Welcome to ‘season 3’ of mad music mondays. If you want to go back and enjoy the journey from season 1, here is the first episode. You can find season 2 here.

In this season of mad music mondays, I’m exploring what I shall term ‘practising’ music-making. One of the challenges of having finished formal education is that all of the work we now do needs to be finished to a high standard, even if we are learning something new. So I’m giving myself small projects on a time limit, that I have to call finished by the end of the allotted time. The aim is to see what I am capable of, but also what I still need to learn. Let’s begin!

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Episode 1.

The first project is one that I completed almost a year ago now, but it inspired this idea.

The challenge was to record, mix and share (definitely not properly produce) a cover of ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ in just one day. Now to be fair, I already had a version of this ‘under my fingers’, so I didn’t need to make any decisions about the arrangement.

I have to say, I really enjoyed this one. As much as there are so many things I would change about it, it reminded me that I am, in fact, capable of making music. Shocking.

More than that, it was useful to explore what settings suit my voice, and really helped me prepare to record properly for my single.

The interesting thing about the time constraint is that it made me make decisions significantly more quickly than I normally would. What it proved (again) is that first instinct is usually the best one. Now to just practice applying that in bigger projects!

Here it is, in all its unvarnished glory. Enjoy!

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Jena Ren, 2022