Fawm - Week 1 Summary

Fawm (http://fawm.org) is an annual event to write an album in a month.  The idea is to write 14 songs in 28 days and release an album.

It is now the start of day eight, so I thought I would update my progress so far (given in 2013 I managed 3 songs and 2014 I manged 6).

Well, the scores on the door is currently sitting as 2.5.

I started off on February 1st, whilst everyone else in the house was asleep.   So it was headphones on, leave the noisy guitars alone and work on a new tune for my Sineglider instrumental project.


This is based around the Alchemy plugin by the recently defunct Camel Audio.  Shame, given I like their plugins.



As with all songs I am going to demo this month, it will be very rough and will be re-worked over the coming months.

In the afternoon, I went to visit E from my band The Hair Thieves. I challenged him to come up with a song in the three hours we had.  

To speed things up, we used Toontrack's EZKeys piano plugin.   So over the course of three hours, we chose some piano patches, re-worked the chords.   Sorted out a rough beat and started the lyrics.

At the end of the day we had a rough tune and some partial lyrics.

On the Monday I recorded the lyrics, before reconvening back at E's on the Tuesday to finish the demo.

So after deleting the vocals for lines that didn't work (either melodically or scan).  We reworked the lyrics, added bridge lyrics and recorded some more vocals.

We then called it quits in the demo and released it onto the world.

This song will probably be on The Hair Thieves EP8, so we will rework this sometime later in the year. We will possibly throw away the piano and using the chord structure re-write for guitar.

Overall we are pretty pleased with the song.

The third song that was started is called "A winter's memory" the title was given as a skirmish (where you have one hour to write and record a song, with a given title or subject).

I managed to write the lyrics in under an hour, but never finished the music.

Idea came from a conversation I had with a friend at Uni.
We was talking about his girlfriend and he said something along the lines of,

"I love her, but sometimes, I wake up and look at her and just want to punch her in the face."


A Winter's Memory

Waking from a long sleep
A vision of you
Head under a pillow
I was never so cruel
It was so easy
though I'm not thinking straight
Why is it love, comes with such hate

And the winter remembers
The ghost of you
The coldness, the darkness
The screams and untruths
And the memory sparkles
as the nights draw near
Into my silence
you're worshiped and revered.

Snow falls on the landscape
On coats of blue
Ice breaks and dredgers
Still looking for truths
It was so easy
To make them understand
The love of a woman, can melt a man.

And the winter remembers
The ghost of you
The coldness, the darkness
The screams and untruths
And the memory sparkles
as the nights draw near
Into my silence
you're worshiped and revered.


I have started the music for this.  Initially, using EZKeys again.  I am currently in the process of replacing the piano with guitar and bass.  A the moment, this is in the tuning of DGDGBD since that was the guitar to hand.   So this will be a song for the Rollasoc project.

I will try and finish the demo in the coming days.

So on to week two.   I have signed up for an exquisite corpse game.   This involves several people, with the first person writing a minute of music and then sending the last ten seconds to the next person.  This process repeats until the end of the line is reached.   The first person then stitches all the snippets together into one long song.

I did this last year and got the Sineglider tune Foxtrot 4 out of it.


So another one minute Sineglider tune will be on the way this week, given I am second in line in my corpse.

Until next week's update, I'd best crack on and write a couple of new songs.