The Daily Two
In October 2011 I started a little community music creation workshop I called The Daily Two. The stated goal was to create and post a minimum of two minutes of music a day for a month straight. A few friends decided to join in with me and we quickly found ourselves in over our heads and had a weirdly fruitful month.
My personal goal was to get in-practice with my recording tools, since I felt like each time I sat down to record I would spend a good deal of time learning something new about my recording toolkit, which meant each finished recording sounded dramatically different than the one before it, and no two quite alike. The idea being to get a good deal of that learning out of the way with the stated goal of learning, rather than producing a finished masterpiece. I think I tricked myself pretty good and wound up recording things that I wouldn't have if I weren't in over my head and out of ideas. Turns out, for me at least, you're never totally out of ideas: some really interesting stuff happens when you've done about as much as you think you can do and need to fill up a blank space with something new.
Quantity precedes quality, or practice makes practice
I'd read The Artist's Way, or at least the first couple chapters, in the time leading up to that first Daily Two. I have a lot of disagreements with the concept of a 12-step program for creative recovery, but the concept of the Morning Pages was fruitful for me with regard to writing, cranking out three pages written longhand each morning before going about your day. In the book, Julia Cameron references the art school adage that, if you want to throw a good pot, you have to throw a bunch of pots, and over time you'll get the hang of it. I liked the idea of giving myself permission to fail exuberantly on the way, and to do it in community. If I focus on quantity, the byproduct of it is an increase in quality, or something in that vein. I was curious to see how it would pan out, and it has, year after year, each time we've done this.
The dumb shit
In 2013, I moved out west and worked for Santa Cruz Guitar Co. My boss in the finish shop referred to one of the biggest hurdles of learning how to do the work being "the dumb shit," like how to hold a screwdriver. You have to learn all that stuff in order to good at what you're doing, and if you don't know you don't know it, then you're going to create some weird messes on the way to realizing that you're missing some fundamentals. There's not a strong feeling of accomplishment learning it, either, since it typically shows up when you're trying to do something more complicated and interesting but can't pull off because of what you're missing. I think anyone showing up to this challenge should be ready to get pretty frustrated with what they don't know, but every time we do this I get to hear basically everyone in the group meet the frustration in their own way and work through it toward work nobody expected. The feeling of accomplishment from learning the dumb shit doesn't come when it clicks so much as from what you wind up doing once it does. From the perspective of the organizer of this whole mess, that's been the most rewarding part, experiencing it for myself and getting to celebrate with the other participants when something clicks for them too.
Dealing with platform rot and mission drift
That first year, SoundCloud was new and Facebook wasn't the ad-swamp that it is now. The original group has changed and grown, and as several of us have left Facebook (and especially since SoundCloud killed Groups and started charging absurd hosting fees) I've been wondering for a few years about how best to organize this. The last couple of years have been based on Reddit and making use of a small self-hosted, free streaming platform called AloneTone. This has worked okay, but it's been a bit of a mess and has driven home the need for a central hub for this regular challenge, as well as a space for continuing on with the creative process inside that same community outside of the challenge.
Enter: frequencing
This is intended to be a place to share your creative process and progress, built for community encouragement and skill-sharing. My initial idea for the site was to resurrect the functionality that SoundCould nuked when they got rid of Groups. In the process of building out the site it wound up being somewhat trivial work to bring in photo and text posts as well as music, which pretty much covers all the bases that Facebook Groups had covered, and allows artists and writers to share their work as well as musicians.
Platform features
At this point, users can start groups (public or private) and admin them, we've got most of the conveniences of a typical platform like this (sign-in with Google, email notifications, DMs, playlist management, rich previews for sharing) and I think a few things that the other sites don't (like accidentally stumbling on some OpenGraph implementation that brings an active Play button into iOS Message previews, which Apple hasn't documented exists but is a carryover from the OpenGraph protocol they use for rich preview rendering).
Daily Two Oct 2026
So, since October 2026 marks 15 years since the first round of The Daily Two, I figure now's as good a time as any to get this thing launched in late beta, work out the kinks where they show up, and get the place ready for a proper v1.0.0 release. We're already super close, and I'm so excited to share the platform and give this community a new home free from ads & monetization in general.
Future & ongoing development
There are a number of ideas for further development work (a community calendar?) but I think where we're at right now is as good a place to start as any, and those features can be added as we make sense of how they would fit through actual use.
Join in!
For right now, the community is wide open, and the Daily Two will exist as a Group within it. Join up here: https://frequencing.com/groups/daily-two-15-oct-2026
I can't wait to see what you all are making!
Tom
