The 5 In 5 Songwriting Challenge

 I know, I just wrote an entire blog about how to survive Mercury retrograde as a songwriter or a musician, and of course, the number one thing to remember about Mercury retrograde is to not start anything new or take on any new projects, but...

The 5 In 5 Songwriting Challenge starts on Monday. 

So, eff it. I'm gonna do it this time. 


I've lurked before and downloaded the prompts from the Facebook group to save for use at a later date (I have a whole bunch of notebooks full of prompts that I can call up whenever I get in a writing rut), but this time I'm dedicating the entire week to writing one song a day - and potentially two on Friday, when I start ANOTHER songwriting challenge/workshop. (But I'll blog more about that one in a few days as we get closer.)

It's a fun challenge, and it's totally free - you get 5 songwriting prompts every day for 5 days, and your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to write 5 full songs every day for the 5 days. Bonus points (not really) if you record and share your song in the associated Facebook group. 

The hardest part of this whole thing for me is going to be setting aside my inner critic and my desire/need to do everything perfectly right off the start. I mean, that gets me nowhere. So what if I write five totally suck-ass songs? That just means I'll have written five totally suck-ass songs and I'll have gotten them out of the way so I can write some GOOD stuff. 

So at the end of the next 8 days, I could potentially have 8 new songs to work with. Some of them might be great, and some of them might be totally sucky. But at least I'll have gotten their bones down on paper and I can take it from there (or not). 

AND this songwriting challenge is open to anyone on any instrument - so even if you don't play ukulele, it's still a fun thing to do. And if you DO play the ukulele, it's a fun way to push yourself outside of your comfort zone. 

Let me know if you decide to sign up for the challenge, and maybe we can co-write or share our songs!


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ukulele Major Scale Patterns

Image
So we had a lazy weekend last weekend. My husband wasn't feeling great, and we have all just been feeling kind of stretched thin and exhausted all the time. So on Sunday morning, my husband put on a relaxing movie (War Of the Worlds with Tom Cruise, ugh) and then about twenty minutes in, he got up and left the room to take a phone call and left me there with my steel string baritone guitarlele (fun little instrument) to practice scales over the sounds of explosions and screaming.  **(If that's not an apt metaphor for what's happening in the world right now, I don't know what is.)** Anyway.  After mastering the first major scale in the set of exercises (they're actually for guitar, but you can obviously play them on the 6-string guitarlele, I just transpose them in my head so I know what scale/key I'm playing in), I went on to the next...and realized that the fingering pattern was exactly the same as the first - it just started on a different fret.  I went on to
Read more

Monday Musings for October 2, 2023

 Oh, wait, did I say October? I meant ROCKtober. Ha! Last year, I started making some videos for Rocktober, but that got cut short when we all came down with Covid and I spent the next 10 weeks in bed trying to recover, in between ER visits and cardiac monitors and acupucture and everything else.  SO NO BAD VIBES THIS TIME, YOU HEAR? I'm done. Sick of all this shit. We are out of the shadow of Merc Rx and I am just done and ready to take some meaningful steps forward. There! Anyway...now that I got that out of my system... Yes, this is the month I affectionately call Rocktober, so I may or may not try to do some covers of some of my favorite rock songs, and now that I have an actual practice amp for my electric instruments, that might be fun.  Tonight is the first online monthly songshare with a group of my songwriting friends, and I have to make sure I have most of my latest song finished and ready. It's gonna be a little tricky because I'm writing it on my six string (gas
Read more

Monday Musings on Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Image
 Well, shit. Another week goes by, and I only wrote one blog last week. C'est la vie. To be fair, I was busy doing stuff. And we had a great weekend: we took my father in law to get a Christmas tree, and then we decorated the tree and had yummy comfort food for dinner, so it was a nice time.  Yesterday was a bit of a shitshow, with a bad winter storm that didn't hit us as hard as it hit points west and north, but still enough to fuck up the roads in the early morning. And due to general transportation fuckups (thank you, shadow of Mercury Rx), it turned into a mental health stay-home day for my son. So we made the best of things and took care of our chickens and had truffle mac and cheese for lunch and baked 5 dozen mocha Russian tea cakes for his school fund raiser next week.  BUT one of the best things that happened was my giveaway prize arrived from Sheri Kurdakul , aka The Glitter Witch, arrived in the mail!  I signed up for her email newsletter and won this fabulous copy o
Read more