I'm a witness, miracles do happen! I'm done this week's challenge hours ahead of the deadline, and it's all thanks to co-writing. First, allow me to outline this week's challenge- we had 2 to choose from, or we could do both: the first one was WRITING FOR RADIO (link here) and the second one was WRITE A HOLIDAY HIT (link here).
While I would have loved the challenge of writing a holiday song, when Michael Proudfoot approached me to do a co-write for the radio edit challenge, I was all for it. He already had a lyric idea, so we went with that- which meant my main contribution was melody. This was my first co-write experience where one person focused on lyric and one on melody. It was fabulous!
Firstly, Michael got the ball rolling by having a draft lyric ready at the beginning of the week- he also kept checking in so I felt accountable in getting my contributions to him in a timely manner. It's great not to feel the pressure of being totally last-minute. It also helped that we are both located in Toronto and could meet up in person- which we did initially, although after that it was exclusively by email, phone and Facebook.
We went back and forth in refining the lyric, melody and chords during the week- then once we had enough for me to record a draft lead vocal, I did that and Michael started on the production side. He came up with some great ideas- then once we had finalized the song and structure, I re-recorded the vocals and he made finals adjustments to the production, as well as trimming the song for radio edit purposes. I think editing for radio proved to be the easiest part of the challenge for us, perhaps because the form of our song was relatively easy to pare down to the required 3:30 time.
Here is the radio edit of our joint production: GET IT RIGHT THIS TIME
I think our skills were quite complementary overall, which is perhaps why I feel it went so well. I will look forward to trying to write a Holiday Hit once this challenge is done, just for the fun of it. For now, I'm struggling to have something done for the final Matt Dusk challenge that was issued in week 1 and is due tomorrow- so back to the salt mines I go. Blog soon,
J.