Welcome to mad music mondays, where we explore how music is created! In this season of mad music mondays, I’m exploring what I shall term ‘practising’ music-making. Find last week’s episode here.

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.

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Episode 2.

The music I made for this post feels like it was a long time ago now. It was in the first lockdown (which really is a long time ago!). I hadn’t written music properly for a while, because I’d been traveling, so it felt like a return.

The challenge for this was to write a one-minute piece of music, because that was the maximum amount I could share on Instagram at the time.

Looking back at this, I can see that a lot of my effort since has paid off. At the time, I didn’t understand how to balance the tracks, in particular how to properly mix the vocals. Hence why I made myself do last week’s challenge.

What I can learn from it, however, is that I need to be less nervous of software instruments. Every single layer of sound in this piece is one that I recorded and then manipulated. Although in my single ‘you should know’ I did come to peace with a touch of software instruments, I need to learn to use them more effectively than I have in the past.

Here is the music in question! Enjoy.

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Jena Ren, 2022