Motifs

It is 3:28 AM on a Sunday Morning. Since I’ve yet to adjust to school, I have to pull an all-nighter to get my hours straight. So what am I doing? Composing.

I reset my hard drive again; my computer just tends to be prone to virus and I’m too lazy to actually buy an antivirus software… Don’t tell me to use AVG, I don’t like it. I prefer this anyway, it’s a nice clean slate.

I digress. I opened up a NOTION template for solo piano and started working. Well, it didn’t go like that. I tried a lot of different ideas, trying to work on Starlight, since I do have a prelude for it and all… But that didn’t go too well. So I went to my (horrible, pedal-less, 66-key piece of crud) keyboard and just imporvised a bit on a bass motif. Ding! Idea.

So, back to NOTION. I start a new template and give it no title, just a C minor key signature and Common time. And I begin. Sadly, my MIDI is not hooked up to my computer because it’s impossible to find a MIDI to USB cable ANYWHERE. *steam blows out of nostrils* I put in the bass notes, add a horn section, decide it sounds bad, and voila! In ten minutes, I have a very short composition for solo piano. And by very short, I mean 30 seconds.

This album is… a stretch for someone sheet-music savvy like myself. My goal here is to only use live performances with the equipment I can access (though I will still need the new equipment because a fifty-person chorus singing fortississimo usually overloads most microphones) and to follow the sheet music like a jazz musician would. By not doing it. The sheet music for each piece in Motifs—the title of this new album (I’m sneaky)—will be like a lead sheet with some basic motifs in it. No chord symbols unless the object is to improvise based solely on chords. There are a few things I’m going to have to watch out for here, including that a piano is not a choral reduction and therefore I should attempt to avoid giving up a bass line in favor of two-handed chords, and my favorite key to work in: C minor.

However, I have started the album, so expect it… eventually. Now that school has started it may be longer, and I also will have to find a good recording venue… like the Performing Arts building at school, if only I could get permission to use the new piano and some of my church’s equipment… ;)

By the way, track one will be titled “Faint of Heart” and it just so happens to be in C minor.