Community Challenge 41 | Make your own limitations and stick to them (Patreon)

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Hi Everyone,

Community Challenges are (usually) a weekly reminder that music is a language. Learning to speak a language involves crafting your own sentences and paragraphs from your own thoughts - not memorizing travel phrases!

The same goes for being a musician. It's one thing to say "I understand what is happening in this song" or "I can play this solo note for note," but it's an entirely different thing to say "I'm going to use what I've learned to create something new."

Community Challenges are welcome to everyone. You can participate at whatever level you're able. If you want to write a whole song and record it in your DAW, go for it! If you don't know what that means, you're welcome here too! Write a little 8 second something and record it to your phone. You don't HAVE to share, because the main point of the community challenge is to get my Patrons to create music once a week. 

If you would like to share your creation, you may do so on this community forum post.

This week's challenge is Make your own limitations and stick to them

This challenge is a bit of a tightrope. The goal is to FIRST sit down and decide on some limitations for yourself. This could be something technique focused like:
• Only ever play two notes at a time
• Play as many open notes as possible at all times
• Only use bar chords
• Write a melody that emphasizes hammer-ons

Or you could go music-theory focused:
• Only use minor chords
• Only use major chords
• Write in a specific mode
• Implement fifths and major sixths into your melody

Or you could go emotion-based:
• Write something sad
• Write something happy, with a sad section
• Write something hopeful

The idea is that you come up with parameters/limitations for yourself FIRST, and THEN you start writing. Again, you don't have to write something difficult - it could be simply a chord progression or a single-note melody. But you must try as hard as you can to fulfill the limitations you've put on yourself.

Have fun! And remember, you're not setting out to create the masterpiece of your life, you're just practicing creating your own music.