What is Jamnuary?
2026 will be my fourth year of participating and hosting in an annual daily songwriting challenge over at Seed to Stage. We call it "Jamnuary", our own spin on the popular music event observed by many music communities throughout the Internet. In our version, each day for two weeks, all participants simply 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 composition, beat making or 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 time to explore tools, sounds and new ways of working; but you may find consistently reaching a creative flow state becomes easier over time when you're making a routine out of putting the time in daily.
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.
This post will focus on strategies that I use during Jamuary 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. Last year, these strategies helped me produce my Jamuary 2025 mixtape, with a streak of new daily demo tracks for 41 days in a row.
Before I start: I don't consider myself a guru, a master or an influencer, but a student and enthusiast. What I share here is no more 'right' or 'correct' than your way of doing things if it works for you. What I write here is just me sharing what works for me in hopes that some of it might be helpful to your creative endeavors this Jamuary.
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.
As a hobbyist 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 noticeable period for the first few days when I tend to feel like I'm stuck 'warming up'.
Throughout the exercise, some days always feel very natural and easy compared to others. Some days, the idea 'rolls off the tongue', so to speak. On other days, the process is going to feel more labored. One of the important concepts to learn is that time spent not making decisions is time that is wasted. Whether your goal is to produce a loop or a song demo in a day, moving forward is the most important part. Instead of worrying over creating the best you've ever done, instead just focus on experimenting and seeing each idea to its logical end. Focus on ideas that you'd be excited to return to more than polishing tidbits.
You've got to start somewhere each day, and the bar doesn't need to be set very high. 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 kernel of an idea is messy. Maybe it's weird. That's not just okay, it is desirable in the sense that now we are forced to think reactively and move forward.
If you have 15 or 20 more minutes to spend, your second step and many steps after can simply be to focus on giving clarity and direction your existing idea. This might mean adding clarity or identity to the sound design, or it might mean using existing voices to write a 'B' section to the loop. No matter which direction you're developing your musical sketch, 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.
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 digestible, direct and not very time consuming by design. And they work great to just give some direction to your jam for the day.
Refine Your Process as You Go
This process of rapidly 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.”
Barebones Mixing with Simple Sidechains
During Jamuary mixing is definitely the part of the process I want to spend the least amount of time on. I'm really only interested in hitting a decent volume level with the demo track and helping individual voices stay clear. Volume for the track can be easily dialed in with something like YouLean Loudness Meter on the master along with some kind of gain control (I often just do this within Ableton's EQ8 or Utility)
Basic sidechaining can also go a long way in making the track sound more polished in an instant since it can lend clarity to the idea and voices. Often, initial sidechaining going to be predictable, repeated actions like pulling the bass away from the drums that suddenly makes a rough demo sound much clearer. I like to use WavesFactory TrackSpacer for this during Jamuary simply because it is fast and easy to dial in. Whatever method you choose, make it simple and fast.
Doing it this way I think strikes a nice balance between having a common anchor point to start my sketch to save time and maintaining a lot of flexibility in the stylistic choices I make each day. I also want to upload the demo track at the end of the day to gauge reactions and get feedback, so getting the volume level decently close and having a safety net for voice clarity.
Listen to Music that Inspires You
Before Jamuary even starts, it's a great time to center yourself creatively by listening whatever music that makes you excited to create your own.
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 inspires you now. 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 want to try your hand at making your own music. Try listening to some of this music before you open your DAW each day to create.
Set Meaningful Goals for Yourself
My biggest goal every Jamuary is to farm new ideas for new projects. I would love to make another mixtape similar to the one from last year - where the goal is to preserve the rough ideas and creative spirit of the event without altering the daily output too much. In my mind, a song idea or composition outline is a lot easier to return to than a pile of non sequitur sound design shards.
It's always my goal to produce material that I can return to and be enthusiastic to finish. And while fragments of interesting sound design may be interesting to work on for the day, I've noticed that most of my jams that start this way don't end up getting finished if they haven't developed a sense of structure and identity by the time I've finished with the first session. This is why I always aim to develop an A and B section daily.
Learning new tools or getting better acclimated with ones that you're already using is another thing that has always been helpful to me. Each year, my template file has been integral to keeping me grounded and not reaching for too many different things. I think that keeping tool selection tightly focused helps the music sound like it all came from the same place and 'belongs together' naturally.
Choose Tools You Want to Learn
Making some practical decisions about focusing on a limited number of tools can also 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 the core tools in detail. More experienced producers may find that this is a perfect time to finally try some specific niche or weird technique that they've been looking for an excuse to try.
Regardless of experience level, you might have a stack of VSTs they've been meaning to make time for. Choosing a limited handful of these ahead of time and becoming more familiar with them as you go is another thing that will save time. Minimizing time rummaging around for what to use saves a lot of time for actually writing and experimenting.
Templating can also be extremely helpful here. If you're already aware of the tools that you're aiming to explore, baking some of these decisions into the default file that opens with your DAW can be another huge time saver each day.
I've experimented with templates for the past few Jamuary events. For me, I like to take a day or two to develop a 'sound font' and a basic template. This template includes basic drum kit, a couple of return tracks for common effects like reverb or delay, and 2 - 3 basic instrument channels, often all using the same synth that I plan to deep dive into for a couple weeks. This year, I'll be focusing on getting back to basics and mainly using:
- Ableton Meld - Its easy to quickly produce rich, interesting, bi-timbral patches from scratch
- Ableton Roar - Super powerful non-linear distortion and saturation for unique tonality
- Ableton Drum Kit - I want to make my beats from scratch using samples and synths
- Ableton's MIDI Generation Tools
- Environmental foley audio from FreeSounds.org and Splice
- WavesFactory TrackSpacer
- ToneBoosters EQPro
- YouLean Loudness Meter
Stay Organized and Leave Behind Notes as You Create
Creating notes about what I'm working on is also incredibly helpful to me. For a long time, I liked keeping my notes in the file itself using ELPHNT's NTPD. I still think NTPD is a very helpful device within the context of the set. But nowadays, I tend to keep most of my notes centralized in Obsidian because it's easier to review and update them and keep the 'big picture' of what I'm doing in scope.
Putting the key of the song and its BPM in the file name is something that helped me immensely when I started doing it. Suddenly it was a lot easier to see in my file browser when two ideas may be able to be spliced together because they are close enough together in key or tempo that they can be merged. Or maybe noticing that one track is in the relative minor key of another. There is a lot of info that you can see at a glance to help organize an put related ideas together.
Numbering the file name for each day is another thing that can make files and ideas easier to navigate than just an aesthetic title on its own.
Lastly, for Ableton users in particular, properly saving your sets to their own set folder is a massive help for keeping things organized. I spent longer than I'd like to admit saving all of my sets to a massive project folder that contained many .als files instead of having a numbered, dated directory of projects that can easily capitalize on Live's 'Collect All and Save' functionality. Staying organized at a macro level like this makes all of your projects much easier to return to than a landfill of half-finished sets with vague names.
Show Up Every Day (That You Can)
The biggest and most important thing for Jamuary is consistency. Committing to the event and showing up repeatedly every day is what actually builds skills. This isn't to say that someone has 'failed' if they miss a day or even a few - that's life! But carving out a block of time for two weeks and opening the software, even if it's just to play for a few minutes is more than enough to develop new skills or at least knock off some of the rust if you've not been at it in awhile.
Having a great community to share your work with like at Seed to Stage or Brian Funk's Music Production Club is also a must for any aspiring musician who wants to grow this Jamuary. Art doesn't happen in a vacuum, and surrounding yourself with an encouraging group of people who are also aiming to grow is essential to get the most out of Jamuary. It's hard not to be inspired and excited for the next day when we're all tapping into a creative mindset together - that's why we keep coming back year after year!
