Music in Lockdown
Being in lockdown for the past two months having nowhere to go has left me with a lot of time – especially with my workplace closed & the fact that I can’t work from home.
I’ve put a lot of this time towards taking care writing my own music – something I’ve never really done seriously on my own, having written in a band and always really focused on that. It’s been a very different experience coming up with everything myself and making all the decisions but has also felt liberating, being able to take the songs wherever I want and not have to worry about the playing styles or technical limitations of others – just my own boundaries which I can push with all this time.
Considering this, I’ve ended up writing things in styles and using techniques I wouldn’t have considered before. The first song I wrote was actually my first time ever writing outside of common time (4/4) and is mainly in 6/8 time, and slower than what I’d usually write, although the chorus is in 4/4. I don’t have a name for this song yet and also feel that I need to find a singer to add some vocals to it because, although I have written two guitar solos it doesn’t feel like an instrumental song to me. If you’re a singer reading this and interested in working with me, get in contact through the links at the top of the page!
The next composition was a track called Concrete. It is named after the genre which it is based around – Musique concrète. This is a genre based around using raw recorded sounds and modifying them to create a composition in the form of a sort of montage, these songs often have no consistent pulse so lack a real sense of tempo and just sound interesting. I kept mine short at just under a minute long and its certainly an interesting listen – I think it will be the intro to any compilation of these songs. It can be found on my website.
The third song I wrote is called Rain. It was also my final composition for my first year of uni and you can hear an early version of it on my main website. It originally only had MIDI instruments as this was the mandate for the composition and was written in Steinberg Cubase, a software I am not familiar with, nor did really enjoy using, but this presented an entertaining challenge and resulted in a different song than I perhaps would have written in more familiar software. I have now transferred it to Pro Tools, my preferred DAW and am going to re record the guitars and bass with real instruments to start then see where it goes.
The next song does not have a title yet, but I am using the working title “wind” just because I couldn’t think of anything and it keeps to a theme with Rain. It came about from a guitar loop I made while playing around with a looper and learning hybrid picking. Improvising over the loop I wrote a melody I quite like and have since expanded the song to around the 4 minute mark adding choruses and a couple of other different sections. I’m yet to decide whether to put vocals on it. The recording of the initial improvisation can be found on my website under “Idea 21-4-19 (Wind V1). This is currently my favourite of the songs I have written.
I have four more songs currently in the works, although these ones are much less complete than the songs I’ve written about above. The first is currently titled “Seven” simply because it is in 7/4 time. The drum part for this song is almost entirely written, but there are only ideas as far as melody and other parts go. This is a new approach for me as I’m not a drummer but using MIDI drums in a DAW is very fun and certainly a challenge to make them sound convincing. I have one more song out of common time, this is in 3/4 and has more of a ballad vibe, currently just bass drums and piano and just a verse so far.
The remaining two songs are the most rocky ones I am working on. “Beat” is the working title for a rock song based on a drum beat that popped into my head one night when I couldn’t sleep and I whispered into voice notes on my phone to work on the following day. The final song is a song based around bass and guitars moving in different directions melodically and tying to create interesting harmonies, which I’ve not really done too much of before.
If you’ve made it to here – thanks for reading 🙂 if you’re a musician and would be interested in collaborating or need someone to produce/engineer some songs then get in touch and we’ll see what happens.
Don’t forget to follow me on twitter – @adamheathmusic – I am going to try and be more active on there.
I hope everyone stays safe & happy during this difficult time.
