AuthorI'm a high school English teacher who hasn't quite given up his dream of being a rock star. Archives
October 2022
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Week 3: Making Time3/16/2022 This past week of Genius Hour was the first where time, or the lack thereof, began to complicate the forward progress on this project. Progress was made, but not as much as I have seen in previous weeks. This isn't to say that every issue this week was down to struggles with timing, but when it doesn't feel like time is available to make substantial progress, I've found that it's often easy to convince yourself that doing even a little bit is not worth it. By the end of the week, fortunately, I was able to work beyond that hiccup by leaning on the techniques and exercises I have gleaned from my songwriting course to find ways to "hack" myself into inspiration for forward progress on my music. Not that kind of hacking. This Week's Progress: VocalsUnlike last week where I really got into exploring videos on voice exercises and warm-ups, I spent little to no time this week working on vocal exercises. Knowing how good my voice sounds now (read: not good at all), I'm sure that loss of a week will come back to bite me near the end of the project. That being said, I do feel pretty good about what exploring these voice videos has done to help me find my range and use that to guide my melody writing for the songs I'm working on. It's definitely helping me figure out what is feasible and what isn't with my current skill level, so that's something at least. This Week's Progress: SongwritingOn the songwriting front, much of my focus this week was on just giving myself time to do something productive. I probably only really got a combined hour or so of work in on writing itself this week, but there was some forward progress at least. Earlier in the week, I pulled out my guitar and allowed myself to just jam on some variations of a riff that I improvised in Eb Minor incorporating diminished intervals (for those who don't know music theory, these are technically "keyless" and have a tendency to sound dark). I wasn't sure if I liked the part or not, but I wrote it down so I could give myself some distance from it. Surprisingly, it actually still sounded okay when I listened to it a couple of days ago, so I'm thinking I might give myself some time next week to revisit it and experiment with some backing percussion and other variations that could be turned into parts for a song. My biggest struggle with songwriting so far has been with the song I'm tentatively calling "Dying Light" I referenced in my last post. The aspect of this particular song that is giving me the most trouble is the chorus. The chord progression for this part of the song is one that I like quite a bit despite its relative simplicity, but the vocal melody that should go over it has continued to elude me. Fortunately, this week saw a bit of progress in that area. Using some tips from my songwriting course, I decided to change the way I was approaching the vocal melody to give it a different context. Instead of focusing first on the rhythm and lyrics as I have done with the verse, I pulled out my guitar and created a melody line using different intervals from the chords in the progression. I haven't lived with it long enough to know if this will work, but I'm definitely more excited about writing lyrics around these notes than I was about the ideas I had come up with before. Some DataLyrics Written
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