Daily Creation Challenge

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A new challenge - Piece a (week)day

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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

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Creative Motivation

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It is hard to believe that I only stopped my Piece a day/Daily Creation challenge less than a month and a half ago. I was producing a piece of music everyday for over a year, and now since I have stopped I haven't produced a single tune!! It is pretty scandalous really, all the usual excuses start creeping back in....too busy, too tired, too whatever! It is pretty terrible really, it is no excuse! For me it shows what a valuable exercise piece a day was, forcing myself to do something everyday. It draws parallels with exercise I guess and all those other things it is easy to put off rather than do....guitar practice, language learning etc....such as shame that 'work' work sucks everything out of us to the point where doing creative activities or activities beneficial to our health, wellbeing, further development takes a momentous struggle or crazy daily challenge to do?I just stumbled across a couple of pieces I quite like from that period....Enjoy!andPeaceNeil

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Daily Creation Challenge : The Whole Lot

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As you many know, last year I undertook the challenge of being creative every day, this started back in August 2011 with my piece a day challenge and then morphed into the daily creation challenge. Well, I have just gotten around to compiling all the music and photographs into one big piece. The total running time of the music is exactly 2 hours!! (I am pretty impressed that I had written that much, and it just goes to show what you can do when you put your mind to it). There is a pretty wide range of material, and some of it is a little bit on the experimental side, but hey, that's what I like! It is also funny how some of it (to me) sounds a little bit too close to the soundtrack to The Social Network by Trent Reznor and Aticus Ross (oops!)It is interesting listening back to it all, as it certainly reflects my moods and thoughts across the whole year, in fact it is quite an emotional experience. I haven't found a way to easily compile all of the titles of all of the pieces, and I actually think at the moment I don't want to do that as it might be a bit too emotional, as they certainly reflected my feelings on each of the days!So here are all the pictures, accompanied with the first days of the challenge. If I can find a way to post a 2 hour mp3 of all the tunes then I will (any suggestions?)It was a blast, and it is now a kick up the backside to get the next music projects finished!PeaceNeil

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2013 - What is the challenge now?

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Well seeming how I don't have my piece a day any more, I am going to be focusing on new challenges for the New Year and I will be writing more about this in the next day or two, once a few things are finalised. But, some of them include releasing the new Light B4 Sound CD project, finish writing and record a guitar EP under the name of Neil Spencer Bruce (watch this space) and also engage more with my online community and friends. This means I will hopefully be posting lots of helpful videos and posts on things which I think will help and inform you guys out there, of course I am open to suggestions of any questions you need help with. So to start with here is a link to a very useful guitar lesson, which might help you when trying to formulate a plan for practicing in the new year.Interms of a daily challenge, I am now setting myself the target of tweeting a useful tweet everyday for a year, of course you can be the judge of how useful it actually is! This will also be incorporated into a daily blog post here! It is based on what the ethos of this blog is.....thoughts on a creative life.....So here we go again :)Enjoy and have a fantastic 2013.PeaceNeil

A year (and more) in music! Piece a Day / Daily Creation Challenge - Day 365 - Finishing and Starting on the perfect note

So! Here is the final piece!! I did it! We are here, I have reached my goal and well what have I learnt? We the simple answer is *SO* much!! I don't think any of my thoughts have changed that much as to when I wrote this piece about the initial piece a day project. Can I believe I have done it? Well, yes and no! I know I can be a stubborn bugger when I set my mind to something, and I don't like to fail. But it has been so much more that this, it is part of my life now, I am not sure how I will feel when it isn't there, it has been challenging, but in a few ways I didn't expect, rather than those I did (i.e. technology failures) it was more to do with the frustrations of services (broadband) and sometime the lack of time, ending up doing it right at the last minute. But not once did I suffer from creative block, for some reason, this didn't rear it's ugly head. I think this is important lesson to take from all this, when you know you have to do something, you do it, when you have time to procrastinate, you do. Time is your friend....or rather lack of it!! The question is now....what next? Well I have a few ideas and I will announce them on the 1st of January 2013, along with a few other big plans for the year!It has been a blast, it is so interesting to look back at the pictures and the music and remember the emotions, the up's the down's but more importantly than that, the experience of the year itself. I am shocked at how quickly it has gone, the gig on New Year's Eve 2012 with Groovething where I took the picture of the fireworks, before I began this crazy project, actually really only seems like a few days away.I will be compiling all the music and images into one big 2012 montage and it is certainly going to be interesting viewing. I am also looking forward to compiling all the the titles of all of the pieces into one essay and it should give a clear indication of 2012 in word format!Thanks to all those who believed I could do it and have supported me all along, you know who you are! I hope that this challenge will inspire others to try something similar, because it isn't a challenge at all, it is a way to relax, a way to be creative for you for a certain period everydayall I can say right now as it is rather emotional is that if I can do it....you can do it...I encourage you, do something for you every day....and see where it takes you, the sky is the limit!Thanks for all your supportPeace, love and good happiness stuff and Happy 2013Neil