First, an update on sticking to the schedule. After the decision last week to move everything forward by one week, everything has been going just fine and this second track should all be recorded by Tuesday.
In this post I want to discuss my writing process for the second track ‘Peach Boy’. I set the goal of completing a draft of the track in one afternoon to practice working more efficiently. I made use of the music making workflow discussed in the last post, which suggests starting with either lyrics, melody or instrumentation, then work on structure and transitions, before repeating two more times and picking the best song (Mayzes, 2018). I started with instrumentation by choosing a lead synth, drum kit and another synth to play the chords. I changed the workflow slightly by creating a structure and melody before writing lyrics as creating a solid structure was something I found difficult with the first track. I also did not write three different songs as suggested as I wanted to save time. Overall I would say even though I changed some aspects of it to fit my time frame, this workflow was generally successful and I will carry on using it in the future. Here is a screenshot of the track I sent to Ciarán:
I had to bounce in place two of the tracks as he does not have the ‘Alchemy’ synth, which is my go-to when I need to work quickly as it has lots of very good preset sounds which are also very customisable. I also added in a bass line which I asked him to improve, and a piano version of the vocal melody as we found this was a sufficient way to communicate that in the last track. I explained to him that after this written section of the song I would like to end with a very long bridge-type section with vocal and instrumental ad-libs. Other than this, I once again gave him the freedom to add any creative ideas he wanted to the project.
I recently read some of ‘Guerrilla Film Scoring’ by Jeremy Borum, which although film scoring is not entirely relevant to the project it had a quote which stood out to me:
This quote really inspired me to not worry about trying to achieve perfection in writing music and to focus on the fun and creativity.
When looking for ideas on how to improve my writing process I watched George Clanton’s interview on the YouTube show Vinyl Rewind where he discusses his most recent album ‘Slide’ and other things he has been working on. He explains how his musical training was very basic and therefore his compositional process is also basic, with simple chords and a few notes at a time, and this makes his music more accessible and more memorable because of its simplicity (Vinyl Rewind, 2020). One particular quote which caught my attention is ‘I typically compose with it sounding like s***, because something about the cloudiness of the sound helps me to hear things which aren’t there yet’. I can relate to this as I think most of the instrument presets in DAWs sound too clean, so I applied this to my workflow by creating the distorted sounds I wanted first and then writing for them without worrying about clipping or an unbalanced frequency spectrum which can be cleaned up later on.
Finally, I looked for ideas on how to write better lyrics and read a post about the technique ‘object writing’ by Marc Davis (2019) where you choose an object each day and write about it for 10 minutes. I only had time to try it for a few days but I feel that it helped me to write down ideas faster and in the long run it is supposed to help with creative and highly emotive writing.
References:
Borum, J. (2015). Guerrilla Film Scoring: Practical Advice from Hollywood Composers. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
Davis, M. (2019). Never Run Out Of Lyrics With Object Writing! positivesongwriting.com. [online] Available at: https://positivesongwriting.com/never-run-out-of-lyrics-with-object-writing/ [Accessed 22nd April 2020].
Mayzes, R. (2018). The Music Making Workflow. [online] Musician On A Mission. Available at: https://musicianonamission.training/workflow-charts [Accessed 13th April 2020].
Vinyl Rewind (2020). George Clanton interview | Vinyl Rewind. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_ACOjleCU4&t=719s [Accessed 20th April 2020].
Damon Siseman MUS634 