Neil Spencer Bruce

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A new challenge - Piece a (week)day

As some of you may remember, between 24th August 2011 and 31st December 2013 I wrote a piece of music everyday (or towards the end also expanded that to doing something creativity, be it drawing or photography). The piece a day challenge was born out of a life situation where things weren't too great and everything was all rather negative, my thought in developing the challenge was firstly to do something creative and hopefully get into a 'creative routine' where creating became a habit (it did!) and also trying to do something positive and creative in amongst all the negativity.

Needless to say, I completed the challenge and it was one of the most inspiring, thought provoking, liberating (and difficult at times) things I have done. It also showed me that the only thing that holds one back from being creative is oneself! Anyway, roll forward 11 months, through a year which to be honest has been one of the worse I have ever experienced for some many reasons, I have found that once again there is a lot of negativity and bad stuff happening. My first thought about dealing with this now is to rekindle the Piece a day challenge and get creative again. I also found that after nearly a year and a half of being creative, since I stopped I have done very very little (okay pretty much nothing!), so I am also hoping that this will get me focused to get a couple of big projects actually completed. These projects include a new Light B4 Sound album (pretty much written!) and a 5 track guitar EP (half written!).

The goal now is very similar, but with a couple of small changes. I am going to start today, 13-11-13 and go through until 31-12-13, so just over a month really. The biggest difference this time is that I am only going to write pieces on weekdays (Monday to Friday), why....well I am still doing a course at Berklee and I have assignments to do at the weekends, so I don't really want to overload myself (with work as well!). The other rules stay the same

The rules I set myself were as follows

  1. Piece has to be longer than 30 seconds.
  2. Can’t be an existing piece or idea.
  3. Can be music or sound art or soundscape.
  4. Has to be uploaded by midnight on the day.

So without much further ado, here is the first piece today and yes I have been listening to a bit too much Paul Hardcastle this morning!!

Enjoy

Peace

Neil