Need creative accountability in your songwriting? Well, here it is!

I’m beyond excited to start on this journey together with you guys! Over the next 10 weeks I’ll be providing you with a weekly exercise that will serve as a song starter and will help you level up your skills when it comes to your lyrical writing, your musical understanding and your ability to work with your digital audio workstation (or DAW for short). At the same time, this practice will serve as a way for you to connect to your creativity and get to know yourself through your creations!

Here’s what we’ll do:

• Every Thursday, I’ll be posting a video with a new exercise
• You’ll have a week to finish your song
• We’ll keep it going for 10 weeks and you’ll end up with 10 songs by the end of the year!

What does “finishing a song” mean?

There’s no need to stress over getting a song release-ready. All we’re going for is a demo that contains the soul of what your song is. This could just be a verse and a chorus, or you could go all out and make a whole song. But in any case, it would still need editing.

The point of this challenge is for you to get creative without editing yourself for 10 weeks. Once the 10 weeks are over, you can then pick the songs you like, and edit and polish them for release. But for now, let your ego go and just have fun!

The foundation for this challenge

The book I’m basing this challenge on is Ra Wilson’s book, Write 47 Songs. If you haven’t heard of it yet, I highly recommend you get it. As the name says, the book gives you 47 exercises that serve as a practical roadmap for your artist development through implementation and self-exploration. So it’s a highly practical guide for artists who are just starting out in their songwriting journey, and it’s packed with exercises that are designed to help you put in the practice and level up in all the ways I mentioned before – from your lyric writing to your musical understanding, to developing yourself as an artist in terms of your sound and your artistic voice. All of that through implementation. Because it’s what you DO that counts. When you learn to play an instrument for example, you go to lessons and you spend most of the time DOING. Songwriting should be no different.

If you’re on board with that and are ready to join the challenge, here are some things to prep before we start:

• Get your creative space in order so that you’ll be ready to get on it with your DAW
• Pick a day and time slot on which you’ll be writing your song and put it in your calendar
• Get an ideas diary – this can be digital or pen and paper to capture ideas whenever they come up.
• And the last thing that isn’t a must-have, but it can really help to get you going with your songwriting, is a DAW template in which you have a selection of your favorite virtual instruments ready to go.

Wanna join alongside a group of artists?

If you’ve ever made a purchase with us (like joined any of our bootcamps, or got Ra’s book) you also get access to our free WhatsApp community where our artists hang out and support each other. There you can share what you make within a safe space and listen to what others share as well. This will make it way more fun and really help you with accountability.

If you decide to get the book (or you’ve already joined a bootcamp with us), be sure to send me an email so I can give you access to the community! My email address is sonj@artistspringboard.com

That’s it! I’m here, if you have any questions (you can use my email). Otherwise I’ll see you on Thursday to get started on SONG 1 🥰

See you then!

Sonj