I was unwell for a few days so Tune-a-Day got put to one side and I did a lot of sleeping… Now I’m trying to catch up again. This is day 7 – not quite sure where all the darkness came from, but it works its way up as it goes along, hence the name.
As I’ve been out of action, I pushed myself to get a second tune written and demo’d today. So here is day 8’s tune as well. I’ve been trying to use unusual time signatures so that I hopefully write something different.
Day 7 & Day 8 – Ascent & Rebellion
I was unwell for a few days so Tune-a-Day got put to one side and I did a lot of sleeping… Now I’m trying to catch up again. This is day 7 – not quite sure where all the darkness came from, but it works its way up as it goes along, hence the name.
As I’ve been out of action, I pushed myself to get a second tune written and demo’d today. So here is day 8’s tune as well. I’ve been trying to use unusual time signatures so that I hopefully write something different.
Day 6 – Independence
Today’s offering doesn’t feel completely finished, but I’ve spent quite a long time to get it to this stage, so I need to stop for now.
Day 5 – Spy Kidz!
Today’s tune is probably one of the wackiest I’ve written yet. It starts off as funk and arrives somewhere in the land of fun, aggressive commercial electronic pop. I’m not sure about all of it, but I’m not really trying to get to fully finished productions. It’s more about getting ideas and exercising the ‘creative muscle’.
Day 4
Today’s tune is a bit more classical than yesterday…
Tune-a-Day June 2016
Last year, my friend Max said he was going to write a tune a day in June. I felt challenged and joined in. It was an enormous struggle to get past the two week mark producing a proper tune every day, but I made it to about three weeks in before the writing petered out. It was as tough as any physical workout.
This time, I asked Max if he was up for it again this year… I wanted to do this, because I don’t feel like I have written enough in the last twelve months, particularly writing purely for pleasure and wanted to concentrate on some songwriting.
I managed to forget June had started though, and suddenly saw Max posting a tune on 2nd June. (What am I like?!) So I have started a bit late, and am going to try to catch up. The first couple of tunes were just small ideas, loops to get warmed up to the idea of writing music again after churning out various college assignments over recent weeks. Most of the last year’s music writing has seemed to be writing to a brief, with a few exceptions, so I need to find the strand of pure creativity and draw myself in deeper. It might take a few days or so to get where I want to be!
The tune for Day 3 is a step beyond where I got to with the first couple of ideas, so is the first thing from this year’s challenge that is worth sharing. (Note: It’s just a demo of the idea – not properly mixed and produced.)
New Video: Sunset Landscape
I nearly forgot to share my new video, which is available on YouTube. This is the video that I made by taking lots of stills photos a few weeks ago, and made a blog post about.
If you get travel sick easily or suffer from epilepsy, I should warn you that it’s quite wobbly because of how it is made, with rapidly changing images. It was an interesting technique to use, though, a bit like stop motion, and I wouldn’t mind making something in a similar style but using a tripod or similar stand to reduce the wobble factor another time.
Age Equality Survey
As part of my academic studies, I ran a survey during February concerning perceptions of and attitudes concerning age equality, as it relates to the music industry. It also looked at different ages’ listening habits.
I don’t think it was the most scientific study ever, and I’m sure the Radio 4 More or Less team would be able to pick some holes in it, but I think there is at least some indication of the trends.
A significant proportion of the responses came through posting requests for responses on Lincolnshire musicians’ facebook sites, but there were also responses from further afield. There may therefore be some regional bias affecting the overall response as a result of the survey’s methodology. All responses were anonymous, though, and the survey did not collect geographical information. Approximately half of participants were music consumers rather than being involved in the music industry to some extent.
A huge thankyou to everyone who took the time to fill out the form, making this a much more interesting and fulfilling project to undertake.
You can view the original survey and read the results via the link below…. (don’t be put off by the length of the document, it’s mainly charts!)
6 May: Save the Date
This Friday, 6 May will see the launch of my debut single, Sunset Landscape. This is the track that I was making the video for using stills photography a few weeks back. It feels exciting to have got this far through the process and to be able to share it here.
I’ll post more details in the next day or two – watch this space!
Springy Photos
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- Digital StillCamera
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- Digital StillCamera
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- Digital StillCamera
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- Digital StillCamera
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- Digital StillCamera
I took a very long walk (for me at least) in the sunshine yesterday to take a LOT of photos. The idea is that I will be able to string sequences of some of them together to create some time-lapse style video footage. We shall see how that works…
In the meantime, here are a selection of the stills.