I’m running late this month!

November is a time of remembrance and Thanksgiving. All Saints Day, All Souls Day, Veteran’s Day, and Thanksgiving all give us opportunity to remember loved ones and be thankful for what we have. Given the push these days to skip Thanksgiving altogether (at least it feels like that in the stores) it is up to us as Christians to buck the trends of commercialism and push for the values we deem important.

For this month, please submit any songs or lyrics you might have that involve thankfulness or remembrance. Also, don’t be afraid to post songs that still need some work. In the next months I am going to add a collaboration page to make it easier for everyone to contribute to songs in progress.

Thank you everyone for the incredible response to the first challenge.  Many of you are already accomplished songwriters which is great.  I’m looking forward to building this community and I hope that these “challenges” help to push everyone to be better songwriters.

This month I want to move away from building complete songs and work on the process.  There’s a book called Lyrics – Writing Better Words for Your Songs by Ricky Rooksby that I like a lot.  Maybe I like it because I’m a terrible lyricist 🙂

One of the first discussions in the book is about finding inspiration for songs.  The book recommends using anything and everything for inspiration – the newspaper, books, art, TV, media, conversations, the list goes on.  Sometimes I think that as Christian artist in general – we tend to stray from anything secular when writing.

So for October I’m proposing that we simply write down inspirations.  Simply comment on thoughts, experiences, scriptures, poems, stories, etc.  that you think would make good song material.  Given that its October, fall, and scripturally ordinary time – I think we have a lot to pull from.  Don’t worry about trying to put these into songs yet (of course unless you want to 🙂 ) but I’m hoping to pick several to use in future challenges.

Happy Inspirations!

How September has flown!

Just one week left to submit a link to something recorded!  I know that there’s a lot more artists and songwriters out there!  Need some help?  Post a comment in the forums – folks are here to help.

Starting in October I’ll be adding bi-weekly challenges around writing different styles of songs, themes, etc.  Stay tuned!

Its September and fall is upon us.  With school starting and the weather cooling, its a great time to start new projects.  And what better project than songwriting!  If you’re like me, you have wanted to write music for a long time.  Maybe you’ve even written a few pieces for specific readings, or written a Responsorial Psalm.  Maybe you have pieces of songs all over the place that just need finishing.

This community is for you!  In order to get this community started, I think its important to start writing and recording SOMETHING.  And that’s our first challenge.  Record yourself playing or singing something.  This challenge is meant to allow us to start introducing ourselves to each other and get some of the technical challenges of recording and sharing out of the way.  If you can’t come up with something, record yourself performing a cover of another song.  Record 30 seconds on an instrument.  Just start by recording something.

There are a lot of tools out there to help with recording and plenty of websites to describe the process.  I will be posting some links in the forums and I encourage others to post their own tools and sites.

Feel free to post links to your recording in the comments section.  There are many ways to share links to recordings.  You might look into Soundcloud or Reverbnation to start.

This challenge will close on September 30th.  Happy recording!