If it pains you to shelter in place try sheltering in no place to live

Raise your voice. Share what you are passionate about by submitting your original music video and helping us to share this message to all of us fortunate “dwellers”. If you have them, share songs about issues facing people in this time. And share songs about hope, love and celebrating the advantages we all have

Raise Awareness. Covid has increased the suffering of the half million Americans who are homeless. The Winter Solstice (Dec 21) is the shortest day for most people, but the longest coldest night for many. We need your help to draw attention to this exploding crisis. We want to use your songs and build a wall meant to let people in.

Raise Funds. Donate your video (and some money if you can) to SAW Serves the Homeless to help increase awareness provide needed food, shelter and other essentials. And then spread the word (and the link to our video wall) to your friends, fans and unlikely strangers.  All the money will go directly to Hope4Restoration and So Others Might Eat (SOME), two non-profit organizations focused year round on community-based solutions for ending homeless.

Ask your fans to mention your name when donating; SAW will hold a concert in early 2021 featuring our most popular artists on the wall. You can make a difference, share your songs and build our community of songwriters, just by sharing your music.

The shortest day in America is the longest night for the homeless.

For Make Music Day 2020, we asked musicians around the country to post a video  to our virtual video wall. Now, more than ever, music is the answer everyone can hear. 

Community Day 2020

SAW hosted the first ever Virtual Community Day on Saturday, June 20. We had a full day sof workshops, sing-alongs, song circles, song critiques. Plus recording, singing, and performing demonstrations. Pro advice from industry leaders. With a few celebrities from the LA music scene to boot! All online.

With Celebrity teachers like: Jason Orme  (Alanis Morrisette’s guitarist), Ben Peeler  (virtuoso Founding member of The Mavericks). Songwriting with Louise Goffin. The daughter of Carol King and Gerry Goffin has an ear for music and can turn a phrase in equal measure. She talked about songwriting to at least 20 lucky registrants. Read about all the offerings on our Community Day page and watch the livestreams from the events through the SAW website.

 

Manage This! with Tom Carrico

Join award-winning Artist Manager/Talent Buyer/Booking Agent Tom Carrico for an entry level workshop on a variety of topics, including, but not...

Songwriting Masterclass with Louise Goffin

100% of all event money will be split between Color of Change and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.  Louise Goffin has had a...

More Me in the Monitor

Listen and learn from a panel of expert professional audio engineers as they share fun and interesting stories, dos and donts, useful tips, and...

Art vs Craft with rob Hinkal

To reserve a seat   A note from rob (this week): So – the world has changed dramatically at least TWICE since 2020 began rendering much of my last...

Uke workshop with Glen Hirabayashi

The Ukulele, while accessible and inexpensive as an instrument, lends itself to many different uses in music. Glen will take the group through some...

Mixing with the Pros @ Omega

Learn valuable recording and mixing techniques from professional Audio Engineers. We will be demoing Pro Tools, a variety of plugins, an analog...

Song circle with Dan Mack

Dan Mack will hold a song circle on Saturday, June 20. This class will be held on Saturday, June 20 over Zoom as part of SAW’s 2020 Community Day....

Maximize Your Studio Experience with Dave Mallen of Innovation Station Music

Join Dave Mallen of Innovation Station Music for: - A short presentation on the process of taking your music from song to finished master....

First Impressions Panel with Ron Goad

Our panel of local bookers, radio hosts, and other music leaders will listen briefly to your songs (pre-recorded and anonymously submitted) and...

Chord Grammar

Matt Holsen, arranger, producer, composer and performer, leads this popular and fascinating class. Learn about the music theory you know but were...

The Songwriters’ Association of Washington has just completed a new online video contest: Streamcatcher.

StreamCatcher is SAW’s first CoVideo19 project. An attempt to create and encourage community from isolation. Songwriters were asked to create a video, register, sign in, submit, vote, encourage their fans to the site to view and vote.  There were $2,000 in prizes awarded and untold rewards in building a stronger, better music community.

Thank you to all who participated

Over 150 videos were entered, and we’ve put them up on a virtual video wall. 

Here’s the letter we sent out on May 19, 2020 to participants:

Greetings,

The winners are announced and the first big winners are… songwriting, music and community.

We hope you enjoyed, learned and grew through the exercise. Nothing we write here can adequately thank you for being part of this experiment in “seclusion inclusion” through songwriting and promotion.

And it is the second of those two things that fuels our winners today. Promotion and creating an audience is the work of the successful artist. There are so many worthy efforts in the CoVideo contest that I shudder at the thought of having to pick the winners based on whose video is best. Instead we let thousands of votes determine who would be our prize winners. A combination of high score and high voter counts helped determined our awardees. Alas, there are too many good videos that aren’t on this list. The winners didn’t stop with making and placing a video, they pushed hard to bring an audience to the site, got more votes, got better votes and kept at it til midnight on May 15th.

Well-earned congratulations to the following prize winners (go HERE to watch all winning videos from the same page) :

Gold Prize ($1,000) 
Six Feet Apart (Crys Matthews and Heather Mae)

Silver ($250)
All I Can Give (Jillian Matundan)
Sweet Coronacation (Lili Malatinszky)

Bronze ($100):
Can’t Go It Alone (Jen Hawley)
Lightly (Natasha Russell)
Midwest Fantasy (Christopher Robin Sapp)
Show You What Love Is (Lisa Crawley)
Will He Remember? (Jill Koshiol)

Finalists:
Courageous Me (Michelle Lockey)
Having a Ball (Marcus Truelove)
I Remember Me (Richard Walton)
In the Last Hour (Lindsey Hirshfeld)
The Maker’s Mark (Robert Dale Klein)
One-Sided Love (Ellie Rose)
$crubs (Kristen Ford)

We have received some responses from the poll we sent out in the last week: Yes!, More! Can you fix a few things to make it better? And so we will.

We will be announcing a virtual concert soon with some of the winners of StreamCatcher, sponsored by Focus Music and SAW. Look for details soon.

We will be leaving the StreamCatcher videos up for some time and be pointing to them throughout the year as part of our move to make online communication a better tool.

But this is no time to stop.

SAW is going to run a “virtual” community day and we are the DMV sponsors of Make Music Day (Virtual Edition) the weekend of June 20th and 21st . We will be having multiple workshops on music-related topics and song workshops online. For Make Music Day, we are asking for every musician within the region to post a video of themselves playing to a virtual video wall we will be creating. Can we count on you?

Music is always the answer and SAW, StreamCatcher is going to work with you this year to find all the new ways to give voice to music and to gather people, however and wherever it works to bring more. We will all learn together how to work at our craft and protect our art.

Thank you again and we hope to hear from you soon,

Jay Keating
President of SAW

StreamCatcher, a project of the Songwriters’ Association of Washington (SAW), is an attempt to create and encourage community from isolation and beyond.