AUM162: Week 11

This week, we focused on our last project. We were to compose a full song, using all the knowledge we've gained through this trimester, as well as to create a lead sheet of our composition, then present it to the class in week 13. We also had a lecture on Lead Sheets, which I didn't know were different to normal music/score sheets.

Lead sheets are "an abbreviated form of notation featuring just the essential musical information," (Feist, 2019). In other words it "gives you the basic information of chords, melody, lyric, basic rhythm and song form with the intent that it is a guide," and that its purpose is to allow the musician to arrange it their way or improvise (Stroud, 2017). Our lecturer taught us what we needed to include in our lead sheets and also clarified anything that we wanted clarifying.

For the rest of the lesson, we started working on compositions. I managed to come up with a chorus and a bit of an outro. I didn't really have a reference track in mind but after a while of listening to it, it felt like it had a similar vibe to Art of Noise's "Love". I also wanted to try something different with my percussion and so I went out to find some experimental samples. I also added a melody line played brass-like bass synth (something I've never done) and I was surprised it worked well with the percussion. To support that, I had a really nice pad wavering in the background, which helped to create a wavy and psychedelic feel to it. Here's a link to the demo of it [Disclaimer: I know it's distorted, I thought it sounded cool at first but I realised it actually doesn't, hence this is called a "demo"]

Demo

Hope I'll be able to get some ideas running for verses, maybe a bridge and a proper ending. Sounds cool so far in my opinion but it's weird that I haven't sprouted anymore ideas for other sections yet. Maybe because I'm dealing with instruments I hardly use when composing as well as working with an unfamiliar rhythm, it's put up a writing block. I just hope it doesn't last long.

Bibliography

Feist, J (2019). Why Lead Sheets?. Retrieved from https://www.berklee.edu/berklee-today/summer-2018/lead-sheet

Stroud, S. (2017). In music reading, is a lead sheet the same as sheet music?. Retrieved from https://www.quora.com/In-music-reading-is-a-lead-sheet-the-same-as-sheet-music