It was a bit of a surprise when an old song I had written way back when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth came into my head yesterday and wouldn’t get out. Much to my amazement, when I pulled out the guitar, the chord progression and rough playing style came back to me almost instantly.
For a bit of perspective, the song, “May Faire” has never been performed. So, it’s not like I spent uncountable hours rehearsing the song. I may have toyed around with it whenever I could not come up with something new for a few years, but it was not on the forefront of my thinking.
The song below is not a new song, but one I posted a short while ago. I am trying to create a reusable set of Gutenberg blocks in-post to borrow from for future audio-oriented posts to make the songs/spoken-word stand out better as an audio file.
I have a few other formatting ideas that I want to play with, but if you have an opinion, please let me know in the comments (on either music or player design). Let me know if you are having problems rendering. If so, let me know the platform (WordPress Reader/web), device class (mobile/laptop/tablet) and browser (default for your device if you use the WP Reader app) .
Thanks!
[07 dec 25 update:]
Yesterday’s attempts didn’t have the intended appearance when it comes to viewing on WordPress Reader,. I can still leverage what I learned, but I’m going to attempt a new approach here and see how it looks dark, (stack on mobile, header large font not H4, copyright no-call):
Yeah, no matter how you tweak it, the appearance is the same on WordPress Reader. A bit broken with “no-stack” on mobile, but looks good stacked. Seeing as it matters not at all for WordPress Reader, I will just decide on a favorite when I set it up later (and avoid using rows on the copyright line, because it breaks in feeds and WP Reader, but I’m just trying to be fancy there and the fancy isn’t required).
I’m leaning towards the dark variant above (using “media and post”), feel free to pipe up if something absolutely does not work in your mind.
For new visitors: I occasionally set myself up with the challenge to write, record and produce a songlet (not a full song) in the space of 120-minutes, starting from scratch. I try to limit the song to about a minute in length.
As a result, quality varies greatly and I don’t promise that there are any hits that will arise of this personal challenge. The quality over time will vary dramatically, depending on how my creativity level is faring for the day.
I decided that I needed something to shake up things a bit, some incentive so I didn’t keep dithering around when I was creating music. I often catch myself playing around and never actually writing anything while I was horsing, so I said to myself: “Self, you need to have some motivation to do more than press buttons and listen to sounds.”
As I mentioned yesterday, I was needing to get out of my writer head, who wants nothing at all to do with writing (for whatever reason). So I have.
I had previous mentioned my intentions of buying virtual synth and maybe upgrading to the subscription model for my DAW. Then I read the fine print: that subscription price on the DAW was only good for a year, and then the price would double. Great deal at the half-off price, terrible at the standard price.
Well, the last thing I want to do is lock myself out of my own music when I decide to no longer subscribe, so I opted out of that plan and redirected those earmarked funds to the second virtual synth I had my eyes on, thereby saving myself some money in the process.
One of the things I have been considering is futzing about with music again. Like creative writing in my previous post, that also has a well that dries up, especially as I don’t usually have collaborators to bounce ideas off anymore. And my tooling around is more for the purposes of learning new recording, engineering and playing techniques than it is for performance. Much like publishing my writing, I am more interested in the joy of creation than I am in the idea fame or profit.
[Trigger Warning: Musician-speak ahead and I don’t explain the terms I am using. Enter at your own risk.]
Good evening all. I wanted to circle back on this to give people incentive to play along with me and experiment with songwriting. While there were two Brave and Hearty Souls who joined in on my little bit of play last week, I would really like to give others an opportunity to jump in and show the world they lyrical writing chops.
The idea was to give you a rough idea of the sound and see what you might come up with if you were the lyricist for a band without actually having heard the song. In this case, I asked folks to think like Andrew Eldritch from Sisters of Mercy, bored in some dark nightclub wishing you hadn’t used up all of your amphetamine while the night was so young. He had a some new catchy lyrics that he wanted to write, but no music to write them to. Well, maybe it was not exactly that, but you get the idea…
I was trying to locate some old files to see if I could recreate a song that I never finished to… get around to finishing it.
The only problem (if I could find the files) is that they were possibly recorded using an obsolete DAW (digital audio workbench): either a much older Cakewalk or via Sony Acid (which I abused and made into a DAW when it was really just a loop manager) file. It was a song that was mostly done except for the vocal tracks and some management of song structure, but it might be lost and I’ll have to recreate it from scratch if I can figure out just what the heck I did ten or more years ago [Update: Found it! It is only six years old and I have the compatible files. Now I just have to decide if I want to modify it or keep it as-is.]
One of the things I like to do to break up the creative cycle is to noodle around with music. As some of you may recall, I’ve played music in several different genres on a number of different instruments — bass, keys, guitar, 12-string guitar, mandola, drums/percussion (short-lived at the throne), and generally anything that comes my way (tabletops, trash percussion, violin bow on electric bass, vocal experimentation, etc.).
Below is the product of my noodling around last night.
Listening to some of the post-punk/darkwave/synthwave music I’ve been listening to these past few weeks has inspired me not only to pick up the bass once again, but to get back to playing around with some songwriting and DAW recording as well. [DAW = digital audio workshop, a home studio option for the modern era].
As I was discussing this direction in comments with Chris, I began to think that it might be interesting to at least some of you to share with folks the general thought process and progression of how some of us — or at least I do — get about to writing music.
