Geek Pop
Once the project began I found it pretty easy to begin with, I had tons of ideas and enthusiasm and so I was rattling through the project effortlessly. I was also really pleased with the quality of the output. Songs like 3 Years and 3 Monkeys came pretty early on and still get downloaded a fair bit even now, and I frequently send them off to industry types in a vain attempt to get reviews and airplay, and I occasionally get lucky, which leads me nicely to my first little success with the project.
Once the project began I found it pretty easy to begin with, I had tons of ideas and enthusiasm and so I was rattling through the project effortlessly. I was also really pleased with the quality of the output. Songs like 3 Years and 3 Monkeys came pretty early on and still get downloaded a fair bit even now, and I frequently send them off to industry types in a vain attempt to get reviews and airplay, and I occasionally get lucky, which leads me nicely to my first little success with the project.
After hearing about the Geek Pop podcast from a friend of mine, I decided that 3 Monkeys sounded fairly geeky and sent them a link to it, they got back to me the same day and were kind enough to feature it on their “virtual festival” which in turn led to me getting the opportunity to play at a real festival, The Green Man Festival to be more specific, due to their involvement with Einstein’s Garden. So during a rather wet but pleasant weekend in Wales I got to take the stage on two consecutive days for a solo acoustic set, which made me extremely happy. So if you’ve never heard of Geek Pop, go check it out, it’s a great listen and I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank its wonderful creators Hayley and Jim.
Cutting Back
So things started well, and I got a little bit of publicity with Geek Pop, and couple of other blogs, podcasts and even some college radio in the US but at some point I realised I’d bitten off slightly more than I could chew, not with the actual songs funnily enough but with everything else that I’d decided to do alongside them. I was recording a weekly video blog, which I’ve already mentioned in a previous blog entry, a podcast, and I was now also playing live again which I wasn’t planning on doing until the project was complete, but it’s hard to say no sometimes . I pretty much maxed out all of my free time and every second counted with this endeavour so I was staying up late, not eating particularly well and I’d stopped going down the gym so something had to give.
I cut back on two things, the videos and the podcast intros, which gave me back a nice chunk of time. I still did both things but instead of putting a spoken word introduction at the beginning of each podcast I just put out the song itself, and on YouTube I’d just put a still image along with the song title and my web address. Like so:
So if you’re reading this and thinking of embarking on a ‘Song A Week’ challenge your own then my main tip for you would be, just do a song, forget podcasts and videos, they were fun to begin with but started to become a major drag after a while and I didn’t really see that they were benefitting me or my music in any sufficient way. It’s important to put your stuff out on a few different sites but make things as easy as possible, so you’re not struggling to generate new content for each.
Creativity
They say genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration, now I’d like to state that I’m not claiming to be a genius in any way shape or form, I’ve just found myself beginning to identify with this phrase. A completed song, a novel, a short story or a painting, all kinds of creative projects can probably fall within this idea. It’s sometimes easy to have an initial idea and to begin something, but it takes a whole lot more to take that idea all the way through to completion, even a three minute song.
I don’t actually find creativity difficult, my mind’s constantly churning out random ideas; I have shed loads of notebooks, scraps of paper, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and tapes full of musical odds and ends that I’ve created over the years. So even if I’d been genuinely stuck one week, I’d have had a load of ideas to fall back on.
I find it way more difficult to edit what comes out of my brain into something that could possibly sound pleasing to the ear, and it’s this process that sometimes leads me to believe that I might suffer from some mild form of attention deficit. Before the project began I’d often find myself halfway through recording a song and another song would pop into my brain and then I’d start recording the new one instead, then the previous one would then get tossed into a darkened corner of the vaults never to seen or heard again. You could argue that this mind-set may be an editing process in its own right and that my subliminal mind is using my attention span as a way of filtering out the weak and inferior.
This quickly changed in 2010, if I was half way through a song and my brain started to go off on a tangent I’d still persevere with the original idea and see it through to completion. I knew I wouldn’t always have enough time to bin it and start again, which in turn led me to look at song-writing in a more pragmatic manner; I started reading about structure and arrangement and listening more intently to other people’s music, in order to work out how to complete the songs I was having difficulty with.
I found that attempting to clone an existing song I enjoyed was a really useful learning exercise; I’m not talking about completely ripping something off note for note, but analysing it and attempting to produce something with a similar vibe. For example I did ‘I Used To Be Cool’ which was based on Blur’s There’s No Other Way and Life In Monochrome which was based around Pink Floyd’s Breathe. These methods just opened up my mind to new methods of completing songs and varying the overall sound of the songs in order to keep it interesting for myself, and hopefully for the listener.
Below are some of my more experimental moments, where I’ve either borrowed ideas from existing songs or just gone off on a musical tangent.
Creativity
They say genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration, now I’d like to state that I’m not claiming to be a genius in any way shape or form, I’ve just found myself beginning to identify with this phrase. A completed song, a novel, a short story or a painting, all kinds of creative projects can probably fall within this idea. It’s sometimes easy to have an initial idea and to begin something, but it takes a whole lot more to take that idea all the way through to completion, even a three minute song.
I don’t actually find creativity difficult, my mind’s constantly churning out random ideas; I have shed loads of notebooks, scraps of paper, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and tapes full of musical odds and ends that I’ve created over the years. So even if I’d been genuinely stuck one week, I’d have had a load of ideas to fall back on.
I find it way more difficult to edit what comes out of my brain into something that could possibly sound pleasing to the ear, and it’s this process that sometimes leads me to believe that I might suffer from some mild form of attention deficit. Before the project began I’d often find myself halfway through recording a song and another song would pop into my brain and then I’d start recording the new one instead, then the previous one would then get tossed into a darkened corner of the vaults never to seen or heard again. You could argue that this mind-set may be an editing process in its own right and that my subliminal mind is using my attention span as a way of filtering out the weak and inferior.
This quickly changed in 2010, if I was half way through a song and my brain started to go off on a tangent I’d still persevere with the original idea and see it through to completion. I knew I wouldn’t always have enough time to bin it and start again, which in turn led me to look at song-writing in a more pragmatic manner; I started reading about structure and arrangement and listening more intently to other people’s music, in order to work out how to complete the songs I was having difficulty with.
I found that attempting to clone an existing song I enjoyed was a really useful learning exercise; I’m not talking about completely ripping something off note for note, but analysing it and attempting to produce something with a similar vibe. For example I did ‘I Used To Be Cool’ which was based on Blur’s There’s No Other Way and Life In Monochrome which was based around Pink Floyd’s Breathe. These methods just opened up my mind to new methods of completing songs and varying the overall sound of the songs in order to keep it interesting for myself, and hopefully for the listener.
Below are some of my more experimental moments, where I’ve either borrowed ideas from existing songs or just gone off on a musical tangent.
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