The very few rules are listed at the bottom of this post in bold.
So the idea for the album writing months originally comes from here: https://fawm.org/ The original challenge is to write 14 songs in 28 days in February. Typically this NPO project has not drawn a lot of electronic musicians.
The idea was to just get the bones down for the songs, no polishing necessary. So, arrangement and lyrics and just rough recorded demos.
For electronic musicians I think the challenge will feel different as much of our music is lyric-less and driven by sound design and creative mixing decisions, versus someone writing songs on their acoustic guitar.
I don’t think we’ve ever done a proper FAWM here, maybe once some years ago. In the past we have lowered the song count or even all agreed to write a certain amount of minutes worth of music.
It seems like the last few time or two we bothered coming up with parameters, people pretty much just did what they wanted regardless so I’m all for people just setting their own goals whatever those are. Personally, though I love the original spirit of FAWM, I’m probably just going to make a goal of a 4-5 track EP. I did that last time and it worked out pretty nicely.
There is also the issue of sharing WIPs during the month or holding them all until the end. I kinda liked just going through and listening to them the month afterwards and commenting on the final product.
This ended up being quite a bit less formal than I imagined, but traditionally IDMf album writing months have resisted being formal : )
We will run the writing month from Jan 2nd to February 2nd. I’m really not kidding no extensions. You don’t need to have anything properly mixed or mastered. Concentrate on coming up with “good ideas” (whether that is traditional song writing, sound design, creative mix ideas, strong samples etc).
Will there be a certain goal to aim for? For example, 4 songs? I plan on participating. I have the first week off in January. I plan on setting up a new workflow/set-up this weekend and getting a head start the last few days of December. I am excited!
It’s supposed to be an album, so 8 tracks. Last time I only managed 4. This time I’m going for six with vocals hopefully. It’s really as many as you can. They don’t have to be polished, as the point is to get as many out, as a base for polishing later.
I fancy a go at this. Is there usually a concept, or just do what you want? Due to time i will likely only get 4 tracks done, likely of dubious quality!
Well I got 4 ideas.
Just gotta get some rhythm tracks and track the parts!
Gonna practice a bunch more too. But 4 guitar riffs are written with a few variations.
Maybe I can squeeze out one more than last time. If I can track some ideas for the first 4 and come up with a 5th I’d be pumped!
As it’s an album as such, it should have a certain degree of coherence, but in what shape that comes in is up to the individual. It’s more about getting things done than anything else. Although if your anything like me being somewhat fussy, and usually expecting too much for the amount of time, the coherence kind of goes out the window somewhat.
And, as a thought, could we remix some of the other tracks in view of a qawm comp or something. I know we haven’t started yet, but there’s some grumbling about stuff in other threads. Could be a cool group effort.
All do an ep, then call dibs on remixing each other’s tracks?
Might be too much?
