Songwriting Challenge, Time Challenge, Everything's A Challenge!

Wow, is really over a month since I last wrote a blog?

I suppose that it must be...

Have I been busy?  Well, sort of!  My work has slightly changed, erm, occasionally, but I'm not going to talk about that!  I've decided to try and avoid that subject most of the time for a variety of reasons.

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However, because of the slight changes, it does mean that my online time has diminished somewhat, and therefore I can't do online stuff as much as I used to. I know, that was a long-winded way of saying "I can't get to the computer very often and blogging on my iPhone can be a pain in the arse!  Especially when I frequently forget to wear the obligatory over-40 pair of reading glasses.

So, the middle of the year songwriting challenge known as the 50/90 has begun.  I started steadily, but there are some bits up there.  It's not as I envisioned, because I only wanted there to be complete songs on there for people to check out, but some forces have gathered that have caused that initial rule to be slightly altered - only slightly.

The other evening I didn't have headphones on me, so I was left with the unfortunate prospect of recording completely live on-the-spot, and then post that up.  I posted up, I think, three tunes in total on Sunday night/ Monday morning in that manner.  The first was a tune entitled Walk Don't Run, which was something I came up with based on an on the website challenge of using a verb in the title of a song, here I use two of them.  I took that title and basically used it as a public service announcement.  That was live vocal and ukulele.

GarageBand on the iPhone

The second was a response to one of the skirmishes on the site, where a title is given to work from, and you are tasked to write and record a piece within an hour with that title.  I came up with a melody, and then recorded myself playing that melody on a melodica - live once more of course, as I couldn't do any overdubs.  That piece was entitled In the Grip of Strange Thoughts, and in a way the solo melodica sort of adds to that strange eerie feeling I suppose.

Finally for that night I had for some reason agreed to link my doing 50/90 with another challenge called Fearless Songwriter, where you agree to write a song every day based on a prompt.  This was day one, technically...  The prompt was "Parrot", so I wrote and recorded, in twenty minutes total, the song Polly The Pretty Parrot, a fun song about not being able to get a parrot to talk.  In the comment son the Facebook page for the Fearless Songwriter challenge, someone said that it needed a bridge or something, but I can't see where else that would take us other than to take a break musically.  There was no more story needed in my opinion.  Live vocal and ukulele again for that.

My melodica

I've done some work during the challenge that I am proud of.  Lakeside Stroll from last week is a piece that I spent a heck of a lot of time on (three hours mixing for instance), and is an ambient piece with a guitar figure that I thought of and then had to push myself to be able to pull it off!

Hazy Morning is another instrumental that I have written, this time in a sort of soundtrack style I suppose, although at the time of writing I was just thinking of it as an instrumental with a nice melody.  Cool Blue is another instrumental piece, this time with a funky bit of guitar/bass/percussion interaction where I just thought, "yeah, I'm going to have some fun here!"

I could go on and on about what I've done already, but I won't.  This is just an introduction to what I have done so far.  There is actually more there than I thought that there would be.  I have already co-written a song in fact, which I thought I wouldn't have the time to be able to do, and I have started off one corpse piece, which is where someone writes and records a minute long piece, then sends the last ten seconds of that to someone else for them to write a minute long section based upon, and it continues.  I have also done a section for another corpse as well.  All of these things I am surprised at, because I thought that I just wouldn't have the time.

Strangely enough I have.

Thank you for reading, please take care.

July 30th 2014 (43 years, eight months, and 4 days old)