My Trials & Tribulations of SpinTunes Round 2 (Part1)
If you’ve been following my tweets for the past week and a half or so, you may have picked up that the challenge for Round 2 of SpinTunes TERRIFIED me and although I started working on it pretty early, I was fighting to get it done, yes, up to the last minutes!
(Well, I wanted give myself at least a little bit of a buffer for uploading, so there were a few things I would have done over, but I opted for getting it in so I even had a chance at competing, rather than get eliminated for missing the deadline. So I got it in with about 15 minutes left to spare, which thank goodness I had that time because I forgot to include an mp3 file with my first email and still had a chance to send it!)
Why was I so freaked out? The challenge was to write a song where the time signatures in the verses were different than the time signatures in the choruses.
I am NOT by any means a music nerd or genius or whatever you want to call those talented people I envy who actually know what they are doing. My music education has been with pretty awesome teachers when I get the chance, but also scattered, varied and sporadic, and much of my writing so far is purely by ear & intuition. Before you start giving me the long list of AMAZING artists who never knew a lick of music theory and tell me I’ll be just fine, rest assured, this has long been a complaint of mine, so I’ve gotten versions of that story a bunch of times, and I’m well aware that you don’t HAVE to be a theory genius to make great music that other people enjoy.
However, the challenge for this round DID require some basic knowledge to be able to pull it off. I’m willing to bet that 99% of my songs are in good old standard 4/4 time. Any of them that aren’t are purely by accident/instinct/chance. (Which I guess the same can be said for all of them that ARE in 4/4 time as well! ha!) Keeping ONE time steady while playing and singing is hard enough for me, let alone switching back and forth in the same song! Because I so often stray from the metronome, I’ll usually play at least a drum loop pretty loud to keep me on track when I record guitar parts, and then depending on the song I will leave it or drop it later.
The thing that seems extra bizzaro to me about that is that I can dance different time signatures - waltz, swing, salsa, etc - no problem! But this challenge made me think of a couple getting up to start waltzing together and suddenly on a dime the music changes to salsa! And then back again to waltz! And back to salsa! All in 3 minutes! That was the best way I could come up with to explain it to my non-musical friends and family who didn’t understand why I was so distraught.
Now I think that really ideally, it would NOT necessarily be that obvious that the time signature was changing, or the change would be fluid and seamless at least. I wasn’t even sure how I was going to pull off two time signatures at all, since GarageBand only allows one time signature per song. (the workaround is to just turn off the metronome and ignore the bars in the recording space as much as possible.)
I wanted to choose two really different time signatures so that it was really obvious that I’d completed the challenge, both to myself and to the judges. I sorta randomly chose 4/4 & 6/8, knowing that the one time previously I THOUGHT I wrote a song in 3/4, a teacher responded with comments about it being in 4/4 and when I asked him to explain why it wasn’t in 3/4 when I’d really tried to make it that way, and how I could tell the difference so I could get it right next time, he wasn’t really able to give me a good answer. So in my book, 4/4 & 3/4 was too high of a risk that I’d end up with no time change at all and be eliminated for not meeting the challenge. Later I realized that there is often confusion between 6/8 & 3/4, but even then I figured if I aimed for 6/8 & landed on 3/4, that would still be different from 4/4.
So that was a starting point.
