What is improvisation? It’s a creative activity of immediate composition, which combines performance with emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous responses toother musicians. It’s a skill that I think every musician should practice and learn. Musicians throughout the ages had to start off with improvisations to better their skills in their own personal arts. It’s also an important skill that I think I clearly need to work on to be able to work with other musicians as well as even creating my own songs because for me, I focus on making things too perfect early on rather than trying out ideas first and seeing what works.
This year has been a new kind of experience for me in terms of working in a group to improvise and write multiple songs. It was a first for me to take other peoples ideas into consideration compared to just writing things by myself and making all creative decisions. I personally found it difficult working in this group with people I didn’t really know and found it difficult to speak up to try and help to generate any ideas that I had. Because we had five singers in our group, it was really intimidating being paired up with them all and singing along with them. Personally, I found it difficult to find a role within each project, again due to there being five singers and also because I don’t play any other instrument, I couldn’t even help with any melody lines or chord progression ideas or even any decorative elements to the overall piece. However, I do feel as though I was getting a little more confident throughout the middle of the year with actually joining in with the groups and expressing any melodic, lyrical or structural ideas I had that I thought would fit with the whole vibe of whatever song we were making at the time. It was interesting to work with others to try and improve my collaborative skills by bouncing off each other’s ideas to come up with a final product. It also felt fulfilling as the week went on to see how these initial ideas changed the outcome of the song each week and seeing what we had in the end.
Project 4 March/April
Out of all the songs we had made throughout this year, my personal favourite was our last song of the year [appendix 1]. Although I didn’t partake in any of the singing in any recordings, I helped with writing the lyrics for Rachel and Bree who were the singers, and I also helped the group with realizing the structure of song as we were having trouble moving the song along with what we had. The song we ended up with went through a lot of trial and error. For example, in the beginning, there seemed to be a lot more going on musically, but it seemed like too much and it didn’t all sound right when putting the piano and guitar together. On the piano, Josh had come up with a type of ripple sound that ultimately got taken away as it sounded like too much was going on while playing alongside the guitar and accompanying the vocals.
This piece doesn’t include any drums, partially due to the fact that the drummer of the group had not attended any of the lessons during the making of this specific song. Another reason is that it didn’t need them as it would’ve ruined the whole harmonious and serene feel of the song in my opinion. Also, compared to the final cut of the piano part, which was playing the chord progression F#m E – F#m E – F#m E – A __ G#7, during the rehearsal process, it was higher in pitch which we rearranged it to sound deeper as the higher notes took away the focus of the vocals.
I left the backing track to the instrumentalists while we singers were figuring out the melody line. While writing the lyrics, we used personal experiences alongside a specific image of nature and valleys [appendix 2]. Because we were using personal experiences as well to write the lyrics, Rachel and Bree took more control of the direction the song was going in while I helped with how they structured things as they had the ideas but didn’t know where they should go in the song.
When I spoke to Rachel about how she found this project, she told me that she also enjoyed it because she got “free reign on making the vocal lines and the lyrics” because, like me she found it a little awkward trying to join in with the other multiple singers in the group. However, she expressed that since the start of the year, it didn’t take long for her to build up the confidence to express her ideas and grab a mic to try out said ideas.
On the other hand, talking to Bree, she said that because she joined the class a little later than everyone else, she was “slightly intimidated by everyone but after I made some friends, it made me a little more comfortable and I could speak out more”.
The final lyrics we had (appendix 3) were finalised after certain events that happened in our private lives as they helped us to express our thoughts and feelings through song. This specific skill also helped me in some of my other subjects that include songwriting as I wasn’t used to writing lyrics so the different techniques we used throughout this year as little exercises, like using an everyday conversation to strike up any ideas, thinking about current world affairs, and even personal experiences, really did help me a lot.
As I started to really listen to instrumental of this track, I started to get different ideas of what colours do I think of, what emotions induce while listening and even a specific year or time frame. Considering all of these different aspects have redefined how I go about writing music.
