Process Journal #4

Alright, so I don’t have a lot to write about today since I haven’t had any time to work on my project, but I figured why not show what I’ve been doing for the past week or two.

As I mentioned in my first post,  I’m using MuseScore to create my digital score. I’m still having a mind blank and have not been able to come up with any good melodies, but I’ll show what I have so far.

So this is the first actual melody that came to my head. I was messing around on my piano and ended up coming up with this. I’m not too impressed by it though, and I feel it’s really lacking something. I also don’t know where I could go musically with it. Hopefully I can somehow either revise it to make it better, or just be able to come up with a totally new melody.

I’m trying to create a song that kind of tells a story of some sort. I don’t mean an actual story, but just something that has varied harmonies and rhythms. My idea is to make something that starts off slow and then becomes more intense as the song progresses. I am hoping to create something similar to this, but of course for piano.

As I keep saying, pretty much the only thing holding me back right now is coming up with good melodies. When I have done that, I’ll be able to hopefully get a lot of progress on my project.

Process Journal #3

So today I decided to start make a YouTube playlist containing various songs with melodies I like. I'm having a hard time coming up with a good melody, so I hope that by doing this I'll be able to forge some ideas.

Thankfully this is going to be the last week that I'm extremely busy. This means that I'm going to have more time to practice piano and work on this project. I'm really going to have to work on time management because currently I am also learning Rhapsody in Blue for my piano recital in December. Hopefully I won't procrastinate on things and be able to make progress on my project.

Process Journal #2

I actually worked on my personal project on Tuesday, 9.18.2012, but I never had time to write about what I did. So that is what I'm going to do now!

On Tuesday I decided to watch tutorial videos on how to use MuseScore. MuseScore has tutorial videos on their website, which go through the different steps on how to create a musical score. I learned how to add notes into the score more quickly and effectively, and also how to format the score so that it looks organized.

I also listened to various piano songs to try to get some ideas for melodies that I might want to include in my composition. My favorite pianist on the web that I always listen to is Kyle Landry: http://kylelandry.com. I've been listening to him for a few years now, and he's inspired me to try my best with piano. He does a lot of compositions, which he posts to his YouTube channel. My goal is to be able to freely play improvisations on piano like he does, but that's definitely going to take a lot of work.

Sadly I've  hardly had any time to work on my project, or even practice piano general. I've been extremely busy these past couple of weeks, so I hope that I'll be able to have time to play piano again soon.

My Very First Process Journal!

Today I am officially going to start the process of completing my personal project! I've decided to make my very own piano composition, and later on create the score using Musescore. At first I was going to use SibeliusFirst, but after a bit of research I've decided to use Musescore because number one, it's free, but it supposedly also has more functions than the basic version of Sibelius. I still haven't purchased a music theory book, but it's not a very big deal since I already have a lot of musical experience.

I've already played around with Musescore and tried out the different functions, just to get used to the software. At first I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but after looking at a few tutorial videos on YouTube I understood the program a bit more.

Hopefully I'll be able to come up with some good melodies that I can incorporate into my song. I'm aiming to write a more advanced piece, but I'm not sure yet if I'll be able to do that. I guess I'll just have to wait and see. :)