My Trials & Tribulations of SpinTunes Round 2 (Part2)
My original idea for approaching the challenge was to create a music track and write lyrics to fit it. I tried to put pieces together in a million different ways, making two different files in GarageBand and thinking to paste them together but it wasn’t happening. I started to get a little panicky then.
After a couple days of not getting anywhere I realized I needed to take a new tactic. I decided to try out fitting music to lyrics, so I started looking through a few lyrics I had been working on that week for a class. I chose the one called Bullseye partially because one of the things I heard in my head while writing it was a big drum crash right before the chorus as if something was BAM!, hitting a target. I was hoping that would serve for a believable reason to stop playing one time signature and move to a new one, since I had no idea how to smoothly move between them.
With one piece feeling more created, I thought I might have more luck figuring stuff out with my brother’s keyboard, but he was at VidCon and I couldn’t find the power cord. A few frantic tweets and emails later, he finally got back to me saying where it was and I got started listening to rhythms.
I switched back and forth between trying to get the rhythm parts down, figuring out the chord progressions and adding to the lyrics, at one point ending up on the wikipedia page for Billiards scouring it for possible terms to work into the song.
It was also at about this point that I started losing my voice. Which was weird, because I HADN’T been singing or doing anything to wear it out. It just kind of disappeared. Which sucked because I couldn’t vocally try out the melodies in my head. As it got worse, l started to worry I might not be able to sing for my entry at all! I have a good friend who I thought would probably be willing to step in for me if that happened but realized that I also would not be able to explain to her how the melody went without a voice! So I spend a good deal of time picking out note for note the melody in my head “hunt & peck” style and trying to notate it in Finale, which meant a lot of trial & error & re-adjusting of rests and such to get it to sound as close as possible to what was in my head.
The amazing Jules sent me a recipe for a throat potion, which luckily the cafe where I work had all the ingredients, so I made myself several big cups of it on Saturday during my shift, and my voice slooooowly started to come back a tiny bit. I brought some home with me and kept drinking it the next couple days.
Sunday night I started REALLY panicking. Nothing was working. Nothing sounded right. At least I had more puzzle pieces than I’d had a few days ago, but I felt like they were all from different puzzles!
I had a radio show interview to blog about and otherwise prepare for, homework to catch up on and a house concert to prepare for (which entailed COMPLETELY rearranging the furniture in my house and getting the guest room ready for the artists, and preparing food & drinks for the party). I also had to put in a couple hours at another job the next day and was supposed to pick up my brother from the airport which is 2 hrs away on Monday night during the time the song submission was due.
After watching a bunch of YouTube video lessons about time signatures, stress snacks, some supportive talk from my husband complete with listening to some of his dance tunes collection for examples of how he mixed songs of different time signatures together, several encouraging tweets from the #spintunes folks and a tearful chat with my mom (who was out on the West Coast and therefore still up) in the wee hours of the morning, in desperation I finally decided to go to bed and ask the Higher Powers to give me some guidance while I slept.
