Songwriting

Chord tasting the major7 chords

Victoria — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 13:13:32 -0500

During a chord-tasting session (like wine-tasting, but you taste chords instead of wine), I stumbled upon the Gmaj7 chord, and fell in love with it.

I love its airy expansiveness. When you play it together with the Cmaj7 chord, you can easily turn them into a 2 chords song with a nice floaty suspense.

I have named this 'song' Fathom. It reminds of scuba diving, regulating my breath underwater, my buoyancy determined by my breathing, and making bubbles as I exhale.

Here's the tab:

E----------2-------------2---------------0------0-2-
B-------0----0--------0---0----------0---0----------
G-----0--------0----0------- 0-----0--------0-------
D---------------------------------------------------
A----------------------------------3----------------
E---3-------------3---------------------------------

And here's the loop, good for lullaby on sleepless nights:

Fathom.mp3 (4.9Mb)

Fathom (no loop).mp3 (168Kb)

He finds me funny

Victoria — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Ok.. so here is my new song. There's quite abit of white noise in the recording, and also the bad guitar playing and singing.. don't expect much. I don't claim to have talent. And yea, I was having too much fun with the layering too.. Oh well, but it was such great fun! Also do let me know if this actually sounds just like some existing song written by someone else. It's really hard to tell if you're hearing from your muse or from subconscious memory, especially for something so intuitive like music. There's always the risk that I might just accidentally plagiarise someone. Here you go: He Finds Me Funny.mp3 - 3.02 Mb (the Artist name is 'Tian', that's my Chinese name) He finds me funny (Chords: C Am Dm G again and again and again...) He finds me fun-funny When he teases me into crying Crying like a baby helpless and weak I weep, I weep, I weep He finds me funny, I'm sure All my desperate measures for his pleasure That's what he is after, the laughter, I'm sure My measures for his pleasure He finds me funny when I'm weak Hurting deep inside till I am meek Crying like a baby helpless and weak My spirit weaker weaker He finds me funny when I weep When he teases me into crying Crying like a baby helpless and weak I weep, I weep, I weep That's why he has made me... Oh god that's why he has made me... Oh god that's why he has made me... He finds me funny when I weep... That's why he has made me He finds me funny, I'm sure... All my desperate measures... He finds me funny when I'm weak... Hurting deep inside till I am meek...

The audacity to write songs (the very lazy way)

Victoria — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

A friend has recommended the February Album Writing Month challenge to me, I think it's a great idea. So now the non-musically-inclined, no talent, no training, musical novice me, is going to write songs! In order to warm up to the event, I have tried writing a song last night. It worked surprisingly well. So I'm going to share my method with other non-musically-trained musician/songwriter wannabees like myself. How I do this is very simple, I start by chosing some chords that I like (Eg, C Am Dm G), and play it on the guitar until a melody comes into my head. Then I record the guitar part to my computer using this very cool free open source software, Audacity. After I have recorded the chords, I record the melody as well by humming it so I won't forget. With Audacity you can record multiple tracks to the same project and have the different recordings/tracks play in the same timeline. So I can get my humming to synchronise with the chords. And the best thing is that you can hear the other existing tracks on your earphones while singing into the microphone and recording into a new track. It's much easier than trying to play the guitar and sing at the same time at one go, hoping you won't make any mistake, and restarting if you do. I can also edit the tracks, adjust them, apply effects, time-shift them etc. And of course, export into mp3 or ogg. Next, I find some old rejected poems to salvage as lyrics and record the singing again and again until I get it more or less right. And tada! That's my new song. Without having to painfully note it down as musical scores or guitar tabs even! How lazy! The multiple tracks also enable you to create many layers of vocals and sound effects like an amateur version of Imogen Heap. It's great for people making music by themselves without the luxury of a band. It will be fun to make a game out of this. I can record some basic chords, put the Audacity project file on a forum, then have someone download it, record over it, and put it back. So people can essentially play in a band without meeting in real life. It's like a musical version of 'continue the story'. How fun! Anyway I'm all ready for February now. I'll perhaps even post up my new songs here if I ever feel so bold enough.