What once was a script written in a blitz for a youtube channel that doesn't exist.

Ignore the fork.

I am throwing my life away to music. You don't know me, and you might never. But my life pushed me to a point where I think of music as my only option forward. You don't need to know the details but circumstances made music a lifeline for me this year. There are no alternatives. This is a good thing, because one of the messiest things in my youth so far has been an abundance of choice and it overwhelmed me and made decisive action difficult.

My case is unique. My good friends are musicians and have been doing it for a while and they let me join them as a vocalist around February with zero prior experience. 10 months of writing, practicing, and performing. This is what I learned in that span, and what I struggled with.

Theory/Execution ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Rhythm:

My rhythm is shitty. You can't fake rhythm. I haven't seen any help from metronome practice but I haven't really used a metronome. I have a theory that you need a certain amount of investment into metronome practice and a certain amount of rhythm skill before metronome practice is actually worthwhile. My biggest rhythm improvements have come from practicing with drummers and jamming with people. It was so frustrating immediately playing with an experienced band as a beginner vocalist because I didn't have any timing sense at all. I couldn't track the changes across songs that were written by very good musicians even though they were relatively simple and looking back, because I didn't have the songs or parts written it impeded my ability to write lyrics and vocal parts to preestablished chordal songs. An example being I didn't have a sense for the changes and their harmonic implications when considering the extended chords used in context.

Harmony:

Harmony is probably my strongest skill currently, not in regards to perfect pitch, or even relative pitch, but I think that most people coming into music later like I have will have a pretty good intuitive sense of harmony. So learning harmony for me was moreso putting explanations to intuitively felt movements within the music. Shifts in tonal centers still fuck with me, but after a year it is something that has definitely progressed. Being a beginner musician, I am mostly sticking to diatonic chords when I am practicing alone. Modes are not so much intimidating as I have not found functional use for them yet because for melodies I mostly stick to the scale.

Melody:

I don't know whether this is true for all beginners, or late beginners who listen to a lot of music, but I feel that making melodies over the top of progressions is one of those facets of music that people are initially overdeveloped with in regards to their other skills as soon as their instrumentation gets to a certain point. Listening to thousands of hours of music and focusing on their main melodies means that when it comes to throwing melodic leads over diatonic progressions, as soon as I got an initial grasp on the major/minor scale, constructing simple melodic leads that would sound great in pop came shortly after (a pretty easy task to execute at a novice level). Melody being harmony over time, is so dependent on rhythm and dynamics. And even now I'm having a hard time placing melody notes appropriately in jams. Keeping track of changes and the downbeat. Especially when it comes to vocals. Because I've found while there are so many ways to construct vocal melodies especially across different genres and feels, I'm currently limited to sitting around a couple central notes (if I can stay in key). This is an area I've struggled with when it comes to integrating lyrics, because often in a lot of songs certain words are placed on the 1 (and downbeats) which have huge emotive weight. So when I've written lyrics separated from melody, harmony, and rhythm, as I generally do with writing verse, a lot of times I am forced to actually give up the prosodic structure of my words to fit the best melodies. I think this is due to my poetry and grasp of meter being rather weak, and not having a clear idea of how certain sentence structures fit in whatever rhythms the song demands. Again for now, its mostly 4:4. I think in the future I'm going to work on constructing songs around melodic motifs, after writing hooks or initial melodic ideas. I'm just going to call it sentence based writing because I don't really know how I'll fit that together. The way I approach songwriting is currently extremely messy and disorganized. This is because I'm just getting to the point where I can start expressing my ideas through dynamics.

Dynamics:

Dynamics in regards to song structure, are two separate things at the moment. Perceived or conceptual dynamics, when it comes to having an idea of where you want songs to go, how you would like to express central ideas and feelings of songs, and invoking depths of feelings in music according to conventional or unconventional pacing. And expressed dynamics, by playing with tension and resolve. I am definintely hindered my current grasp of Rhythm, Melody, and Harmony. Currently when I think about structural dynamics in songs its just stressful. There is nothing more irritating than hearing where you'd like things to go, and not having the ability to express or act on those feelings. Even in the first song we've finished, I had so many ideas for improving and elevating the emotive peaks, whether it be how it'd get there, or how it was executed that for a long time the song itself was just frustrating to think about. It made me unhappy listening to it because it wasn't what I wanted. When we would play that song live, or practicing, I felt like because of its extremely simple chords going from C to Aminor, we could just sit and jam and through our coordination with my vocals as a driver of intensity, I was able to drive dynamic ideas and we could express ourselves at depths that the recording lacked.

Improvisation, Revision, and Memorization: Music is two parts. Improv and memorization.

Improv is spontaneous creation, expressing the inexpressed experiences that collect inside our chests. I think fundamentally music is an oral framework for connection, and improvisation is the initial attempts to give descriptors to what was previously undescribed. I think of it as walking in unfamiliar territory. And like in exploring wilderness, whether you are first discovering a well walked and maintained path in a national park for the first time (jazz improvization), or trailblazing (caption:or rediscovering long buried paths) through overgrown wilderness (crazy atonal 52tone solo), there is discovery involved. And unrelated to my own experience, for jazz or other forms at the adept level, you can stretch this metaphor to an experienced lumberjack choosing new routes in a familiar forest. It is motion and creation. Improvization lays the groundwork to walk that path again. (needs to add own experience to this section)

Memorization is predicated on previous improvization and creation, whether by yourself or someone else. And it something I have really struggled with. I've never had a good memory, and its something I think that would take a tremendous amount of effort to slowly change. I don't know my songs by heart yet. I've forgotten words and melodies and placings that with the band we've "set." There are several struggles I've had with this this year. One is, especially early on but even now, I haven't felt confident disciplined enough to really practice on my own. Early on, I lacked the instrumental skills and harmonic knowledge to play them alone. I went off recordings of jams and practices and tried to write vocal parts over constantly changing harmonies but there was no discipline or skill yet for me to do that without the aid of my friends playing them on acoustic guitars or in full band settings. I didn't have the resources or skills to record in time to software. Because I've found its really hard to memorize and learn difficult timings without good rhythm, or a good recording. I also was never satisfied with lyrics. Constantly pouring over them and changing them. Because most of my writing is unconscious, only really structuring with revision, which is a skill I was forced to acquire (through my writing specifically) because of poor improvizational ability. Poems out of meter which say the right things in the wrong way, and then you revise because you found a better way to express those feelings or ideas. Revision for me was relied on as a crutch so heavily it became an impediment to playing with my band, it created conflict and at one point Brendan sat me down and said we've already written parts around your lyrics stop changing them. Revision used as a crutch for poor execution is why I only have one song under my belt after a year of songwriting.

Controlling your pareto, that ability to know when something is 80% done and to move on, is something that I think I really need to focus on while I'm still developing my base skills. Revision and memorization are something that constantly antagonize eachother. Because at my stage the more I've memorized a song, whether it's lyrics, or melody or verse, the harder it is to action changes on the whole when you are playing in a band with other people who are also working hard to memorize their parts. The ability to adapt and change to different ideas is something that I think takes immense discipline as an individual let alone a group. The memorization of parts is still so foreign to me, but I am unpracticed, I haven't used repetition to my advantage. And going forward I'm going to try and integrate mneumonics more, there's a concept called spaced repetition that I think can be applied to music that I'm going to try integrating into my practice.

These three concepts, of improvization, revision, and memorization are something still so foreign and intimidating, but I am trying to break through those plateaus. Even thinking about how I'll do it is something that ellicits deep sighs. Maybe take more psychedelics, get an adderall script. (chuckle sadly, caption: :red alarm: PROBABLY NOT SERIOUS :red alarm:)

Bands ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Band Dynamics Band Practice Songwriting ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Poetry

I think of myself as a writer, so all my songs start with a poem, or an idea that I want to express over and over. It takes 30 seconds to read shorter poems. A song is 3 minutes on average probably. So obviously I'm met with the problem of how do you lengthen a piece of writing that takes 30 seconds to read into 3 minutes? Its pretty easy if you don't think about it, words can be placed arbitrarily, they don't need to carry the burden of meaning within a musical composition. I want them to desperately. In regards to the general culture, music is the only way I can currently see my words having meaning for others. I'm aware this is a crutch because of my own failings, in some respects I never tried writing seriously despite it being the biggest focus of my life. I can't name ten contemporary authors or poets that have changed my life. Most of the transformative works I've been influenced by are written by the dead.

Chord Progressions Writing with others/groups Riff lead writing Vocal lead writing Telling the truth

One of the interesting things about having poor technique and execution on coherent symbolic and narrative structures is that I could tell a clear difference between singing words with and without meaning. I've always been pretty emotionally disconnected from my writing, and I've always been a liar. Storytelling is in my family and I have a personal habit of exaggeration that I picked up from my grandmother. Here's the thing, inauthentic words performed poorly sound really bad. Excruciatingly bad. And while I have the goal of eventually being able to shift my songwriting to other peoples experiences, by sheer coincidence of my current skill progression I've started honing in on genuine meaning. Which is surprising to come into a creative process and see your works have lives of their own. I'm not saying I have it down, but this is something I've infrequently noticed. But its worth mentioning because my approach to songwriting is honestly pretty emotionally sterile. I'm pretty disconnected from myself when I write, poetry to me is still assembling puzzles together, of sonorous phrasing and explosive unexpected words. When I start trying to sing over them poorly it becomes pretty obvious which phrases are worth finding melodies over and keeping, and which ones are just glitter. Not that glitter is bad, but glitter is mostly disposable.

Instrumentation ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Vocals Guitar Bass Virtuosity Dynamics Practice: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Vulnerability Safe Spaces to make mistakes Jam Spaces

I got a job about halfway through the year, moved out immediately of my mothers into a large shared space with lots of people. I was the first or second to really move into that house which came to have 7 people living there, Immediately hosted a jam with all of my friends, moved my friends Vdrums into my house. Made a bunch of noise for a couple hours then the next week my new roommates held a roommate meeting which set some ground rules in place to where I couldn't practice with an amp in the house (reasonable), and no more large gatherings of that sort would happen again. Immediately I stopped practicing in that house, and a couple months later moved out around the same time I got fired from my job. (laugh). The Vdrums sat unused in the garage space for maybe two months.

Being ok with making mistakes Learning Songs ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Drug use Mentorship The scene Music as Trade Throwing shows Joining tickets Booking shows Developing relationships with other bands Songwriting retreat DAWs, LOOPY PRO. Recording in time. Why am I doing this:

I have nothing else. I have always considered myself a writer, but You are what you do. Writing is painful for me and while I do it intermittently I don't sit down and write every day. If you want to write Long form you sit down and write prose every day. If you want to write poetry you write poems even when the poems won't flow. My mental issues and lack of will and determination have always precluded me from succeeding whether in school, writing, creativity. DRIVE. I struggle with drive. This is more general but I haven't actually driven myself at all this year. This is up for debate but I have just went to where people were doing music mostly. I've begged to go to jams. Playing alone is very difficult because I don't have a process. I wouldn't have come this far without my friends, but people are busy and its coming to the point where I've taxed others to keep playing because to host a beginner and to teach a beginner is an energy expense. Most musicians make a living because of this, because people who want to get into music need to pay someone to teach them. Buy my course, rent my knowledge. In this first year I have benefitted massively from the generosity of people in the scene and my friends from allowing me to make mistakes with them, but I know that this won't last and its probably an anomaly.