Week 5

This week we spoke about perfectionism and how it can affect your workflow. I realised I need to stop my perfectionism from getting in the way of my recording/creativity.

I showed Georgia (one of my tutors) a snippet of my recording which is a big thing for me as I wasn’t proud of the way it sounded at all. I learnt that my guitar playing isn't absolutely terrible and that it is more important to get a rough demo for the track than to perfect every detail. 

I have also just realised that for some reason when listening through my headphones, effects are really loud, but when I play it through my mac I have to turn them all the way up in order to be able to hear it. I don’t know why this is but I am going to ask my tutor Adam about it to see if he knows whats going on.  

I also told Georgia about how I was struggling with my recordings and explained the process I go through which is very frustrating to me. I realise now that I am too over critical of my playing when actually its not that bad and as I think and as a demo recording it is perfectly fine. I am going to try and record a whole song even if its just a rough sketch of the thing and aim to show it next week in my lesson.

Later on in the week I also went and showed Amba and George my scratch guitar recording, which was terrifying, but made me realise teachers aren't going to judge me if my recording isn't of a high standard. After all, I am here to learn and it's all part of my process.

Here are more lyrics I wrote for the second verse and break section in Uptight Insights, and a rough idea of what structure I want the song to have:

Week 4 - Trying Out Further Techniques.

 This week, I performed a snippet of something I had just written in front of the class and this was a big achievement for me as it wasn't something I was proud of and I have never performed over zoom before because it makes me very nervous.

While I was showing my song, two students dropped out of the call. This freaked me out a little bit as I immediately thought: “oh my god no was it really that bad?”. However, it was the end of the lesson, so they probably just had to get somewhere, and instead of freaking out about it and letting it put me down to an extreme as I would have in the past, I just said to myself: “So what?!?!” because even if they did leave because they didn’t like my song it wouldn’t matter, because some people aren't going to like what you do, it doesn’t mean that you are awful, it's just their opinion and that is okay. 

I am becoming more familiar with what my writing style is, and have learnt it very much consists of picturesque lyrics to set the scene in a melancholy world.  

I attempted writing from a picture for the first time in a while, which I found really beneficial cause I like to make up worlds in my writing and being creative with the things I see. 

Here is what I came up with and the image I used. I might use some of the lyrics for one of my songs.

Week 3

This week I felt a bit disappointed in myself because I have so many great ideas I just don’t know how to translate them from a page/in my head onto a DAW to be able to finish them and turn them into full songs. It has been getting in the way of me completing a song at the moment, because as I have never had my own DAW before I have very little experience recording myself and therefore have been spending ages trying to record a single guitar part and have become very frustrated cause I can't get it to sound right. Because of this I am going to work on condensing my ideas and making sure I know what I want before I go and put them on the DAW, because this way I will spend less time frustrated for not knowing what to do.

However, I am finding the Production lessons very helpful and aim to go back through last terms content and make notes in my notebook to be able to have something physical to refer back to when I get stuck recording.

My main focus this week is to try and channel my upset with the current situation of the world towards creating art for myself, because ultimately, there is nothing else to do. I am going to practice putting less pressure on myself so I can focus more on what I am doing and less on what I am scared of doing/what is stressing me out.

Furthermore, I have realised I am very good at writing metaphorical lyrics that set a scene very well. Here are the first few lyrics I wrote for the verse in Uptight Insights:

The "twist it and shout" was meant to be a reference to The Beatles, as I found it funny. However, I think I will change these lyrics in the future, as I'm not particularly fond of them, they just fit the melody for now.

Week 2 - Initial Ideas for Song 1 - 'Uptight Insights'

This weeks task about following structures made me realise a lot of the music I love does not follow typical commercial structures. This can be seen in the song Mr. Grieves (Thompson, 1989) by Pixies, where every section of the song is different until at the end it resolves by returning to the first section, using the lyrics and melody it used at the start. This inspired me to write a song that did not follow your typical structure.

I furthermore am realising that the thing that is getting in my way the most when it comes to being creative, is my anxiety surrounding other people. I get scared about what they think of me or that I will be 'letting them down' if I do what I want to do, but ultimately, I have decided that it doesn't matter. I want to do what I want to do and it is nobody else's business. If they don't like it then they don't have to listen to it or have any relation to me whatsoever and that is okay.

This week I have realised that I always have so many ideas flying around my head that I find it difficult to concentrate on one because I keep having new ones. I am going to practice working on one continuous idea alongside having new ones, instead of always abandoning an idea because I've had a new one.

Something I have been practicing recently is telling myself that someone else's success does not mean the absence of my own. This is very important to me as in the past I have had a tendency to compare myself to others in a negative way and this eats up my creative spirit.

Despite all this, this week I have come up with some initial ideas for the first song I am going to work on.

 I woke up one morning and I found myself singing a guitar melody consisting of two chords and a few lead guitar notes. I hummed the root note of the first chord I was hearing and realised it was an A#, then the next chord was a Fm. After playing this chord progression I realised it was very similar chords, but in a different key, to The Only Exception (Williams, Farro, 2009) by Paramore and I must have subconsciously borrowed these chords at the time of writing them.

After that, I improvised on the guitar and played something I liked so much I decided to keep it. This was the chords of G# down to F#, to then slide from A to A# to resolve it back to the chord it started with. The lead guitar part that came to accompany this, I came up with later on while improvising around my original idea. I thought it sounded really cool to have the lead guitar walking downwards in unison with the rhythm guitar, but then when the rhythm guitar slides up a semitone, between A and A#, the lead guitar slides down from F# to F. This, when you combine the root note of the chords A and A# (played on rhythm guitar) with the notes F# and F (played on lead guitar), create a perfect cadence using the third of the chord F# minor (notes F# and A) and the perfect fifth of the chord A# major (notes F and A#), which is the tonic of the key we are in (A# or Bb).

I used this website: https://websemantics.uk/tools/circle-of-fifths-chord-wheel/ to help me work out what key the song was in.

I am aware that, in my writing, I don't always use chords which are in the same key. I have a tendency to use a couple of chords in a key and then have some mode changes throughout or borrow chords from other keys. I do this because in my opinion it can make a song sound more interesting and a lot of the music I listen to does this which is why it comes up subconsciously for me when writing music.

This can be very clearly seen in the song Cyanide (Gould, W. Miles, I.) by CREEPER, where the chord changes are very particular, and it is in the key of A but borrows the chords F and B from another key, which is what gives the song such a particular momentum that feels as if it keeps moving from place to place.

Here are the chords I came up with; I was originally playing them with a capo, but then realised they didn't need the capo as they were bar chords.

I think I want to call this song Uptight Insights.

START OF TERM 2 - Week 1

This week, we looked at a 'Foraging and Forging' technique.

I found this technique didn't really work for me, I found it would perhaps be useful to find chords that I like, but I found finding lyrics and melodies near impossible as I felt like it was, so to say, a fake/artificial and forced way to write. This is because as a songwriter, my mind already does this task subconsciously, as everything we hear as humans we take into our subconscious minds and therefore it will later on come out though our writing. I felt almost as if it gave me writers block because I ended up getting distracted listening to songs and can't get them out of my head.

I was thinking maybe to create two contrasting tracks I could do them in two different genres/vibes.

I found the task this week was contradictory for me as writing comes naturally to me and a formulaic approach to writing songs does not suit me.

My goal for this term is just to focus on myself as much as I can and not get distracted by all the troubles in my head to do with other people. I want to strengthen my logic/production knowledge so that I can record my own songs with ease and overall just be in my own zone without being crippled by the irrational fear that I am upsetting others by doing what I want. 

I am realising more and more that it is important not to doubt an idea too much when you first record it, because it's not going to sound perfect from step one. 

I am becoming more confident in myself slowly which is really good, I aim to be completely confident within myself and my decisions by the end of this term, or, the sooner the better!