February Banjo Tune Challenge.
Right now I’m challenging myself to write 29 tunes for the month of February—why pass up the opportunity to squeeze one more tune out in honor of leap year, am I right?
The idea behind this is to kickstart my creativity by forcing myself to spend some time each day coming up with a new composition on the banjo that hasn’t been done quite the same by any other player.
The rules are that 1.) the tune doesn’t even have to be good or anything I’d ever try to record, and 2.) it has to be a complete idea. If the tune doesn’t come to a resolution or circle back to the “A” part, then it’s not a tune, is it?
I have so many half-finished banjo tunes lurking in the dark recesses of my computer’s hard drive, and it’s frustrating to get writers block and not follow the idea through to the end. It’s time to change that!
In January of this year I wrote 8 banjo tunes, which is the most productive I’ve ever been in writing. Some are good (to my ear), and some are not, but I’m proud to say that they’re all my own creations.
The most surprising part has been where the tunes have gone once I started following the thread. Many are standard amalgamations of Earl Scruggs vernacular, single string, and melodic/Bill Keith style ideas. One sounds like an arcade game theme, and another sounds akin to a composition Bach might have written when he was 5 years old!
Some mornings an idea will come very readily, like it was given to me rather than excavated from my mind. All I really have to do then is write it down before the idea slips away into that familiar oblivion of forgetfulness.
Other times it’s quite a slog, and I find myself reaching for anything to just finish the idea and close the page. It can be discouraging and painful to write something that I don’t ultimately enjoy, but either way I’m MUCH more fulfilled as a creative to get something on the page.
The ultimate point is that, as creatives (in whatever we do) we have to put in the hard work to CREATE SOMETHING NEW. I subscribe to the notion that the harder you work, the luckier you are in this realm. Maybe some day I’ll have a similar experience to Bela Fleck when the melody for “Big Country” just came to him out of the blue?
Either way, I’ll continue to make something new each day and not overthink the process. Creativity is a slippery eel in murky water—but if you don’t fish, you can’t catch anything. Keep an eye out on my Youtube and Instagram for my posts of some of these ideas. Good things are coming!
