Fawm is an annual songwriting event, where several thousand musicians try and write an album of 15 songs in 28 days. This year being a leap year, it the idea was 14.5 songs in 29 days.
I'm happy to say, I failed to complete the task again. Having achieved 3,6 and 9 songs, in previous years, officially, I achieved 12 this year. Though in reality, it is less than that.
I managed :-
three sets of partial lyrics, (without music)
two instrumentals, that require lyrics *
seven instrumentals for my solo instrumental project, Sineglider.
Why so many instrumentals?
Simply, I'm currently suffering from lyrical writers block and low confidence in my lyric writing. I was hoping FAWM would have given me the necessary kick to finish some lyrics, but it wasn't to be.
That with work commitments and the fact that I wanted to learn to use some of the soft synths and effects I haven't got around to using, meant that I was a lot more interested in experimenting with sounds, than finishing lyrics. So instrumentals were the way to go.
* of the two instumentals, one was picked up by another songwriter, who put lyrics to it. Hopefully, you can her it Here.
I took part in another Exquisite Corpse task. (one person writes a song, passes the last 10 seconds to the next person who carries it on, etc etc. Someone when chains all the songs together).
here is my section of the song. Called Gabina.
As I stated before I was trying to experiment with synths and effects this year. One of the challenges this year was to write a 30 second song. I used that as an excuse to play with effects within my recording software, much like I would have done with physical guitar effects. What I came up with was a little more than 30 seconds and is two guitars, one take each. I will re-record this later and expand it with further instrumentation, I think.
As you can tell, I seem to have been in a more heavier mood, song writing wise, than I have been for many years.
This is noticible in this track. When I first started playing guitar in the mid 1980s, I was really into thrash metal. It is nice to go back to my heavy roots now and again, now that I have some wonderful distortion plugins. Plus the guitar in this (my old B.C. Rich Warlock) was tuned to DADGBD.
Lyrically, since the last blog, I have started one set of lyrics. Whilst doing Fawm, I was also (semi) attempting a free songwriting course. The idea was to write a song about your hometown.
Given I had already written a song about my hometown called Strang Familar World, the thought of writing another was not appealing. But I did start some. I will rework and finish this, since I think there are some nice lines in this, but it is rough and needs a lot of work.
Hometown Heart
Chorus
Like a Mistress
I keep coming back to her
She might not have my love
but she will always have my heart
Though distance means
we're constantly apart
Please when I die
take me back to the start
My Hometown heart
My Hometown heart
----
I feel the sea calling me
Through broken sleep
Too long land locked
Miss the warm salty breeze
Though I left half a life ago
She makes me believe
a smalltown boys dreams
and great things to achieve
The course has been pretty good and I did learn some new things, which might help me out of my lyrical hell. We shall see over the next couple of months.
The two songs I think need lyrics, I have passed to E to see if they have any mileage and whether they will be Hair Thieves songs or not. So not sure if any song this year will become Rollasoc songs.
So that was FAWM 2016. I'm quite happy with my musical output this month, but slightly disappointed with my lyrical quantity. Oh well there is always next FAWM!
So now FAWM is over, I can start concentrating back on the album.
After discussion the other night in the pub about Spotify and getting music online, I think my next post will be on the companies I have used to get my music online and how I have got on with them.
So more on that soon.
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