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Scott Paul Johnson
Scott Paul Johnson

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Community Challenge 100 | Work on a previous challenge (pt1)

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Hi Everyone,
Personally, I'd like to spend more time working on previous challenges, and I'd like to help you navigate that process as well. Community Challenge 100 represents a little bit of a shift, where I'd like to have you work on a previous challenge more often and develop your toolbox for developing, refining, and editing your ideas. Sometimes you write something and think "now what?" If you haven't written a full song on your musical journey yet, the stuff you learn from these "work on a previous challenge" lessons should be pretty helpful toward that goal.

And of course, you don't HAVE to write a whole song to participate in any Community Challenge - it's more about honing your skills for whatever role you prefer. Many great musicians are PART of a writing team. You don't have to do everything yourself. I just want to make the resources available for those of you who are interested in rounding out your skillset.

I spent over 3 hours working on my initial idea from Community Challenge 99 | Write something stripped down and I covered so many concepts that I decided to break it into multiple parts. The initial idea was just a fragment of a verse idea with guitar and background vocals. In 3 hours I wrote a prechorus and chorus: both a chord progression and a melody, then I mapped out the dummy lyrics so I could have a starting point to write real lyrics. Then I went through and refined the drum parts, the bassline, the guitar parts - I added some keys and thought through the dynamics of the song and how the instruments can help the intensity rise and fall.

In this part, we're mainly focused on how to write more parts when you only have a verse, and how to organize and arrange your b.s. lyrics to help you prepare to write real lyrics.

I hope you enjoy this and I'm excited to introduce the other parts of this challenge. I also kind of like how this song is turning out and I've been meaning to do some more lessons on lyric writing, so I'll try to finish this song and show you my whole process.

Post what you've been working on, how it's going, before and after, etc to this Community Forum post.

Keep in mind you can work on any previous Community Challenge at any time.

Comments

Glad to hear that!

Scott Paul Johnson

I really enjoyed watching the process!! Very insightful! looking forward to the other parts

Julian Aira

Woa! amazing. Thank u for teaching us!! Super excited for the next steps

Erin


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