"Weeklybeats Members will be allowed to upload 1 song per each week of the year. At the end of the week the upload counter on the home page will restart and all submissions from the previous week will become available for listening and downloading. Members are encouraged to create a new unreleased song for each given week (of course you may submit your song elsewhere as you hold all rights to your content, but it spoils the fun if you release it before hand!)
The objective of Weeklybeats is to encourage musicians to be productive, creative, and have fun!"
Same here, I’ll be happy if I can fulfill half of the slots , might just fill the slower weeks with fieldrecordings. Not much else you can do around here with the lockdown(s), excuse for recording hikes.
Hmm, maybe I will again. I did end up doing it in 2022 and wrote a ton of music as a result. Was really good for exploring different ideas and methods of composition. Thanks for posting the link!
I kinda am planning to do this this year anyway. Just independently. Inspired by Underworld’s Drift series where they recorded & released a new track each week also.
The thing that puts me off with this that it should be about quality, not quantity. Making a lot of tracks quickly is fantastic when you’re a beginner. Giving you an opportunity to explore and learn. And for the ultra seasoned pro’s who can churn out gold at will. But if you’re not at those extremes of the spectrum you may be better served by focusing on making better music, not more.
Exactly. When you’re a beginner you don’t deal with mixing, not to mention mastering. You don’t even create good compositions, because you don’t have a clou what to consider and how to. Instead you’re creating the most simple basic tunes you can imagine. Tunes that an advanced creator would consider as an early WIP at max. Tunes you will never listen to again if you want to listen to music, only if you want to check what you’ve created when you’ve started creating music for comparison or just for some nostalgic impressions. It’s part of the process, but it’s not the result. The result is what you’re capable to create after years of practice, when you know what you’re doing and when you’ve already found your style/s.
It’s possible to create a tune each day, no question about that. And if you’re in a good mood you can create even more than one. But those tunes wouldn’t be neither pretty good nor obviously “finished”. At least if you’re a regular working guy and not a guy who’s got the whole day just for music. But even then those tunes wouldn’t be “good”. Me and many others were used to create music that way for at least 15 years, so I can say it’s just like that. Creating music that way is unthinkable today. A competition that forces you to create a tune in a short amount of time forces you to waste time imo, because you cannot finish the tunes the way you like and to be forced to create something generally kills creativity anyway, which means the result is most likely trash you will never listen to again. So thanks for the hint, but no thanks! Music means expression and passion, not assembly-line work.
On the other side of the coin, waiting for inspiration to strike doesn’t necessarily make for better music either
What’s the saying? inspiration is no substitute for discipline. What I like about these weekly deadlines is that it forces you to be productive, and because of the time constraints, you either get more efficient at what you already know how to do well, or you start thinking laterally and coming up with new methods of production and composition. Since I know that I can’t realistically finish a polished piece in my genre(s) of choice in the span of the typical week, I end up creating “finished” work that is more like a visual artist’s gestural sketch, or a filmmaker’s storyboard. It is “complete” in its way, but also serves as a template or seed for future polished pieces. I dig generative processes too, so these kinds of challenges are useful for me for creating a lot out of a little. I also end up trying out a lot of ideas I wouldn’t otherwise when I don’t have the luxury of no looming deadline.
Honestly, I’d recommend for anyone to try it. I got a lot out of it in '22, and it also encouraged me to finish a bunch of unfinished pieces laying around on my hard drive to meet the weekly deadlines.
But of course @TNT I know that you are bull-headed enough to do exactly as you please! And of course I mean that as a compliment (from one bull head to another)
But a week is really pretty short… I do wish it was bi-weekly beats. Two weeks should be enough time to finish a track while the iron is hot. proper mixing and mastering aside. Of course some music does benefit from a long time sitting alone up on the shelf before completion, but most tracks I think can be done relatively quickly
100%
There is no substitute for showing up and doing the work.
I like your description of it as gestural sketch. The last few months I’ve been posting my hardware jams to YouTube. They are very much gestural sketches. And that’s my weakly goal for this year, a jam a week.
The sad thing is, if I put a track up that I’ve worked on for weeks it gets 28 views. No doubt mostly from posting it here on the forum.
If I post a jam with a populair synth it gets an increasing amount of views. Easily surpassing 300 views and longer viewing durations.
Obviously people are coming to my videos to look at the synths. But maybe, eventually, people will stay for my music.
That is only going to happen if my jams are interesting enough, though. I could probably put out 3 jams a week. But there are not all going to be good enough to capture an audience. Even a good one once a week is a challenge. Still, I’ve got to do all 3 or more jams to get to the good ones. I just don’t think I should share the mediocre ones publicly.
Well, you’re not sitting on a chair staring at the ceiling waiting for inspiration. You go outside an do your stuff, and while you’re doing it you may get inspired. So in fact you’re not waiting for inspiration, instead inspiration will find you when the time has come. No need to work for it, it just happens all the time automatically. And IF you’re inspired of course the music that will be created will be better. Much better!
But this way it’s very likely that the tracks that are created this way will sound more repetitive and boring. I mean, electronic dance music has to have an amount of repetitiveness, but it’s a thin line to keep the track interesting without losing its structure. It can easily become repetitive or too playful (or let’s say unstructured). And who needs more templates or unfinished stuff on the drive? I don’t, there are already hundrets of unfinished and/or unreleased tracks on my drive. No need to produce even more.
Of course, you can bet your ass!
You don’t post for views, do you?
If you want people to stay for your music you gotta finish songs instead of having one jam after another. And you gotta post it on music related websites that also have a community like Soundcloud. YouTube isn’t the right place to gain fans of any homegrown music, it’s simply not specific enough. If at all, on YouTube people will find your stuff only by accident. In contrary to that on specific websites like Soundcloud people will check what else other people who have a similar or even the same taste liked, so it’s more likely to be found by someone who probably will like your stuff. And if you seriously want to gain fans, connections or planning to get “famous”, you gotta spend a lot of time and go for social media. So IF you’re looking for views respectively clicks, don’t bet on YouTube.
This is also my experience But my point is that discipline trumps inspiration 9 times out of 10. exercizing discipline and putting in the work on the regular allows you to capitalize on inspiration when it does come sprinkling it’s magic dust on you
This is a great reason to do weeklybeats. You can finish 52 of the hundreds! The tracks only have to be finished the week they’re posted. They could have been started in 1995
Yes, but in this case “finished” doesn’t mean finished, right? Finished means it’s finished in every aspect, you’re pleased with the composition, mix and master, and you will listen to it again from time to time. In contrary to that “finished” means you’ve somehow completed your composition, whether you’re pleased or not, you’re simply done with this crap. And imho that’s not the goal and not the way a song has to be “finished”. But hey, if this works for you just do it, I’m surely not the one who wants to convince you of my point of view.
If you’re 100% sure nothing can happen! And there’s a catheter just in case.
Finished could mean finished for you Although it would of course depend on how close to done things already are.
same here, bro. I just got a lot of value out of the process, and would encourage others to give it a try. I was definitely glad when it was over, but on balance, 2022 was way more musically productive on a personal level than 23 was for me, in large part because of having that weekly deadline to put out something I was happy with releasing into the wild…
Now how is a catheter supposed to help me to dance?! That’s mainly what I’m using it for…
((())
That’s cool and anyone who has got the time could try it out. Personally I don’t have time anymore for creating music every day and to finish a piece of music every week. Maybe this kind of competition would have been quite nice to have at least 20 years ago, but not today. And as long as I don’t get paid for creating music, there’s no way neither to create music every day nor to create music all day long. This seems to be a competition mainly for professionals or for people who don’t work respectively somehow got a lot of time.
Probably, but that’s surely not the only thing you need it for. If you would have got a catheter and you’re about to move in specific ways, the catheter would help you to move in other directions and the result would be dance moves no one has seen before. You could become a star. You could test it by participating in AGT, I bet you’d get the golden buzzer if you start to dance while having a catheter. On principle!
I don’t post to get no views. I’ve been a “ninja artist” for most of my life. With my work going unseen and unheard. Primarily because I didn’t post it anywhere, ever. But I’m tired of that. So yes, I do post for views.
However, I do create for myself. So whatever I make, I make for myself. I’m not catering to an audience, even if I had one.
I’m sure that is true, but that’s not my experience. Like I said, I’ve got the most response from strangers via YT. My SC interactions is mostly from people from this forum. Which is cool! But it isn’t the same as random people finding my music. Which is what I’m looking for right now.
Don’t underestimate the super power of not having a social life. But the greatest time saver of all is not having kids. Saves a whole lot of money, too.
The way you two can butt heads reminds me of bickering show hosts. Like Jeremy Clarkson vs James May & Richard Hammond on Top Gear / The Grand Tour. Or Mark Kermode & Simon Mayo. Or, I don’t know. Just that things rub against each other and there are sparks but there is no malice.
I’m still a “ninja artist”. No one can find me except the ones who already know me or who find me by accident. No one can find someone calling himself “TNT”, that’s one of the reasons why I selected this pseudonym (but of course there are also several personal meanings in terms of that shortcut). I didn’t post my music for 20 years anywhere (ok, internet didn’t exist within almost half of those years) except a single official release in 1994 on a Techno compilation. Since 2012 I’m regularly posting on Soundcloud without being active online, which means I just post and that’s it. Nevertheless some people have found and liked my stuff and from then on my followers SLOWLY increased over the recent 12 years. I didn’t work for it at all, it just happened. And I’m 100% sure it only happened because I’m posting finished SONGS regularly. If you would post finished songs regularly you would gain clicks and followers, too. And I’m pretty sure your song on YouTube doesn’t have that much clicks not only because YouTube isn’t specific enough (I don’t have much clicks on YouTube, too), but also because it’s an exception. It’s a single song and all the rest are hardware jams. If you’re posting hardware jams all the time no one would expect a finished song, so people who are interested in music respectively songs won’t take a look at your account because there are no songs. Instead you’re getting clicks by people who probably are interested in watching hardware at work, and this means that most likely people who are producing themselves are watching your videos, but not people who want to listen to music.
That’s right. Who wants to have kids in a world like this? I wouldn’t want them to go through the same as me. And for many people it’s not affordable having kids. BUT that’s the reason why Europeans will disappear. Arabs and Africans will take over, it’s already happening.
Jeremy Clarkson is very likeable. And you gotta have respect for other opinions and ways to get things done. At least as long as the argumentation makes sense and the one who’s arguing has already shown that he’s not a phony.
, might just fill the slower weeks with fieldrecordings. Not much else you can do around here with the lockdown(s), excuse for recording hikes.
But my point is that discipline trumps inspiration 9 times out of 10. exercizing discipline and putting in the work on the regular allows you to capitalize on inspiration when it does come sprinkling it’s magic dust on you 
))