Yesterday's song. I took the word spine from the previous day's piece and used that as the starting point for some writing exercises. I did some image searching of X-Rays for inspiration, which are strangely beautiful to look at. I took the notes from my favourite chord from the previous day's piece and used them as a basis for the harmony of this improvisation.
Read MoreYesterday I was going through my videos of the past few weeks, putting them onto a USB to give to my partner's parents, and it forced me to sit back and evaluate just how productive I've been. There are a few songs I've written that have stuck in my consciousness for days or weeks after I'm done recording them, however most get forgotten as I turn my mind to the next day's work. Going back through them made me proud of not only the sheer quantity of my output, but also the quality of many of the ideas. It is not helpful to dwell on either the successes or failures of this project, however a look back through my work has given me a boost of confidence that will hopefully help me push through the dark and difficult patches that are becoming more and more frequent.
Read MoreIf it weren't for the very public nature of this project I think I would have pulled the plug on it by now. Or at least taken a break. But I know from experience that if I take a break at something challenging it can be really difficult to start up again. Especially now, when the rest of my life seems to be getting in the way, if I stopped now I'd probably never find the "right time" to start back up again.
Read MoreOne of the challenges to staying creatively productive is fitting the creative work in with the rest of your life. Before I went off to study music I worked a series of 9 - 5 jobs, however I only ever worked four days a week for most of that time. I tried my best to use my day off for creative projects, and I did accomplish a whole lot of creative things during those years. Ultimately, however, I found the constant shift between corporate and creatively mindsets exhausting. I think I'd be better at it now that I have some robust processes in place, but I do find it much easier when my work and creative practice are more closely related. My mind is never far away from music or art now, and my social circle is full of people who understand and support my lifestyle.
Read MoreFor this piece I took a fragment of yesterday's melody, wrote the notes on scraps of paper and pulled them out of a hat to create a new melody. The first time I pulled them out, however, they were in perfect ascending scale order, so I discarded that melodic idea. If I were really giving myself over to randomness I should have gone with that first attempt, but I found the orderliness uninspiring so I had another go. Really, I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to make something interesting out of half a scale, and I didn't even give myself the chance to try. Next time I'll stick to my guns, and work with whatever material my methods throw up.
Read MoreI considered leaving this to tomorrow morning to record, simply because I would have had more fun if I could crank my amp a bit. Once I start doing that, however, there's nothing stopping me from putting the writing off until the morning too, so I stuck to plan and recorded as quietly as I could.
Read MoreToday marks the end of my first month of songs and I can't quite believe I've produced 31 new pieces of music in as many days. I can barely remember what I did last week, let alone the first week of this project. I think my next task has to be to book a gig, so that I have an excuse to workshop some of these songs to completion.
Read MoreSo far the most reliable source of inspiration for this project has been folklore. I'm not sure if it's because I feel comfortable working in that kind of lyrical and thematic realm, or if it's just what I'm interested in right now, but I turned there again for today's piece. I started with the word skin from yesterday, and the first Google search result for "skin folklore" was selkie, which proved a fertile place to start.
Read MoreToday was a can't-be-bothered kind of day, thanks to a very early start, awfully muggy weather and playing four sets of music at a wedding fair with the entertainment agency I run. It was still about 30℃ when I got home, and melting into the furniture was about all I wanted to do. I gave in to that impulse for a few hours, but eventually the nagging feeling of not having done today's song got the better of me.
Read MoreGood morning! Here's a belated post for yesterday's song. I feel like I need to prove somehow that I did write and record it yesterday, but you'll just have to take my word for it. I didn't finish getting the video ready until well after 1am last night, so I pressed upload and went to bed. I had to re-watch it this morning to remember what I had done, and discovered there is some grammatical weirdness at the end of the lyrics that is going to irritate me all day. I had been wrestling with the end of the lyrics for a while, and in the end I called time and just went with what I had. I'm glad I didn't just leave out the second verse completely, as I now have a rough draft that I can polish up.
Read MoreI have been binge-listening to a couple of really fantastic music-related podcasts recently. The first is Susan De Weger's Beyond the Stage, which explores the way music training can enhance careers beyond the traditional performance-based options that are becoming increasingly rare. The second is Ben Turner's Double Depresso, which explores mental health in the arts. I happen to be meeting up with Ben tomorrow morning to have a chat for a future episode, but the interview I listened to this morning with musician-turned-psychologist Fran felt particularly relevant to this project. There was a lot of chat about the perils of social media, in particular the addictive nature of the "like" culture. So far I've settled into a fairly robust writing routine, however the public nature of the project is not something I have quite figured out yet. I spoke a little in a previous post about it giving me an audience to feel accountable to and help keep me on track with my daily deadline, but I didn't really address the darker side.
Read MoreWeek three begins, and I started today refreshed and ready to write again. The last few days had left me feeling quite stale, so I decided I needed to introduce some fresh creative material into my process. From yesterday I took the idea of the night, and did some quick and dirty Google research into night-related mythology. I was intrigued by Nyx, the Goddess of the night, and so I used her as the basis for this piece. In particular I was interested in the ways she might bring on the night, by physically casting a veil of darkness over the sky.
Read MoreToday marks the end of week two, and I'm feeling awfully burnt out already. I'm mentally, physically and vocally exhausted from a six hour gig yesterday, and all I wanted today was to have a day off. I have to be kind to myself though. This project was never going to be easy, and will ebb and flow with my mental and physical energy levels, and it's something I have to learn to work with.
Read MoreI don't have a lot of brain space left tonight, but I'll do my best to bash out a few cohesive thoughts on this piece. Today was an exercise in learning that something is enough. This one is not very long, and there was far more I was playing around with, but it got to 11:30pm and I decided to just record the most cohesive part. I tried to treat it like a finished piece in performance, and just making that mental decision seemed to help solidify it as a composition that is complete in itself regardless of what it wanted to be originally
Read MoreToday's contribution starts to stretch the definition of music a little, but it falls within my use of the term. This was a purely lyrical endeavour, and came from the line "tripping through streets in insensible shoes" from yesterday, which I found myself turning around in my head long after I'd finished the recording. I decided to take the dominant sounds of that line, S's and T's, as my starting point. After brainstorming a whole lot of words that featured those sounds I put them together into random sentences, and the one I really liked the sound of was "the taste of a stammer". I used that as the starting point for a narrative, and fleshed out the text with other words from my brainstormed list, weaving them together in ways I liked both alliteratively and narratively
Read MoreDay 8, and I still haven't quite got my inner critic under control. It sneaks up on me in the middle of experimenting with an idea and tells me it isn't good enough. Or it's not "me" enough. Or it's too much like something else I've written. Or it's just not very interesting. There's a very strong personal element that comes into play too, the idea isn't good, original or interesting enough and therefore you as a person aren't either. If you let them take over, these feelings can stop any kind of creative progress in its tracks.
Read MoreI felt like playing some mandolin today. From yesterday I took the idea of a square, which has four sides, and played around with intervals of a fourth to find the simple accompaniment pattern. Phrasing that same melody in groups of five over the top creates a nice bit of tension that eventually resolves. It's quite refreshing where such a small idea can lead, and although the result is very simple I can hear all kinds of possibilities for expanding it and arranging it for an ensemble.
Read More
