Today in STAC I continued to work on my song that I started yesterday, but, I just couldn't seem to get a certain melody out of my head. That melody turned into a new song, so now I'm basically working on two songs at once.
I like them both, a lot. One is dark and one is kind of happy, so it's interesting to see what the lyrics will turn out to be on both of the songs. In a way, I kind of want to write dark lyrics for the happy sounding song and happy lyrics for the dark sounding song, just to change things up a bit, and kind of give it a Kate Bush appeal, but we'll see.
I mean, I have time. For me, this project is all about creativity, and using it to the maximum extent. Time is not my objective in this project, like I've mentioned, so I'm excited to see where my creativity and passion takes me the rest of this week!
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Unidentifiable Chord Progressions
I haven't blogged in a really really long time, and I kinda have to blog today, so I guess no matter what this post is going up!
Since it's 4th quarter (and I honestly can't even believe how fast time has flown), in STAC we're starting independent projects. My independent project is to continue songwriting, kind of like I did in the intensive, only at a less rigorous pace. I'm letting the ideas come to me, and letting creativity be my guide and drive rather than a sheet of paper telling me exactly what I have to due and a due date right smack on top. I want to be able to write what I feel easily, and be proud of it. I want to let go with my lyrics, and just expand both lyrically and musically. I think I can do that 4th quarter.
At the same time though, I also want to do something else. I want to study not just songwriting, but something else to do when I get sick of songwriting that is still a project. I don't really know what that is yet. I love to act, I love to sing, I love to dance, and I love to write, I just don't know what I want to do with any of those, but I want to do something. Working on songwriting and increasing my skill is great, but it does get really boring and writers block does start to happen after a while. So, I need to do something else, and I'm trying to decide what that "something else" is.
Today in class, I decided to just mess around on a piano and see what came out. And a really great and unidentifiable chord progression came about, that I really kind of love. To be honest, they're not even standard chords. Nothing is really standard about this song so far, and I really like it. There's not one block chord, there's many made up chords intertwined with real chords and I think that's pretty awesome. I worked solely on music today, and wrote down a few melodies that worked with the piano part I wrote. Tomorrow I want to start working on lyrics, and seeing what happens with the song once they get added. I think they'll give it a whole new dimension.
Overall, I think my 4th quarter project is going to go really well, and I'm really excited that I've had a good start.
Since it's 4th quarter (and I honestly can't even believe how fast time has flown), in STAC we're starting independent projects. My independent project is to continue songwriting, kind of like I did in the intensive, only at a less rigorous pace. I'm letting the ideas come to me, and letting creativity be my guide and drive rather than a sheet of paper telling me exactly what I have to due and a due date right smack on top. I want to be able to write what I feel easily, and be proud of it. I want to let go with my lyrics, and just expand both lyrically and musically. I think I can do that 4th quarter.
At the same time though, I also want to do something else. I want to study not just songwriting, but something else to do when I get sick of songwriting that is still a project. I don't really know what that is yet. I love to act, I love to sing, I love to dance, and I love to write, I just don't know what I want to do with any of those, but I want to do something. Working on songwriting and increasing my skill is great, but it does get really boring and writers block does start to happen after a while. So, I need to do something else, and I'm trying to decide what that "something else" is.
Today in class, I decided to just mess around on a piano and see what came out. And a really great and unidentifiable chord progression came about, that I really kind of love. To be honest, they're not even standard chords. Nothing is really standard about this song so far, and I really like it. There's not one block chord, there's many made up chords intertwined with real chords and I think that's pretty awesome. I worked solely on music today, and wrote down a few melodies that worked with the piano part I wrote. Tomorrow I want to start working on lyrics, and seeing what happens with the song once they get added. I think they'll give it a whole new dimension.
Overall, I think my 4th quarter project is going to go really well, and I'm really excited that I've had a good start.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Intensive Reflections
For the past month and a half in STAC, we've been working on intensives. Since I had shown an interest in songwriting, I was put into the songwriting intensive, which entailed writing a song every day that the intensive ran. In this intensive, I learned a lot about myself, and a lot about my music abilities. I think it was completely beneficial to learn all of the new techniques and things Luke showed us in the intensive, and I think it was great for myself to see how I've grown over the month, and how it's so different from where I started.
On the first day of intensives, Luke brought us all into his office and put on "Surrender" by Cheap Trick. He simply told us that we were allowed to play it as many times as we'd like, but that we had to write down all of the chords and create a song map with the instruments played. This was extremely hard for me. I kept thinking to myself "there's absolutely no way you're going to pass this if this is a test," because I had no idea how to identify the chords by just hearing them. After the first day of the intensive I felt a little degraded. John and Ellen wrote out chords in a minute, and I sat there with a blank page. This however made me determined to go back the next day and completely wow Luke, and try to do better.
Day two was the first songwriting assignment we got. A blues song, key of D, lyrically have locked imagery (meaning the lyric stays in the same thematic/metaphoric space), and must be recorded by the end of the day. I was completely flustered. A song by the end of the day? Nearly impossible in my past. And blues? I had absolutely no idea how to write a blues song. On our assignment sheet, we were told to use a I IV V progression. A I V V progression is one in which the chords jump from the tonic (the base chord), to the fourth of the chord, and then to the fifth of the chord, and back again. I was thankful that I at least knew what that was. I spent the first period that day agonizing over what to do. I firstly had no idea how to play a D7 chord (a chord featured on the sheet) and thanked God that I had an iPhone yet again because I was quickly able to look it up.
Once I finally threw together a few chords, the rest came to me and I ended up finishing my song before the end of the day. I titled the song "Checkmate," and overall I was pretty proud of it musically. Lyrically it was a little weak, but overall I was happy that I had completed the assignment with time to spare.
The next day, we were given another assignment. This time we were to write a pop song about love. using a I IV V chord progression, just like in the blues song. I was pretty happy about this assignment because I felt like it was covered territory. I had already written at least two or three pop love songs in my life, so I was completely ready to take on this challenge. I titled this song "Falling Hard for You," and I can honestly say that it was my best song of the entire intensive run. For me, it is the strongest piece, musically, that I've ever written and I'm extremely proud of it. What started as just the second project of the intensive became the song that I now show off constantly as my best piece.
The third day, Luke introduced us to "The Box" method. "The Box" basically is a common songwriting pattern that is a repeating four chord progression. On a guitar neck, it looks kind of like a box like pattern. The song had to use the box pattern in the verse, had to be about a very specific break-up, and had to be in the key of F# major. This was probably one of the hardest songwriting assignments for me. Since I only play piano, it was kind of hard for me to figure out what chords constituted to a "Box" chord. I've also never been in a relationship before, nor had a break-up, so writing about it is kind of like someone writing about a country that they've never been to before, you can assume, but you'll never know for sure until you experience it. Also, I have a strange phobia and hatred of the key of F# major, so this didn't help matters much either. But, as always I eventually wrote it. To be honest, I really wasn't all that proud of it. Like I said, I had never experienced a break-up, so my lyrics were horrible. I had no idea what to write. Musically, I think I dealt with my hatred of the key of F# major pretty well. Overall, the song titled "What Did You Do?" was kind of a disappointment to me, and I was really itching to make a comeback with the next assignment.
The next assignment we got was a completely restricted assignment. The key, title, lyric restriction, and chord progression were all given to us by Luke, making it really hard to get creative. The title of the song was to be "River Bottom," and we were supposed to use the title once in the song, but not in the chorus. This was a little tricky for me, I have to admit. I think musically I did a pretty okay job because it was in a pretty familiar key, but lyrically I don't think it was my best work. I felt like during the intensive I really started to learn just how great I was at composing music, and just how much work I needed at lyric writing.
The assignment following "River Bottom" was one in which I completely enjoyed. In the song, we had to write a descending bass line, which means to basically keep the chord, and move the bass line downward. This let's the song have a melody with almost no movement, but that is very pleasant due to the fact that it's so simple. Luke gave us a set of lyrics to use, and told us to write the music around it. The song had to be in the key of C, and the melody had to be simple. I think I did very well with this song which I titled "On His Feet." I really liked the use of descending bass line and I really want to use it in my future songwriting endeavors.
After 5 songs that focused on musical technique, we started to get into lyrical technique. I think the lyrical technique was really the most beneficial to me, because it really opened your eyes to different ways to write lyrics. The first way we learned was something that Luke called "Squeeze Play." This was a method in which you find a song you like (someone else's song, a song on the radio, etc.) and write new lyrics for it, filling the new words into the old melody and rhythm. Then you would change the melody and use the same lyrics. This generally works better with two people, so that the second person doesn't have the melody they were written over in their head while they write the music. For our STAC assignment, we were to write lyrics based on one of the songs Luke sent us the night before, and then trade them with someone else in the songwriting intensive, making them write a song around those lyrics. My lyrics were passed to John, and I was given his which were titled "Speaker." After writing the music and showing him, it interested me so much that the music I put to his words was not at all the music he thought he'd hear with the lyrics he wrote. It really opened my eyes to the idea that so many songs and melodies can be made out of just one set of lyrics.
After this, we did kind of a fun song. We were to write a parody of anything, using a horrible songwriting technique, and writing horrible lyrics. I wrote my song titled "Can't Even See," about a girl who is completely distraught over a guy not asking her out and devastated that he didn't because CosmoGirl said he would. I had a lot of fun with it, and I really think it came out to be a pretty funny song.
And after all of our fun came our last songwriting project which was writing another song using a different new lyric technique. Luke took 10 songs that he thought were lyrically fantastic, and cut up all of the lyrics into separate words and put them into a bowl. He told us to take out words, and use them to form our lyrics. This became kind of interesting to me. I formed a very odd story with the words, and in my mind I could see the plot to the movie "Cheaper by the Dozen," when the 12th child feels unloved and tries to run away. They end up finding him at a train station, and then he comes home and everything is happy again. In this song however, nothing is happy again. When I first showed it to Luke, he asked me what it meant, and I told him I didn't know. He said that "I don't know" was not an acceptable answer. I went home that night thinking about the lyrics, and eventually figured out what they meant. I don't know how I came up with them, and they have nothing to do with my life or myself as a person, but I figured out the meaning. The song was called "World on Home," and it's about a father's conscience eating away at the fact that he was the reason his son left, that his lack of affection and respect caused his family to split and his wife physical pain as she stays awake countless nights waiting for him to come home. The song is also about how a son can view a broken family. I don't know where this came from, because I live in a fantastic family and I am so fortunate to have such great parents. It's kind of odd where the words took me, but I started to see this dark story in my head as I was writing. It's interesting where those words took me. I learned a lot about my songwriting that day, and I was actually pretty proud of my lyrics. I showed a true jump from the first assignment we got, lyrically.
Overall, I really think that I grew a lot as a songwriter during this intensive. I learned a lot about when it's good to have control over a song, and when it's good to have absolutely no control over a song. I also learned a lot about myself as a songwriter, like what keys I tend to gravitate towards, the kinds of rhythms I write frequently, and the melodies that usually attract me. I think that all of the techniques and concepts I learned during the intensive are ones that I will never forget and will use for the rest of my songwriting career.
Day two was the first songwriting assignment we got. A blues song, key of D, lyrically have locked imagery (meaning the lyric stays in the same thematic/metaphoric space), and must be recorded by the end of the day. I was completely flustered. A song by the end of the day? Nearly impossible in my past. And blues? I had absolutely no idea how to write a blues song. On our assignment sheet, we were told to use a I IV V progression. A I V V progression is one in which the chords jump from the tonic (the base chord), to the fourth of the chord, and then to the fifth of the chord, and back again. I was thankful that I at least knew what that was. I spent the first period that day agonizing over what to do. I firstly had no idea how to play a D7 chord (a chord featured on the sheet) and thanked God that I had an iPhone yet again because I was quickly able to look it up.
Once I finally threw together a few chords, the rest came to me and I ended up finishing my song before the end of the day. I titled the song "Checkmate," and overall I was pretty proud of it musically. Lyrically it was a little weak, but overall I was happy that I had completed the assignment with time to spare.
The next day, we were given another assignment. This time we were to write a pop song about love. using a I IV V chord progression, just like in the blues song. I was pretty happy about this assignment because I felt like it was covered territory. I had already written at least two or three pop love songs in my life, so I was completely ready to take on this challenge. I titled this song "Falling Hard for You," and I can honestly say that it was my best song of the entire intensive run. For me, it is the strongest piece, musically, that I've ever written and I'm extremely proud of it. What started as just the second project of the intensive became the song that I now show off constantly as my best piece.
The third day, Luke introduced us to "The Box" method. "The Box" basically is a common songwriting pattern that is a repeating four chord progression. On a guitar neck, it looks kind of like a box like pattern. The song had to use the box pattern in the verse, had to be about a very specific break-up, and had to be in the key of F# major. This was probably one of the hardest songwriting assignments for me. Since I only play piano, it was kind of hard for me to figure out what chords constituted to a "Box" chord. I've also never been in a relationship before, nor had a break-up, so writing about it is kind of like someone writing about a country that they've never been to before, you can assume, but you'll never know for sure until you experience it. Also, I have a strange phobia and hatred of the key of F# major, so this didn't help matters much either. But, as always I eventually wrote it. To be honest, I really wasn't all that proud of it. Like I said, I had never experienced a break-up, so my lyrics were horrible. I had no idea what to write. Musically, I think I dealt with my hatred of the key of F# major pretty well. Overall, the song titled "What Did You Do?" was kind of a disappointment to me, and I was really itching to make a comeback with the next assignment.
The next assignment we got was a completely restricted assignment. The key, title, lyric restriction, and chord progression were all given to us by Luke, making it really hard to get creative. The title of the song was to be "River Bottom," and we were supposed to use the title once in the song, but not in the chorus. This was a little tricky for me, I have to admit. I think musically I did a pretty okay job because it was in a pretty familiar key, but lyrically I don't think it was my best work. I felt like during the intensive I really started to learn just how great I was at composing music, and just how much work I needed at lyric writing.
The assignment following "River Bottom" was one in which I completely enjoyed. In the song, we had to write a descending bass line, which means to basically keep the chord, and move the bass line downward. This let's the song have a melody with almost no movement, but that is very pleasant due to the fact that it's so simple. Luke gave us a set of lyrics to use, and told us to write the music around it. The song had to be in the key of C, and the melody had to be simple. I think I did very well with this song which I titled "On His Feet." I really liked the use of descending bass line and I really want to use it in my future songwriting endeavors.
After 5 songs that focused on musical technique, we started to get into lyrical technique. I think the lyrical technique was really the most beneficial to me, because it really opened your eyes to different ways to write lyrics. The first way we learned was something that Luke called "Squeeze Play." This was a method in which you find a song you like (someone else's song, a song on the radio, etc.) and write new lyrics for it, filling the new words into the old melody and rhythm. Then you would change the melody and use the same lyrics. This generally works better with two people, so that the second person doesn't have the melody they were written over in their head while they write the music. For our STAC assignment, we were to write lyrics based on one of the songs Luke sent us the night before, and then trade them with someone else in the songwriting intensive, making them write a song around those lyrics. My lyrics were passed to John, and I was given his which were titled "Speaker." After writing the music and showing him, it interested me so much that the music I put to his words was not at all the music he thought he'd hear with the lyrics he wrote. It really opened my eyes to the idea that so many songs and melodies can be made out of just one set of lyrics.
After this, we did kind of a fun song. We were to write a parody of anything, using a horrible songwriting technique, and writing horrible lyrics. I wrote my song titled "Can't Even See," about a girl who is completely distraught over a guy not asking her out and devastated that he didn't because CosmoGirl said he would. I had a lot of fun with it, and I really think it came out to be a pretty funny song.
And after all of our fun came our last songwriting project which was writing another song using a different new lyric technique. Luke took 10 songs that he thought were lyrically fantastic, and cut up all of the lyrics into separate words and put them into a bowl. He told us to take out words, and use them to form our lyrics. This became kind of interesting to me. I formed a very odd story with the words, and in my mind I could see the plot to the movie "Cheaper by the Dozen," when the 12th child feels unloved and tries to run away. They end up finding him at a train station, and then he comes home and everything is happy again. In this song however, nothing is happy again. When I first showed it to Luke, he asked me what it meant, and I told him I didn't know. He said that "I don't know" was not an acceptable answer. I went home that night thinking about the lyrics, and eventually figured out what they meant. I don't know how I came up with them, and they have nothing to do with my life or myself as a person, but I figured out the meaning. The song was called "World on Home," and it's about a father's conscience eating away at the fact that he was the reason his son left, that his lack of affection and respect caused his family to split and his wife physical pain as she stays awake countless nights waiting for him to come home. The song is also about how a son can view a broken family. I don't know where this came from, because I live in a fantastic family and I am so fortunate to have such great parents. It's kind of odd where the words took me, but I started to see this dark story in my head as I was writing. It's interesting where those words took me. I learned a lot about my songwriting that day, and I was actually pretty proud of my lyrics. I showed a true jump from the first assignment we got, lyrically.
Overall, I really think that I grew a lot as a songwriter during this intensive. I learned a lot about when it's good to have control over a song, and when it's good to have absolutely no control over a song. I also learned a lot about myself as a songwriter, like what keys I tend to gravitate towards, the kinds of rhythms I write frequently, and the melodies that usually attract me. I think that all of the techniques and concepts I learned during the intensive are ones that I will never forget and will use for the rest of my songwriting career.
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