Week 1 of FAWM is over and my GOODNESS what a week it's been. As of yesterday (Feb 9), I have completed 10 of my 14 tracks. So I'm on pace to make my 14 tracks by next weekend - and could have as many as 28 songs by the time this is done. That's a pretty cool place to be! But I've seen a few people taking the challenge who are over 100 songs already. I followed one guy and my feed is just full of his songs. I wonder if those songs ever become something other than a post on the FAWM website?
The FAWM community is so cool. Very supportive and creative and free from the spectre of sponsorship or labels. It's community supported which means no advertising or cluttered website. It's just community and that is so cool to me!
I have run into a few things that make me wonder. For example, I've run across a few songs that just have to be AI. I could be wrong, but the lyrics just have an AI quality to them and there are some songs that are being produced with a very high production value very quickly. It's either AI or someone has been doing work outside of the challenges. And that's not to totally rip on AI. Especially if someone was using it for ideas or maybe they're a lyricist but not musician (or musician and not lyricist), I'd understand using AI to bridge that skill gap. But these sound to me like the songs you get when using one of those AI apps where you ask it to write a country song about making peanut butter in a bullet train.
Not that this affects what I'm doing in any way. I took the challenge for my own purposes so cheating by working outside the confines of the challenge, using AI or even plagarizing (unless it's part of a prompt) only cheats me. Still - it can be hard to measure my songs that I wrote and learned to play in like 60 minutes and recorded on my phone when they're put up against a song with million dollar production and all the technical tools. I'd rather follow the rules and fail than cheat and get the trophy. I did this to learn and grow, not for accolades.
On the subject of accolades, while I'm not anxious to share my creations of this week, I do have them in one place. While I started the month just sharing my songs off my Google Drive, I quickly noticed that people were uploading their music directly to FAWM (a donation perk) or using Soundcloud or Bandcamp to host their music. I'm not quite in the place where I want to put my stuff up on Bandcamp but I think Soundcloud is a reasonable place to start posting stuff and I can start building out some followers on that platform for the challenge. So I did!
If you'd like to check out the songs I've been coming up with and don't want to go through my FAWM profile page, head on over to my brand new SoundCloud page and follow along there! It doesn't come with the same liner notes and lyrics that my FAWM page does but you can add my track to playlists or listen to them all at once. I will note- I'm not keeping these track up for very long. They'll be taken down and replaced with other recordings or demos as we go along. But for now, hear some of the roughest early shots I have!
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