During the long break, I had time to write a full song. This is a song I plan to perform so I used three instruments, guitar, cello and vocals. (I have a friend who plays the Cello who is willing to perform)

Here is the song in its midi form, all the clarinet is representative of the vocals part.

Blue = Verse               Red = Chorus             Purple = Bridge

I wrote down the vocal part of my song by keying in notes with clarinet because I never had time recording vocals. I spent all the time I had practising for the performance instead.

Here are the lyrics

Oh leaves that fall and stay

Oh the rooftops that turn gray

Tell me where the creatures go

Go when winter falls

Oh who knows 

Oh the ravens come and play

Oh the clouds that fade away

What lies after this long road

Walk until we grow old

The doors of stone

Oh   leaves that fall and stay

Oh the rooftops that turn gray

Tell me where the creatures go

Go when winter falls

Oh who knows 

Leave and then end up where

Do we walk up the stairs

Or just stay right here instead

Well it doesn’t feel complete

And just falling asleep

Sinking down to the sea

Even though it’s supposed to retain the theme of questioning what is after death, my lyrics are mostly nonsense. I figured nonsense is fine because lyrics are often nonsense anyways.

The above is the Cello sheet music sent to my Cello player Curtis Wong, I’m very thankful of him helping me out on this because he had to skip swimming to perform.

Our performance on open mic night was pretty successful because we didn’t mess up and not many people came to watch. I made a few little mistakes but the end result was good and received positive feedback.

Here is the video of the performance.

https://youtu.be/YNU6fnPEU_0

The audio and video quality is not the best so in the future, we might do a three-track recording which put together is something very good for me to have.

 

This week I realized that I have too many abandoned ideas,

Scrapped beats, abandoned loops, melodies I couldn’t put together with anything else… I got tired of not being able to finish something completely, so I abandoned the structure and just put together a song with some ideas.

https://soundcloud.com/megaphone-man/ideas

This song has one recurring loop, and I just added some ideas on to it. The song has no chorus or verse, it is just ideas that fit.

Three different parts that don’t even feel exactly the same, they just simply fit under the same loop. To my surprise, this actually ended up as a satisfactory song. I still believe that individually, these three ideas could be fully developed into songs that are better apart. In the future, I will first study and see how other musicians develop a central melody in their song. Songs like Walk like an Egyptian or Darude sandstorm, I want to see how others change from verse to chorus. I will also try to go back to my pile of abandoned ideas and see if I can shape them into something complete.

This video I found is interesting.

I also realized that because this song ended up somewhat fine, maybe it is fine to ditch the song structure sometimes. Songs like Bohemian Rhapsody also don’t have that concrete of a structure so I will keep in mind in the future that I don’t always have to stick to the books.

I’ve realized that my goal has not been clearly stated in my reflections. My goal has always to make music.

Songwriting is quite a new skill for me so, during this semester, I have been trying different ways to create music and is better each week, I will eventually create a song to demonstrate my grown competence in songwriting and present it. Even though my goal is not that concrete, I believe I am making progress in becoming a better song writer.

(Sorry this is not posted earlier, I misread the instructions and thought I only had to submit on dx)

 

My goal is to improve my tone quality.

 

I was unsure what kind of music to pick. I figured the best type of music for improving are long tones and scales. I also remembered that in middle school, we often used warm-ups to practice. So I went online to search for clarinet warm-ups, this is the one I decided to use.

Clarinet Warmups

Specifically, I used the long tones on page three, and the Klose scales on page four.

My first recording for the

Klose Scales        https://soundcloud.com/megaphone-man/c-major-klose-scales-p123-80-bpm/s-rvZBp

Lone Tones         https://soundcloud.com/megaphone-man/long-tones-chromatic-100-bpm/s-YVHXZ

 

I realized though recording this that my tone quality actually is better for the higher notes (B natural and above) than the lower C to Bb. I will especially focus on practising long tones for these lower notes. I will also improve my embouchure as much as possible.

 

I will practice

Two hours on Tuesday

Two hours on Thursday

Two hours on Saturday

(If any of these fail to happen, makeup on Wednesday)

This week was quite an unproductive week. Many school projects were due, and I had a talent show on Friday.

However, I did spend some time at home fooling around with my guitar, and I made a little riff I like with it.

The loop can be found here:

I tried to make this rock-ish, I was too lazy to make a drumbeat with the software instruments, so I made used my pick to strum muted strings to create a percussive rhythm. I liked this better than an actual beat because it adds a unique feel to the song. The bass part is meant to be done with vocals, like the beginning of an AC/DC concert, but this chaotic week didn’t allow me to get a proper recording.

In the next week, I need to work harder to make up for this week. I plan to do some studying about melody; I keep having some problems with writing melody after getting some other part.

I mentioned earlier that a reason this week was unproductive was that of my talent show performance. I sang “Let Her Go” by Passenger, the singing I guess is somewhat related to my project.

Here is my performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RftkTBG6EwU&feature=youtu.be