Creating with Constraints: A Sound A Day

Dedicating 365 days to create and share a piece of sound is no easy feat. Starting today and next week, meet some SoundCloud creators who have dedicated their time to sharing sounds on a daily or weekly rhythm. What they’ve learned is that creating and uploading a piece of work to SoundCloud every day or week has both challenging and rewarding effects.

Billy Mays III creates instrumental music as Infinite Third. Beginning in May 2012, Billy started Daily(Drops) to write a piece of music every day and upload it to SoundCloud.

“I’ve always had this dream of just being secluded somewhere making music every day and this was my way of doing it. Even without the full-on ‘seclusion,’ I found a way to make music every day and that’s all I really wanted out of it,” Billy says.

Daily(Drops) helped him progress as a musician. “I got to get a lot of ideas out of my system and got to experiment with many new techniques that I might not have discovered otherwise. Now that I’ve accomplished one year of daily music, I can be free of the ‘daily’ part and really start to focus on developing these new directions my sound has taken. I’ve also built my discipline with this and feel the strongest I’ve felt yet in terms of being an all-around creator,” Billy says.

Billy encourages taking risks like this to develop your style and sounds: “Be okay with whatever happens. At first, it may feel difficult to truly trust the muse but, over time, it will feel more and more natural to take risks and experiment. The key is realizing that not everything has to be a masterpiece. Some of the most beautiful pieces of art retain an element of rawness. So-called perfectionism can be useful but can also be a detriment to progression.”

Next week, we’ll be profiling more creators in the community who have embarked on the challenge of creating sounds in a disciplined interval of time. Stay tuned on the blog, Tumblr and Twitter.