_{Me on the guitar for a Jack & the Beanstalk rehearsal}

I decided to start a new mini-series that explores the thing I'm actually pretty professional at: Music. Specifically, composition.

I had always planned to write posts about music, perhaps tutorials in studio production or theory or whatever, but I feel there's just not much demand for such things here on Steemit (correct me if I'm wrong), so my other passion - science - came to the foreground.

In this series I figured it might be fun to embarrass myself by publicly displaying all the garbage that I created over the years since I was a beginner at my trade, and slowly work towards where I'm at now, somebody who gets paid (Sometimes...) to make and mix music for movies and such.

Quick History

I've always been musically inclined, and my mum was quick to pick up on this by getting me a tiny little red guitar to mess around with. Soon after I got my first little acoustic and lessons and basically the guitar consumed my middle and high school years. I'd often skip classes so I could sit down with my guitar and just play scales and arpeggios over and over, faster and faster. That's what it was all about!

Needless to say I got average grades, not because I wasn't smart (and not that I am, either), but because I just cared very little about school education. This turned when I decided to dump A-levels and go for a music diploma instead, and 2 years later I showed top results and headed to Uni to do a bachelor in music.

Here I was surrounded by a whole bunch of snobby types who grew up cradled on a violin and fed piano keys, with a couple of losers like me scattered around. The classes I were interested in though were purely snob-centric. They would chuckle mockingly at the way I would pronounce 'shostakovic' as shoss TAK o'vic, rather than Shossta KO vic. They'd whisper within hearing shot for me to go back to goth school or something like that (since I wore black, baggy, ripped clothes).

Either way, I ended up getting better grades than them, much to their visual dismay, and by the third year they were forced to play my music on my instruction, which was nice. But it took many years to get to the point where my music deserved being played, and so I'd like to go as far back to the beginning as I still have records for (which unfortunately isn't all the way).

Quixote

This is one of the earliest full compositions I have, and came out of 2006, my first year at University. I don't believe I have anything from my National Diploma days but if I find any, I'll be sure to post it.

Quixote is seriously bad, and I'll explain why under the track, in case your ears couldn't explain it for you:

I do enjoy looking back at my crap though because it demonstrates exactly what I learnt and when in time I learnt it, any potential I had, strengths and so on that I should exploit in the future.

In this case, it's mostly looking at my weaknesses and the thing that struck me the most - something that still annoys me to this day - is structure

For my entire composing life, I simply could not create a song with a structure as simple and plain as ABA, basically verse, chorus, verse. Nor could I write pop songs with Intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus.

I understood it conceptually of course, there was just some mystical force preventing me from doing so. There was something pushing me, every time I made music, to do things a little different to the established norms. Not a conscious rebellion at all, I wanted to learn these things. But when the sheets are put in front of you and you're putting in each and every note, one by one, one instrument at a time, it's easy to become blind to the bigger picture.

It was only many years later I realised that I was just working with too much. Rather than focus on a solo piano piece or something, I always had to throw in a string section, an oboe, even weird, electronic sounds to complement the group. I never built up. I never had that classical training, and basically built my way up starting at 'high-intermediate' without a clue what a treble clef was. I had years of catching up to do and it shows in this track.

What I can say is that I clearly had some abilities that were actually ahead of the classically trained. I had a far greater grasp on harmony and I had a wealth of ideas just exploding out of me every time I sat down to write. This piece alone has about 15 pieces of music potentially locked away in it, but I was foolish enough to just throw them all in one messy file.

A keen ear might also notice I was exploring poorly the idea of advanced rhythm. Though I was stuck in the same key, falling back on the root, and with the rhythmic fluidity of a marching band, I was trying in my own way to make notes go through the bars (measures), rather than land on the quarter note every single time. Didn't succeed very well in this case. Just sounds weird.

I was also showing my natural inclination toward chromatic harmony and emotionally dramatic content with large climaxes, but these were not to become truly apparent until my next major piece. We can take a look at that next time. With the help of my closest friend at the time (an all round genius - the type that borders on the line of insanity), improvements came fast, and it wasn't long until professors started to notice.

More on that tomorrow!