EPISODE 2 - A Melody for Slippin' Away

In this episode, I share 3 key developments:

• creating a melody for Slippin’ Away - and singing it!
• launching my website and journal 
• and establishing my musical toolkit 

Website information + fade in Suite in D

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to episode 2. I published episode 1 just over three weeks ago, so first of all, a quick apology to anyone who's been waiting for this one, but it's finally here. A lot has happened in that time both with unfinished music and in life more generally. In this episode I'm going to talk about three key developments. Firstly, creating a melody for Slippin' Away. Secondly, launching my website and journal, and thirdly, establishing my musical toolkit. So let's get started. As soon as I published episode one, my mind went straight back to the poem Slippin' Away. I read the words out loud and I decided it didn't quite feel complete. I wrote the song at a time when my mum was, as the first verse says, distressed and adrift. But since then her life's come to an end, and I felt the song needed to reflect that. So I wrote two extra verses trying to bring a sense of closure, and I'm quite happy with the result. I also earmarked a few lines to what musicians might call a middle eight or a bridge. A short contrasting section that can sit in the middle of the song and can take the music somewhere a bit different. And then I turned back to the melody. I simply started singing the first verse to whatever felt natural and what seemed to fit the words. Just my instinct really. And this time I did something quite important because I've done that a few times already. I opened my notation software, Muse Score, and I wrote the melody down. That gave me a complete first draft for the whole verse. So now here it is, I'm going to sing verse one.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

She's distressed standard rift. Every thought now will give. Not long back she was right. She was doing alright now she's spiraling down towards uncertain ground. She slipped away I don't know what to say.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Just after I published episode one, my wife Anjanette and I, along with Patch, our border collie, headed off to Orkney to visit my daughter Mel and her family. We visit them at Easter and summer every year, and sometimes at Christmas, and it's always something we really look forward to. It's quite a journey from Tyne side, but we enjoy the journey itself. We spent a week on the island, had decent weather, with seals along the shoreline, skies that were dark enough to see the Milky Way, and a pace of life that felt completely different to our usual routine in Whitley Bay. Just before we left, I'd also launched my Unfinished Music website at unfinishedmusic.com and I'd written my very first journal entry. While we were away, I kept that going. I wrote about musical layering. I published all the words of slipping away for the first time. I shared a screenshot of the melody and I started exploring ideas about harmony. I'm pleased with how the website's developing. The journal is doing exactly what I hoped it would do. It's letting me think things through out loud in between publishing episodes on the podcast. There are no comments on the website yet, but I live in hope. When we got back from Orkney, I was ill for a few days, barely eating, let alone doing any music work. But over the last few days I've got going again. My other big development in the past three weeks is my musical toolkit. Until now, I've been working in MuseScore, and while it's a great tool, I started to feel a bit sort of stuck. I was trying to add bass notes to support my melody, but doing everything with a mouse and keyboard just felt rather clunky. So I realized that I needed to get my tools to support my music and not get in the way, so I had a rethink. I've been aware for a while of tools called doors, that's D-A-W, which stands for digital audio workstation. Things like Ableton Live or Pro Tools. Notation software like MuseScore is about writing music as you'd read it on a page. You think in bars and phrases and instruments, whereas a door is about sound and performance. You think more about tracks, recordings, and textures. They're two completely different ways of approaching the writing of music. So I did what we all do these days. I went onto YouTube and I watched, I promise, only one video, but quite a long one, comparing a whole range of door products, some of which I'd heard of before, some of which I'd never heard of. After watching and I narrowed it down to a couple of options, and then and I realized that I'd already used one of those two products before. That was Studio One, previously owned by Presonus, which I had acquired along with a Presonus microphone, the one I'm talking to you in now, in fact. And Studio One has been since bought by Fender, yes, that Fender, and suddenly everything clicked for me. So here's where I've landed as far as my technical setup is concerned for composing and recording and producing of music. I've got Studio One as a door for recording and experimenting with ideas, and I do find for me that using a door is an uphill battle. There's a lot on the screen, it's very busy, it's very, very powerful, but also quite hard to know where to start. So I'm spending a lot of time finding my way around at the moment. And then secondly, I have notion for notation and structured composing. One of the great things about these is they're run by the same software team, so they talk to each other. And what that means is I can move ideas or I can move pieces of music back and forth between the two platforms very quickly and very easily. And so that's how I'm starting to think about my work. So, as an example, um, just yesterday I'd um created a simple musical idea and I'd um played it using my laptop keyboard um straight into Studio One, and then I sent it to Notion so I could see it as written music, which is how my brain is still trained to think about music more than anything. I'm a choral singer, after all. I used it in in Notion, I adjusted some of the notes and I had added a bass line, and then I sent it back again to Studio One. And that that feels like progress. It feels like I've got the best of both worlds, but as always with this unfinished project, I'll let you know how it actually turns out. So that's episode two. A melody has been born for my first song, a website is live and running with my journal, and I've got a toolkit that feels like it might support my journey ahead, but time will tell. In episode three, I'm going to cover three new areas. Firstly, a new way of organizing how and when I compose, a new approach to my week. Secondly, some exploration into bird song, and thirdly, a first look at how composers in history actually worked. Thanks for listening.