AuthorI'm a high school English teacher who hasn't quite given up his dream of being a rock star. Archives
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Spring 2022: A New Project3/2/2022 You're Doing Another Project? What Is It?My Genius Hour project this semester is to write music, specifically to write and complete pre-production on at least three original songs. "Pre-production" in this case means that the song is completely written (a full arrangement with guitar, bass, drums, vocals, and other layering as necessary) and that there is a recorded version of it that is indicative of how the final product should sound. For this project, I also define a "song" as a piece of music with a clear structure (intro, verse, chorus, bridge, etc.) and a "topline" (a vocal melody or a melody created by another melodic instrument). But Why?I have played guitar for fifteen years. I have made various attempts at writing pieces of songs for fourteen years. I have never actually completely finished writing a song in that time. I have a lot of pieces of songs — many that I actually like quite a bit — but nothing that is complete and that could go to a studio or be released. My main obstacle has always been my lack of singing experience, which has made me feel insecure about writing vocal parts and lyrics to go with them. My goal with this project is to work through that limitation and make use of a number of resources available to me to better develop my ideas and actually finish my songs. What's the Process Going to Look Like?Before beginning this project, I purchased a songwriting course called How Songs Are Made by YouTuber and songwriter Trey Xavier. I have worked through a good portion of his content and am planning on first finishing watching the videos in this sixteen-hour course and then going back to revisit each module as I use his suggestions to write new parts for songs or expand upon existing pieces of music I have written. Additionally, I have already gone through my collection of song ideas and ranked each piece on a scale of 1-5 to determine which ones have the most potential. As the twelve weeks begin, I plan to take the highest-rated parts and work to finish each of their instrumental and vocal arrangements. As the project continues, I will also be working on developing my singing ability, not necessarily to be used in the final versions of my recordings, but rather to create a solid guide to give potentially to another singer. I anticipate that as part of this project I may find myself purchasing a midi keyboard and pitch correction hardware, though I am not sure if that will happen yet at this time. What Do You Want Out of This?This project will honestly be successful if I can finish one song and feel confident that it could be worth taking the time to track a real demo and final studio mix. Obviously, getting the three is my goal, but having any complete piece of music will definitely contribute to my overall feeling of success. If I ended up having to trade out doing three songs for having one song that went beyond the pre-production phase and that I recorded "for real," that would be an acceptable substitute.
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