Has perfectionism ever robbed you of creative energy? Joel Falconer used to regularly write and record songs in an hour of less. Yes, that’s starting with a blank sheet and ending with a finished recording in less than an hour! In this week’s Premium tutorial he tells us in detail how that practice got him out of a creative rut, and helped him optimize his creative process.

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Writing and recording a song in an hour or less is a daunting task. Musicians spend weeks, months and sometimes even years working on their songs. One needs only to look at Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy to see how far a musician will go to perfect their work—an album that was in development for at least nine years according to most accounts.

Unfortunately, the level of perfectionism most musicians bring to their work can cause a myriad of problems. Perfectionism can completely block an artist out of the creative zone, or render them unable to release anything they’ve actually finished recording. Coming up with new songs becomes an emotionally stressful event, and more than a few musicians have thrown in the towel altogether because the ghost of perfectionism haunts them.

Several years ago, this attitude towards music became a problem for the band I fronted. It got to the point where we hadn’t written anything new in a couple of months and were just going over and over our existing songs. One day, perhaps the day I officially lost my sanity, I said “That’s it—we’re going to write a song and record a basic version in the next hour, tops.”

Here’s an example of one of Joel’s one-hour songs. (Warning: This song contains two words of profanity.)

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Table of Contents

• Setting the Bar (Really, Really Low)
• Getting Fast Inspiration
• Process is Everything
• Structure
• What Do You Do Next?
• Taking Song Sketches to the Next Stage

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