he replaced the notes by a synthesizer playing them. --> smart move!
This followed by some more detail-work. Then, he again asks his tweeps for a topic to sing about. The topic chosen was "How stars work". Going through wikipedia and playing the game "what's the first rhyme I came up with" got me again thinking like: He's kinda pushing the responsibility of getting creative from scratch away from himself... When he's been only singing 4 lines, I started to feel the disappointment rising, and there it went: After the entertaining finale where he almost forgot to lay down the bass in the "b-section" I discovered that he only wrote half a song. More like a verse. Not a full song. It sounds cool, carries a cool vibe and I enjoy it - but I would not label this as mission accomplished... (Sorry Andrew...)
Look who came up there then!
Skip to 10:28 if you are only interested in the result. :)
Roomie finally dialed in! He introduced his video by explaining the situation and decided to top it up by doing a song in 58 minutes. The first step he did was not really a musical one - more kind of a strategy. He mapped out the song in terms of how many bars of a verse, how many bars of a chorus, which song structure, etc. Which is pretty smart for a challenge like that, I think 'cause it gives you a clear overview of what you have done already and what still needs to be done.
Instead of making up something really musical, he really set up the base for his song by choosing his drumsamples to give him something to jam around with. He started by creating a chorus, giving it a simple bassline played on guitar. Since he was using just a foor to the floor beat, this really started to give this "song" a vibe already although he was only starting. He explained that both Rob and Andrew were starting out making their instrumental complete before worrying about the vocals. As Roomie is mainly a singer, he changed that up in terms of strategy as well: writing the lyrics and melody to the chorus was the next step before actually creating the music for verses and prechorus.
I enjoyed this approach - it felt pretty similar to what I do when I write pop punk songs: Usually I start out with the mainriff and/or the chorus... However, just like in the video: YOU DON'T HAVE TIME TO VIBE!!!
Obviously after having finished the chorus he wrote the verses and the prechorus. He did that in such a coherent and confident way, that it made me wonder: Is Roomie THAT talented? Or was he prepared? But I'm not in the position to judge that - I know that I would not be capable of such a challenge. ...yet.
The song itself was done pretty fast but on the other hand: very basic. So Roomie had plenty of time editing it - throwing effects on it and editing the vocals a lot. The fact that his laptop crashed every now and then was not only time consuming for him, it was very entertaining for me to watch as this is so relatable... Haha! The last thing he did before time ran out was adding some arpeggios which sound very poppy. ...which kind of suits his main approach: He wanted to create something poppy. And he did it justice. So far, I think this song turned out the best of those 3!
But that's - of course - not enough for this story...
Skip to 11:08 if you are only interested in the result. :)
Wild Rob Scallon appears again! In the beginning of this video he said the same thing as I did above: Andrew did not write a full song but rather a verse only. He credited Roomie as well in a very nice way "what a jerk" - and set the bar higher once again: He was about to create a full song in 57 minutes.
So here we roll again. Interesting in this video is, that Rob first says that he learned from Roomie's submission that it would be smart move to start out with the structure and melodies for the vocals first. Spoiler alert: He forgot to go with a structure first. What's different to his approach from the first video is that he is actually constantly thinking about the vocals whilst writing the riffs. (This time he wanted to go distorted, since his first song was so chill...)
Even more interesting is, that the more he goes into the process of writing the song, the more chaotic it gets. After having recorded the first guitar track on click he was not really sure about what to do next. He felt like he needed to get an acoustic part done. I think this is pretty funny and maybe Rob just has a different understanding of structure. But at this point I'd say: Rob is not the best writer under pressure I guess. But who would be anyways? But what makes this so interesting is that this video actually proves that everyone has a different approach to songwriting. Even though Rob wanted to start things differently this time, he only did it in the very beginning and then went kind of back to the "I don't know what to do next" approach. Very nice to see that we're all just humans and every musician is different. This is to me the greatest value this video has!
Although his "structure" kind of makes sense, as soon as he finished re-recording the acoustic guitar. He just didn't map it out, he created the main riffs for every part one after another and then added the missing instruments afterwards. But still: He did not think about vocals anymore at that point. Which left him just ten minutes to create them. Good start. He only had "I got a head and ten toes" as a line. So this got me pretty excited again about what Lyrics he's going to improvise within ten minutes!
...surprise: It was not that much. And of course he went with the first rhyme he had: "I'm gonna hang with my bro's". Hahaha! But nonetheless, this song turned out quite well I think. In spite of Rob not being such a great singer, this song really rocks and is actually a full song again. Even with a guitar solo! (Which is not even close to being as bad as Rob said it.)
So what is the essence of this so far?
As we have seen three musicians creating songs in only an hour, it tought me a lot about songwriting under pressure and having different approaches. I think this is a cool experiment and I might try something like this as well this year. (I'll talk about that maybe at some other point in time, but be sure: it will NOT be a 60 minutes challenge...)
It may be hard to believe that the songs you hear in the end were created as they sounded within an hour... AND: If you read for instance Rob's video descriptions, he got them mixed afterwards by Fluff. (Sidenote: I took part in Fluff's Riffs And Beards contest no 3... Check it out here!) ...is that breaking the rules? I'm not sure about that. But again: Who am I to judge? I don't think if I was about to take on this challenge it would turn out as good as those 4 songs did!
But I was not the only one wondering about this hour-thing:
Skip to 1:02:45 if you are only interested in the result. :)
Adam Neely, well known within the YouTube musician field as the "video-essay-music-facts-guy" (I'm not kidding: I learned SO MUCH from this guy!) was wondering as well, if it was even possible to create songs like these in that short amount of time. So what he did was pretty keen: He broadcasted a live stream of him creating a song within an hour!
Watching this entire video takes over an hour - and I know that not many of you are willing to take the time to go through the entire process with him but: - it's worth it!
He engaged with his live chat - just like Andrew did it - and took the challenge to compose something in 11/8 time signature (for those wondering: it's certainly not as danceable as a 4/4 or 3/4 time signature, which are the most common ones in popular music...). Of course something like this would occur in his live chat. I think his target groups does in fact consist mainly of music nerds like I am. Weird chords, odd time signatures, discovering the beauty in complexity... THIS IS MY JAM! ...and that's basically why I was so excited to see him streaming the entire progress live on YouTube!
When he started recording the first chords (taken from the suggestions on the live chat) it appeared, that he was kinda prepared for this broadcast. He recorded the MIDI File in a piano voice but changed it to strings (another track he already setup in advance) straight after it. The useful thing about recording MIDI notes first is, that you can record them in whatever tempo you like and change the tempo afterwards without making it sound odd or pitched. And he did change the tempo afterwards. (Wikipedia link straight to MIDI article in case you are curious.)
What follows then is a lot of MIDI recording... I could elaborate on that in more detail, but hell - this is a long post already! So what he did was working in a rather calm way through the song, labeling different parts of it. Since Adam is a graduate in Bass, of course he played it himself. (After having recorded the bass, he was not able to change the tempo of the bass parts without having to heavily edit them so at this point he already decided on the tempo.) In the forthcoming part, he started playing around with a sequencer in order to add a bit more vivid elements to the song. (Sequencer in that sense means, you play a full chord on your keyboard, but these notes are not played at once as a chord, but the sequencer makes a melody of the played notes in a certain pre programmed pattern that can be adjusted.) When having recorded those sequencies he actually kinda proved that he was not that prepared for doing this, as he decided to create a new MIDI channel for those sequences.
Smart move which was only touched in Roomie's video: He started adding effects to the channels "on the go"... like: recording them, and editing them right away. Adam decided to add vocals as well but he does not consider himself being a good singer. So he added his vocals in another way: I sung a short sample and pitched it into a melody afterwards. Some mad DJ skills over here, Mr Neely! ...and intelligent to avoid writing lyrics as well... He used iZotopes nectar plugin in order to edit his vocal samples... (is it obvious that I am kind of a fan of iZotope??)
A very nice point in this video was about the 37:30 mark: a lot of viewers in the live chat were complaining about the drum sound - and then Adam was quite honest: He is not a producer, he mainly talks about music on his channel. And by knowing this fact (for those of you who did not know yet) I still think it's turning into a good thing!
After having finished smapling the vocals, Adam took on adding melody synthesizer which are to me quite "jazzy" in terms of melody... Who was not expecting that... He is kind of a nerd... But the cheeky thing he did, was actually copying a large part of the song and changing only details in it. Kind of cheating, but actually not - it's sadly a common thing in pop music to copy good parts of they occur again in a song...
He spent the last ten minutes of the process on details again - what I really appreciated: He was even adjusting the velocities of drum hits to not make them sound too generic and FINALLY added the LICK! (insider joke right here. Head over to his channel to find out about it...)
So how did the song turn out? Pretty proggy to me - and not as lame as he found it. Even in the video title it said "and it turned out kinda lame". I would not agree on this, but you have to decide for yourself.
What did I learn?
Creating a song in 60 minutes can be a very funny and entertaining challenge if you capture it the right way - it can be very interesting if you capture it like Adam did, but I'd think this would be very exhaustive for people just wanting to be entertained by YouTube videos.
However: These musicians have my greatest respect for their outcomes and I truly appreciate that they were keen enough to try this out! *applause sound*
I hope this post was not too exhaustive - and if it was: your loss. I'm sorry. :)
Have a look at two other videos of this challenge I really enjoyed:
Mary Spender
Jonas The Frisk
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