Bess: We host this challenge monthly and ask those that want to participate to commit by commenting ‘I’m in.’ They have one week to write the song. At the end of the week, everybody posts their song and everybody listens and we all comment on it. Every month, we’ve had 20 original songs written for each one of these posts. It’s been exciting to see the response to that.
It seems to help people feel motivated and inspired, having the accountability of saying, ‘Yeah, I'm going to do it, I'm going to commit to it.’ Then they know we're going to tag them in it and say, ‘Where's your song? Even if it's not finished, you’ve got to post it.’ Sometimes we all need that, especially when we have day jobs and our obligations, creativity can kind of fall by the wayside. So the community has been really nice. It's been wonderful to see that grow. We're trying to now work on how to further that momentum.
Allie: I'm going to plug Bess. She's been leading an eight-part series in our free community classes called Music Theory for Songwriters. We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback. People are saying, ‘You're explaining this in a way I can digest and actually understand and apply it to songs.’ I help Bess make the presentations and edit her classwork and even though I’ve studied theory, this has reignited my love for it. I get excited like, ‘Chords are so cool!’ I love math, but she’s not teaching it in a math-y way. We're bringing these sorts of things in to fill those gaps if artists and songwriters need that.
DBX: Your Community Classes are free and include individual chapters of the courses you sell as a packaged content series via shared Dropbox folders. What other ways have you been using technology for your business?
Bess: We use Dropbox to host pretty much all of our files for Thinking Outside the Blocks. Everything we do is on Dropbox. So we’re also on Zoom all day. For my music theory workshops, I've been using this app called Chordie. It shows the keyboard and it tells you the notes. So I can have my MIDI keyboard and GarageBand open, just share my little keyboard, and even have Pro Tools or Logic open and share my screen.
Allie: I've actually dug into Logic and learned how to record myself on a basic, but workable level from home so that I can collaborate, and co-write a song with Bess and send her quality stems of my voice. We've also been writing with a girl we've never met in person. Her name is Sydney Mae. She's a talented, young Canadian songwriter. Bess produced one we’ve written called ‘Feet First.’ She recorded her vocals in her home studio and I vocal produced via Zoom. Then when Bess was making changes and working on the production, we “sat in” on the session by using an app called Listento so we could actually hear Bess’s Pro Tools stream in real time.