Friday, April 10, 2009

It's been a while.

I haven't really written too much of anything, I've just been musically frusterated, stressed out, and just haven't had enough time in general to really record anything.

This is an original one, my first time experimenting with Reason. That's a cool program. The mallets that play at the very beginning was the inspiration for this song. I was messing around on piano and came up with the first two measures of this song. I had just installed this Reason program and thought it was an excellent time to put it to the test. This is what turned out. Once the main progression comes in on B Major, that was when the chords kind of took a direction of their own because that wasn't what I intended this song to be like at all. I tried to bring that first concept back with the bridge and ending, but it still didn't sound right until I ended it on a B Major scale.

This song is actually a rough draft of a song that will be incorporated into a flash video game that me and a team of about 15 other people are trying to make. The idea behind this what I was told to write, which was literally "an epic choir hell song." I hate the choir sample in this and I'm still trying to find a more realistic one, I also don't like how it constantly pans. Currently I'm trying to make a jazzy lounge theme using the melody from these choir vocals. This is proving to be really difficult, but I think I can manage.

It doesn't really make much sense to call this an accidental blues idea, but that's kind of exactly what happened. The three little synth notes that come in after the bass guitar were my inspiration for this one. It was meant to be a work song, something to listen to in the background while you were doing something. After I made it though, I thought that this would be the perfect song to have a bunch of people improvise over it because it's so simple. It ends really abruptly because I was just too lazy to make an ending. To be honest though, I don't really want to make an ending until I actually play this song with someone, which probably won't happen anytime soon, but at least this song gave me some blues composition experience, as well as experience with the effects modules in Reason.

One night I was in a particularly bad mood, so I decided to just get the practice room key from the front desk, haul all my recording equipment to the practice room, and just record whatever I happen to play on piano. Viola. I can't take full credit for this; however, because I took the chords from Together We Shall Live Forever by Clint Mansell and just added a dominant chord on the end and repeated all of those chords over and over again for twelve minutes and just kind of rocked out. I don't want to make this an actual song, but I was surprised that it wasn't as boring to listen back to as I thought it would be. I am sloppy as hell in this though, I'm no piano player.

That's about it. I have a lot of stuff to do and I probably won't get around to all the musical things that I want to, but we'll see.