Week 2 - Progress so far

Rock song? Well I guess you really couldn't call what I've got so far a rock song. I'm changing the title, it's now just a song, since I can't really explain the genre of what I've decided to create.

The program I'm composing on is a nifty little tool called "Guitar Pro 5". I like it a lot, and use it for most of my composing. One of the reasons I like it so much is that it allows me to view both the score and tab of a piece at the same time:

It's all MIDI but you type it in using either the tab or the score. It's my preferred way of writing as I can come up with a riff on the guitar and write in the tab. It allows you to use techniques such as bends and slides too.

In this project I'm doing 3 things:

1. Writing a song
2. Recording the song
3. Mixing the song

Why no mastering? Well, I only have around 2 months to do this. It's challenging enough. Whilst I aim high, I feel mastering it on top of everything else I need to do is a bit much.

The first thing I've decided to do is work on one of the many ideas that I jot down on GP5 (Guitar Pro 5). They aren't full songs, and there's a lot of room to work with on them, but they are solid melodic ideas. I take a leisurely scroll through my little folder:

As we can see, I'm innovative with my titles. Those letters in parentheses are a guideline for how complete the songs are. (A) stands for idea, (B) stands for developed idea and (C) stands for a complete song. As of yet, there are no Cs. That's something that will be changing soon.

I had a quick listen to all of these, which took a while. Most of them are decent at best, although you can pretty much tell how good they are by the dates. I had just finished listening to "heavy rock song" when I open the next piece up, the eloquently named "jg". I have a listen and it strikes me as very nice. At this point it was little more then a mellow instrumental based on a simple Emaj7 riff.

In just a day's work, I've sat down and created a piece which I am extremely happy with. This song is, at least to me, very relaxing. I find it hard to point out things that I don't like - a rare occurrence. It still needs work, definitely, but the major ideas are there. I need to change the chord before the key change, but that will take about 5 minutes to find a nice sounding chord to fit in there.

Here's a link to the song:

http://soundcloud.com/ampburner/individualprojectpiece1

I'm enjoying this project.