Of my 100 day Challenge, I released 84 songs that were completed after January 1st 2025.

Here's the breakdown:

• 3 songs were written in December as practice for the challenge ("Countryman," "Journey Before Destination," "Lazy Day,").

• 8 songs were written before the challenge ("Parachute," "Invincible," "Anything Possible," "Down by the Willow tree," "Live and Let Live," "Volcano," and "Victim"), plus 2/3 of my classical pieces

• I also included 3 covers and 1 parody ("Good Gracious Miss Polly"), albeit all the covers required additional work

Out of these, only the 2 classical pieces were less than an hour of work.

That's a total of 16 songs that didn't include brand new creations during the challenge period. Beyond the 100 posted songs, I actually wrote several others that never made it to publication, as well as a lot of unfinished ideas.

There's a song called "Entropy" which I think of as a prologue to my challenge. I wrote and released it in December, but I consider it an honorary part of the journey—setting the stage for what was to come, I also reference it in several songs. One of the things I plan on doing in the future is turning this song into a fully fledged mix and music video.

The challenge wasn't just about quantity; it was about developing a sustainable creative practice that could withstand the pressures of daily output.

In this challenge I was testing two competing theories of creativity: does great work require inspiration or consistency?

What I discovered surprised me - it's both!

Some of my most inspired work came on days when I felt completely uninspired. This suggests that creativity functions equally like a muscle as magic—something that responds to regular exercise rather as well as lightning strikes of inspiration.

In my opinion these songs are equally as good, if not better than my pre written tracks which I talked about before. Out of the prewritten tracks, only 3 made my album shortlist (which is about 35 songs long at the moment - will explore more in another article)

Making a song every day meant I had to get real about what mattered. I couldn't perfect everything, so I had to pick my battles. The daily routine became almost like a ritual. Even when I really didn't feel like it, just showing up at my desk with my guitar became this anchor in my day.

I found that inspiration rarely shows up before you start working. Starting was always the toughest part—staring at that blank project file or empty notebook. But once I forced myself to just play something, anything, the ideas would usually start flowing.

An example of a song that came out of nowhere is song 42: So wide awake

This wasn't the case for day 99, though. The stress of the challenge really got to me then. Nothing flowed, nothing seemed good enough. I just had to push through and keep playing and writing for hours until I found something worthwhile. I think this song has some of the best I've written, and the melody is something that keeps getting stuck in my head.

I think this proves that there is no one set way to go about writing a song.

My growth as a songwriter wasn't linear. Looking back at day 1 versus day 100, I can see how my approach matured over time, becoming more natural and comfortable. The songs didn't necessarily improve day by day, but my relationship with the process deepened.

The biggest revelation was simple: a song is just a song. Not every piece needs to change the world or be profound. Once I accepted this, my writing actually improved because I removed the pressure of trying to create masterpieces.

My strongest songs emerged when I stopped overthinking. Just focusing on crafting a good melody with lyrics I liked yielded better results than chasing perfection or complexity.

For instance, song 98 "Hot coffee" is a fave of mine. The lyrics: "hot coffee, hot coffee smooth, hot coffee, hot coffee for me and you." The verse was "I'm balancing a tightrope, Hoping I don't fall down." and finally the bridge: "What would life be if we didn't have hot coffee" - Very profound lyrics(!)

One crucial element I missed throughout most of the challenge was editing. I skipped this step for 99 songs, only editing the final one. For my album, this will be essential to elevate the work from good to great.

Daily practice definitely improved my singing, but the real growth wasn't technical—it was psychological. I learned to embrace imperfection. Recording in one take means accepting flaws, and that's okay. It's perfectly fine to use autotune occasionally rather than feeling like I need to nail those power screams in every track.

Another revelation was about mixing. Early on, I cranked my vocals too loud with heavy distortion, using a plugin called fresh air like a crutch. By the end, I found balance—letting the vocals sit naturally in the mix rather than forcing them to dominate.

This challenge taught me that vocal maturity isn't just about range or technique—it's about knowing when to pull back and when to push forward. True vocal growth comes from understanding your instrument, not just training it.

My worst vocal performance in my opinion was song 40 - Lost in a Shadow world. I refused to use autotune, and only took one pass, unnecessarily straining when I didn't have to:

Whereas, my best vocal performance in my opinion, was song 92 - Hold me close. I wasn't scared of using autotune, and I took my time warming up my vocals, and did 3 passes through. Moreover, I believe the vocal production is better all around, though It shines on other tracks like "Hot Coffee" and "Waste".

I often used guitar solos as stop-gaps for bridges or middle eights due to daily deadlines. I relied on "shreddy" techniques to impress, using the same two patterns repeatedly. But my best solos were the ones where I took my time, focused on melody, and didn't try to be flashy. Less became more.

That being said, I am really happy with this guitar solo(2:09):

But still, that's only 1 out 100 solos, of which most are not great. For the album, I'll properly develop these sections rather than defaulting to solos. The pressure of recording in one or two takes limited what I could do. For an album, I'll have the freedom to craft more thoughtful solos that serve each song.

This experience reinforced that restraint often creates more impact than technical showing off—a lesson that applies well beyond guitar playing. This is evident in my final song "waste" where I make the guitar solo really simple, but change the chord progression underneath - I think it was one of my best solos.

All that being said, I am very comfortable with my guitar playing, and I learnt a few things as a producer:

• You don't need excessive distortion to produce a big sound

• You can stack the same recording on multiple tracks with different settings to produce a fatter sound

• using bass amps does thicken the sound

• you don't need excessive reverb and delay, unless you need it for stylistic reasons.

Apart from guitar and vocals, my production speed improved substantially throughout the challenge. What I think would have taken 10 hours at the beginning now takes just 2. I spent a similar amount of time producing song 1 as I did 100 - and feel free to listen to the production difference yourself. In my opinion it is night and day.

Song 1:

Song 100:

Daily deadlines forced me to make quick decisions rather than endlessly tweaking. Back in the day production was limited to how much tape and money you had. Modern technology makes it surprisingly easy to create decent-sounding demos. Perfect EQ and effects matter less than capturing the essence of the song.

Now that I have the barebones mix of each song, I can revisit the strongest ones with fresh ears and develop them into fully realized productions.

I would say that my bass and drums production didn't evolve much throughout the challenge - so maybe that is something I can further explore.

The limitation of an 11pm deadline became my greatest teacher in the studio, forcing me to develop efficient workflows and make decisive creative choices.

This challenge pushed me into completely unfamiliar territory—video production. I started knowing nothing about lighting, 4K footage, captions, or color correction. Finding the right filming setup was a journey of trial and error. I started with just my phone, then discovered OBS software with Droidcam, which let me use my phone as a USB webcam.

Lighting became my unexpected nemesis. As days grew longer, window glare became an issue. Through experimentation with angles and lamp placement, I eventually achieved a decent look in both daylight and nighttime conditions.

The learning curve was steep, but by the end, concepts that seemed foreign became second nature. Diving in unprepared forced me to learn quickly and develop practical solutions rather than getting lost in theory.

I think you can see the evolution in video quality throughout my challenge the most evidently, towards the last 20 or-so songs, the quality became more consistent (except 89, as I was visiting relatives).

I still however have a lot to learn, as I believe I can be even more consistent.

Content creation was not my main focus, but I am happy to report, a 200% growth on instagram, an 8900% growth on Tiktok, a 5400% growth on Youtube, and a 50% reduction of followers on warpcast (albeit, my tunecaster has grown). My top commenters were my mother, father and sister across all platforms.

This is all to say I wasn't really focussed on social media growth, rather building a community, which I have done, the people on tunecaster.xyz have been so supportive, and I couldn't ask for a better outcome from my challenge.

I don't plan on trying to pump out clickbait-y content for my challenge, or filming 70 promo videos for each of my songs, but unfortunately my most viewed videos are the short 60s clips I did on songs, which is to be expected. So will make platform appropriate short form videos, but I want to get to a point where the music speaks for itself. If I wasn't making content every day, I believe I could have continued this for longer, as I genuinely love writing songs, and I will continue to write songs regardless if the cameras are on.

However, modern artists need versatility. The ability to handle multiple aspects of creation gives you control over your artistic vision in ways that weren't possible for previous generations of musicians. Therefore, the good news is that I have control over what I want to release and show to the world. I don't want or need to go viral, I just want to keep making better music, and improve my content creation skills.

I want to clarify my stance on using AI in this creative process. I did not use AI for any songwriting aspects—no AI-generated lyrics, chord progressions, melodies, or samples. My mixing was also done without AI assistance, though I did use Logic's mastering assistant on some tracks.

I did experiment with AI in one instance—for my music video "Snow," where I tried using Krea AI to generate some visual elements. I talked about this experiment openly in that video, exploring the potential and limitations of the technology.

Where I did employ AI regularly was for practical support: generating auto captions for videos, creating descriptions, and helping compose scripts and blog posts like this one. Even then, I provided substantial input, with AI primarily helping me organize thoughts and improve grammar and spelling.

This reflects how I see AI fitting into my creative process—as a tool to handle tasks I'm not as good at, allowing me to focus on the creative elements that require human expression and emotion. AI helps me compose my thoughts and communicate more effectively, but the artistic vision and musical creation remain entirely mine.

This challenge has fundamentally changed how I approach music and creativity. While I won't be writing a song every day going forward, the lessons from this intensive period will shape everything I create in the future.

This article was written with assistance from askgina.ai to help organize my thoughts and experiences, though I had a lot of input, and edited it a ton, passing through the post 4 or 5 times and editing entire sections before posting.

• I will be making short form content about what I learnt, with this article serving as my beta script

• I will make another article soon(marrying it with my website) about each individual song, and what I liked/ disliked etc

• Will start the process of making my 100 songs into an album, but I don't want to limit myself to just these 100, so if I write a new song, or if old stuff like entropy fits in, I'll be happy. (I want to try something interesting)

• Again, please reach out if you are interested in collaborating

My journey has just started, and I would love any feedback or advice.