by Marty Dodson
May 11, 2017
Hey! We’re Carly and Martina and we’re 15-year-old singer songwriters from Chicago.
We’ve been really working on writing songs, building a fan base and more! Recently, we transferred into online schooling to finish our freshman year because keeping up with our social media presence and doing all of our music was just too much. We’ve turned it into a full-time job! This is just a snippet of our daily life on an average day!
7:00 AM: We like to wake up at 7 so we can do an hour of schoolwork before we go to the gym. Normally, this is where we do easy subjects like French. We also start to respond to our emails and go onto all of our socials. We do a round on twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat to answer all of our new comments and direct messages. We also post on these platforms letting everyone know we’re up and ready to talk to everyone!
8:30 AM: We always do an hour of either Krav Maga (Israeli self-defense) or boxing because we need to be healthy and we need stamina for all of our upcoming performances. We sometimes have gigs that can be a couple hours long, and if we go touring this summer, we gotta be strong!
10:00 AM: We have to go back on twitter and answer all of our new likes and mentions. We really like talking to people and becoming friends with our fans. Also, during this time, we try to listen to as much new music as we can. We listen to all of the new music playlists in pop, country, rock and even jazz! Something that has really helped our songwriting, both in lyrics and melodies is listening to all kinds of music and not being biased to a certain kind.
11:00 AM: We have to do school for a couple hours whether we like it or not!! Our schooling is online through a program and it’s really awesome. We’re in all honors and AP classes and we’re learning a lot. Right now, we’ve finished math, English and French, so we’re just doing Physics and History. Our parents are really supportive of our career, but if we don’t get straight A’s, we have to go back into regular schooling or we have to do less music, so these few hours of school are VERY important! We’re also trying to finish school early so we can do music full time as soon as possible.
3:00 PM: We are usually done with our school day at this time and are answering all of our new comments. Now’s the time when we usually practice piano, guitar, bass and drums. We usually practice for about an hour everyday. It’s really important for us to keep up our skills!
4:00 PM: We normally have a co-write at this time or write by ourselves. We don’t write everyday because we sometimes need to give our brain a rest, so we usually write about 4-5 times per week. On our non-writing days (usually the weekend), we’ll hang out with friends and do normal teenager stuff. Talking with our friends and hearing about all of their drama not only keeps us feeling somewhat normal, but they also give us great song ideas.
6:00 PM: We also produce our own music. When it comes to producing, we’re still learning but we have a room in our basement that’s our studio and vocal booth and we are down there all of the time, every day. We normally produce the demos for co-writes and send them off to people for pitches or we work on our own stuff. We just released a single called Better and if you check it out, those vocals were recorded in our basement! Producing is a huge part of what we do because it means we can totally be self-reliant. Because we’re still learning, Youtube is our best friend. Part of our producing time is looking up how to do something if we don’t already know how to. Producing can take anywhere from 2-8 hours, and normally we are done producing at around 2 am.
8:30 PM: We are supposed to have dinner, but we normally don’t or we bring it down so we can keep doing music. Normally, Martina mixes the song and I continue on social media and building our business. We also have been developing our merch, so I help get the orders together.
1:00 AM: We are normally starting to wrap up our production if it’s a normal day. If we have an important opportunity though, we will continue for however long it takes to finish. We’re also constantly looking for ways to improve our songwriting, production and social media presence. We also work hard at finding really cool gigs, like performing at Feinstein’s 54 below and galas to perform at. One of the coolest opportunities we’ve had to date was our TEDx talk about our story and how we transformed being bullied into a whole music career. There’s a link to it on our website: carlyandmartina.com
2:00 AM: Our mom is really happy if we’re in bed by this time 🙂 Normally, at this time we’re getting tired so we just talk about the progress we made today and how we can top that tomorrow. Then we go to sleep because we have to get up early tomorrow!
(Note from SongTown co-founder Marty Dodson: The reason I asked the girls to write this blog is because I wanted you to see the kind of dedication and hard work it takes to succeed. You don’t have to stay up until 2 AM every night or work every single minute of your life on music, but you do have to do everything that you are ABLE to do if you want the greatest chance at success.)
Write On! ~Marty
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