Music experiment: I made 10 house track ideas with 20 minutes dedicated to each track.

In order to foster my creative spark, I often set myself difficult challenges. However, this format forced my creativity and skills to its boundaries. In this short piece, I’ll talk about what I learned.

What was the challenge?

The challenge was to create about 16 bars of a house track in 20 minutes. I did that 10 times to test my resourcefulness, consistency and creativity in general. It was inspired largely by FACT’s Against the Clock, which illustrates how more seasoned producers than I can churn out some gold-dust in only 600 seconds. I’ve been glued to them for years.

How did I start? I set myself some rules

I used Google’s timer throughout this entire exercise. I gave myself ten minutes composing elements in Ableton’s Session View. My next timer was set for 5 minutes, which was about turning the elements into some kind of an arrangement. My final 5 minutes was dedicated to doing EQ, Panning and general levels of the mix.

So, all in all, that’s twenty minutes committed to each song. The ideal scenario would be 10 x 16 bars, which takes 200 minutes in total, with a real view in the future to making some of these into proper tracks of their own accord.

The Approach

I have made music using Ableton for about 12 years so, naturally, I have my go-to software instruments and approaches. However, part of my aim was to delve into parts of Ableton I maybe didn’t always venture into.

Whilst I needed some rules and conventions to make sure I could rapidly get stuff done, I thought I’d make it doubly difficult by launching some instruments and Max for Live Devices that I had never used before (a questionable and laughable decision in retrospect).

The Process

My process was a bit mad really, as I had barely any preconceptions of what a song might be like before I started. I would simply start doing something at random and find that it governed the rest of my workflow.

I did the first four songs, all back to back, with occasional stopping for coffee. That wasn’t exceptionally difficult, as it was only 80 minutes of my time.

The final 6 were done about a week later or something, all in a row. England had just got to the semi-finals of the World Cup. Due to the country being in utter pandemonium, I wasn’t really making music for a week and was riding the crest of a wonderful wave — football is my other passion in life (it’s coming home).

Did it meet expectations?

Sort of — I totally valued each second and predictably was left wanting once I hit the end timer. I didn’t like some songs a great deal, but I’ve only wasted 20 minutes of my life exploring that idea. I could effectively leave that forever and not be too precious about it. However, I’m going to try and make an album from all of these tracks, so that sentiment isn’t quite true.

Because I had barely any time available, I also had to mix in context. That is, I spent barely any time whatsoever listening to elements in isolation, because I couldn’t afford to.

Whilst I only had 5 minutes for a mixdown (and the real thing is a scientific art in itself), it set priorities for me again in the time allotted. This was simply to get everything balanced in terms of loudness, and to attempt to give each element it’s own space in the mix through subtractive EQ and some pan.

More predictably, I absolutely loved it. I got a real adrenaline rush from time being an all-too-scarce commodity. It was an exceptionally difficult challenge and I can only thanks 12 years’ experience and intuitively trusting the process for getting something workable out there.

Overall, I have spent 200 minutes of my life creating 10 prototypes to move forward with — so I’m pretty pleased with that.

What will I do next?

I’m going to aim to turn all of these ideas into fully fledged songs. I’m working on an EP at the moment, but after that I’ll make it happen.

In the spirit of this first part, I’ll take all ten songs, and set a time limit on creating their component parts. Then I’ll give myself barely enough time to arrange them into something a little longer and more listenable.

This formula isn’t clarified yet, but I think I’ll go for this:

Perc: 10 mins

Bass: 10 mins

Pads: 10 mins

Melodies: 10 mins

FX: 10 mins

Arrangement: 10 mins

Mixdown: 10 mins

Total: 90mins (15 hours for 10 tracks)

To conclude, I think that this is a perfect task to try out across two days of a wet weekend (frequent in England). Watch this space!