What is Jamnuary?
2025 will be the third year that I have been hosting and participating in an annual songwriting challenge over at Seed to Stage. We call it "Jamnuary", our own spin on the popular music event observed by many music communities thoughout the Internet. In our version, each day for two weeks, all participants write a short piece of music. There isn't a concrete expectation for the format of this music. The real goal is to simply put the time into your DAW and get creative; whether that means experimenting with songwriting, beat making or simply creating sound design experiments. It's really up to the individual musicians to make a daily choice create what they want and put in however much time they want or are able.
This exercise in simply creating something musical each day, whether you're a beginner or a more experienced producer, is an extremely potent creative act. Anyone who is trying to step up their music production game to attempt this exercise at least once or twice a year. Along with being a fun way to express yourself creatively, putting in the reps for a month is an amazing way of developing your technical skills quickly. Not only is it a fantastic way to explore tools, sounds and new ways of working; but you may find the reaching a creative flow state consistently becomes easier over time when you're consistently putting the time in.
Activating and nourishing that creative neural circuit again and again makes it an easier part of yourself to tap into again and again. And at the end of the two weeks, you'll have a collection of starting points to come back to or turn into complete tracks and resources later.
Whats more, when you do these marathon exercises occasionally, your output can serve as a measure of your own technical and creative growth since the previous exercise. It can be a real inspiration and confidence boost to look at what you've created and see for yourself the stark contrast with your work from only a few months before.
Here are 10 creative strategies that make creating new music every day sustainable, fun and explorative. I've been refining these strategies since I started taking part in Jamuary back in 2021.
1. Confront the Blank Canvas
The creative flow state is not unlike a muscle - if you don't exercise, it atrophies over time. If you haven't opened your DAW in awhile, you may find that the blank canvas syndrome hits pretty hard in those first few daily sessions. The blank canvas can be an especially massive roadblock for blossoming producers - for whatever reason, early on in their musical journey, they walk away for a few months and feel like their starting from scratch again when they brush off the dust and get back to it eventually.
Even as someone who has put years into making music, it still feels like this for me when life prevents me from getting back into Ableton for a while. And it's absolutely crucial to push through this initial wall of doubt and sluggishness if you haven't grappled with it before. In my personal experience from doing these creative endurance runs, there is usually a very noticable period for the first few days when I tend to feel like I'm stuck perpetually 'warming up'.
Throughout the exercise, some days are going to feel very natural and easy. As though the idea rolls off your tongue. Other days are going to feel more labored. But at the end of the day, time spent not making decisions is time that is wasted. Instead of worrying over creating the best you've ever done, instead just focus on experimenting and seeing each idea to it's logical end.
Each day, start by giving yourself 10–15 minutes to create without judgment and save whatever you make. Maybe what you've come up with in this starting phase is a drum loop, or a chord progression. Maybe it's a full blown 8 or 16 bar loop. But whatever form this initial idea takes can serve as an anchor point for the rest of what you create in a given day. Committing to developing whatever you've come up with already acts as a helpful creative restraint. Whatever your second step is - it should be in service to the development to the core idea you've already put together. Maybe this initial kernal of an idea is messy. Maybe it's weird. That's not just okay - it's desireable in the sense that now you are forced to think reactively and move forward.
Your second step and many steps after can simply be to focus on giving clarity and direction your existing idea. No matter which direction you're developing your idea it's all but guaranteed that the second decision you make - "how can I make this better?" will come easier than the answer to the question "What should I do to get started?. So instead of laboring forever over what you should do - just get in there and explore and have fun. Jamuary is about consistency and quantity, not about creating 31 of the best tracks ever made.
Alternatively, consider using a set of prompts. Or at least consider having some on hand for that days that getting started feels especially laborious. I'm a fan of Brian Funk's Book "5-Minute Music Producer: 365 Music Making Activities for Better Songwriting and Music Production". The prompts throughout the book are digestable, direct and not very time consuming by design. And they work great to just give some direction to your jam for the day.
2. Refine Your Process as You Go
This process of rapid prototyping a bunch of music in a short period of time is a perfect chance to examine your process, workflow, and tools that you reach for often. During the exercise, you can think about the parts of your creative process that feel the easiest and most laborious. Keep an eye out for the habitual roadblocks and bottlenecks that you put in front of yourself. As you advance through the two weeks, it's a great time to try and make incremental tweaks to your process to make things run smoother by the day.
We can take this idea a step further and actually commit to those incremental tweaks by saving them to Live's default set. Outside of Jamuary, I usually prefer starting new sets from a completely blank slate with nothing added. However, when I'm working through a two-week challenge or Jamuary session, one of the things I like to do is create a growing starting point using a constrained set of tools that I want to learn and tweaks that I thought were successful in previous days' sketches.
The goal with these refinements and tweaks to the default set is to reduce the time spent not 'in motion' actually creating music and reducing the psychological drag before take off into the creative flow state. Optimizing your environment as you go and creating a few restraints in the tools that you're using cuts out a lot time spent doubting your choices and endlessly weighing options. The second the environment loads up you can get started exploring and creating immediately. A few brief moments of setup time or aimlessly dragging in VSTs could add up to hours of time over the course of two weeks or a month. Having such a clearly defined starting point definitely made it easier to hit the ground running each day. There wasn't time wasted wondering if it was right—the mindset became, "this is what I'm working with, don't second guess it.”
3. Choose Tools You Want to Learn
Making some practical decisions about focusing on a limited number of tools can create a lot of clarity in your process each day. If you're a less experienced producer, picking a proprietary synth and a few effects within your DAW and really digging into the manual or a good video lesson for 5 minutes each day before you start can provide a ton of inspiration just from learning th core tools in detail.
More experienced producers might have a stack of VSTs they've been meaning to make time for.
4. Leave Your Expectations at the Door
- Define manageable goals: Aim to create an 8- or 16-bar loop or experiment with a single sound design concept.
- Detach from results: Treat each day’s output as a stepping stone rather than a finished product.
- Celebrate small wins: Completing even a simple idea builds momentum.
5. Reference the Music that Inspires You
Listen
This one may seem obvious, but taking time to listen to the music that made you want to create in the first place can stoke the creative fire in a powerful way. Take time to actively listen to the music that made you want to create in the first place. If you're ever in a place where the blank canvas is staring back at you, consider taking a moment to just listen carefully to some piece of music that made you excited in the first place.
Use Reference Tracks
Better still, working with this music as a reference track in your own set can be a simple and effective way of keeping inspiration a button press away. Currently, I have Ableton's default template set up to include a channel to drop in reference material. I've also mapped that channels solo button to a hotkey which means I can switch back and forth between listening to my own material and the reference track with a single keystroke. I don't use a reference track every day during Jamuary. But, on the days that I'm not really sure what to do or how to get started, I'll drop in a WAV file from something I've bought from Bandcamp. I build up a playlist of the tracks that catch my ear and try to replicate or reproduce elements from those tracks that I think are interesting. Usually it doesn't take more than a few moments of this to send me off to the races making something that may sound completely different from the reference material. This method is a great way of getting the creative juices flowing or having a constant source of musical food-for-thought.
6. Set Meaningful Goals for Yourself
- Skill development: Focus on improving a specific aspect, like sound design or mixing.
- Tool mastery: Dedicate sessions to exploring new plugins or instruments.
- Creative habit-building: Use this time to establish a sustainable daily routine.
7. Stay Organized and Leave Behind Notes as You Create
Creating notes about the music that you create. Keeping this material organized can also yield a lot of musical sketches - threads that can be woven into later projects that need fresh ideas or B-sections. Put your keys and tempos in the file names and it becomes quite easy to pull in relevant material from other sets and projects.
- Label files consistently: Include key information like tempo, key, and date in project names.
- Take notes: Document your thought process, challenges, and breakthroughs for future reference.
- Create a library: Save unique sounds, patterns, or loops in a dedicated folder for easy access later.
8. Revisit Daily Jams and Examine what Can be Reused (And How)
Identify standout ideas: After a week or two, review your work to find loops or motifs worth developing.
- Combine elements: Experiment with layering ideas from different days to create something new.
- Repurpose creatively: Use older material as starting points or inspiration for fresh sketches.
9. Establish Patterns, Then Break Them
- Work within structures: Start by sticking to familiar forms, like verse-chorus arrangements.
- Introduce variation: Gradually subvert expectations by altering rhythms, melodies, or textures.
- Experiment intentionally: Dedicate sessions to exploring “what-if” scenarios, like reversing roles of instruments or applying extreme effects.
10. Show Up Every Day (That You Can)
- Commit to a schedule: Block time each day for music, even if it’s just 20–30 minutes.
- Be flexible: If life gets in the way, prioritize showing up on most days rather than striving for perfection.
- Track your progress: Keep a log of your daily sessions to build a sense of accomplishment.
