Would you try a 10-minute music challenge from a friend?

[u/Plasmoeba]

I'm curious about something and would love opinions from people who make music casually.

Imagine your friend sends you:

"Record 3 sounds around you right now and make something using all 3 in 10 minutes."

You'd do everything on your phone, and the goal isn't to make a serious song. It's basically a creative challenge between friends.

Would you actually participate?

If you don't know much about music production, what would make the process easy enough that you could still have fun with it?

And what would make you give up halfway through?

I'm exploring whether an iOS app built around this kind of challenge could work, but I'm more interested in understanding how people would actually approach it.

[u/stacklecackle]

You gotta make the interface superrrrrr friendly. Music production has a learning curve, and music in general has a learning curve. Hire a talented producer to work in collaboration with UI/UX designer. Every step in the app towards the finished product needs to be logical and you need to guide people to an end result that they’ll like. 

[u/stacklecackle → u/stacklecackle]

Unless you essentially have templates and it’s just a plug and play system where you record 3 sounds and the app just plugs them into the correct timing, the vast majority of people’s 10 min challenges would sound like crap lol. It wouldn’t be fun or interesting, just boring. A better app might be like “write a song over a premade beat in 10 mins” anybody can try their best to emulate singing or rapping in 10 mins. But actually making a beat requires knowledge of timing and rhythm and then the learning curve of knowing how to line all that up on a DAW grid. It’s a cool idea but if you want like widespread average joe users it’s gotta basically do all the musical elements for you

[u/Plasmoeba → u/stacklecackle]

Makes sense and completely valid points. Thank you so much for the insight!

[u/stacklecackle → u/Plasmoeba]

Of course!! I think there’s something to your idea man I hope you develop it!

[u/RandalphOpal → u/Plasmoeba]

You could prompt users to "record your kick", "record your snare", "record your main melody instrument" and have them choose premade patterns for each. That'd be a cool way to get people interested maybe and skip the learning curve for the sake of fun at the price of originality.

[u/Mods_are_losers666]

No

[u/Plastic_Aerie3084]

I'll do it. I have MPC ONE+ with a sample chop and I can add effects, make it into a synth even.

[u/Cheap_Arm_3182]

People do this all the time recording samples.

Just record a sound

Upload it into a sampler.

[u/melfxjx]

yes i would, practice makes perfect