My Challenge

Get inspired!

I’ve been casually writing music for several years now, but due to stress at work/school I’ve never had time to focus on writing an album.

When I heard about JetBlue’s All You Can Jet pass, I realized that being in the air is the perfect place to focus! When flying, I’m disconnected from the world, so I can’t get distracted from work and school  emails/phone calls.

I feel really inspired while staring outside at the beautiful sky, so I decided that I needed to challenge myself creatively with all of these hours in the air.

I’m challenging myself to write and record a simple song idea on every flight I fly this month. Naturally, all of these will be very “MIDI” sounding and poorly mixed due to the roaring jet engine next door, but I hope to re-record my favorites once I’m back at my home studio in October.

Here are the rules I’ve set for myself for this challenge:

• No sampled loops, ever! - I’ve never really been a fan of them, where’s the fun in using other artists’ rhythms/melodies?
• My laptop is my only instrument – all songwriting must be done on the laptop, and all keyboarding must be done on, well… the keyboard.
• I must post something after each flight – regardless of how rough of a cut it is, it must be posted. The pressure’s on! It can be improved at a later date and reposted, but the key objective is to capture the ideas, not to necessarily make them sound good.

I hope you enjoy the sketches as I release them, and continue to follow me for the next few months as I finish producing them! It should be an interesting insight into how the songwriting process works.

Follow me here, and on Twitter: @blakeeb