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.
Episode 4.
The challenge this week was to create a 30-second mood for a short video I took in my local park the other day.
As I mentioned in a previous week, I am trying to get more comfortable using software instruments. So although this started with vocals, they were quickly scrapped.
What they did provide, however, was a good starting point. I had improvised the vocals, given myself a series of different ideas in a row, picked one, but ended up muting the track.
I learned a few things this week. The first was that I am starting to learn from my mistakes, and just keep it simple.
The second was for a future project, and that is that I need to learn how to mix software instruments more effectively. For example, I had to work hard on making sure there wasn’t an unpleasant overtone ringing from the vibraphone. I couldn’t get rid of it completely, and need to do some research about that. Just goes to show that software instruments come with their own set of problems!
The video is on my Instagram, so if you’d like to see more of these kinds of videos, follow the link and give it a follow!
Jena Ren, 2022
Jena Ren 
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