Guitar (Song Writing) Update 1

Guitar song writing

So one of my CAS activities was writing a song on guitar, this is something quite personal for me and to be honest quite difficult and time consuming. This is part of my creativity as it is a creative thing to do as one has to come up with ideas how to play, what to play, what to write etc...

Objectives

So my objectives were to write a good rhythm, write lyrics to the rhythm and perform the song infront of some people.

Progress

Until now I have managed to write down a chord progression and I have filmed this and put it up at the top of this post. I thought it was difficult to come up with something that sounds good and is in harmony and I tried to make a few variations while I played the chords so that it isn't that monotone.
My next step now is to write down some lyrics and get some vocals into the next video.

Until now I think I have seen the difficulties I have with song writing, as well as undertaken this new challenge. In addition I have increased my knowledge on guitar chords as I had to learn a lot of chords to find something which is what I was looking for.

Progress 2

I have now written a bit more sophisticated melody which sounds nicer and I have gone with a change in tune which I think is good. I have an introductory part plus a song part and a chorus, however I have to find a way to transition them into one song and then still write lyrics to fit with the tune. However I feel the song is making progress, slowly but surely, it is not easy writing melodies with little music theory knowledge, so I have started studying some music theory to understand the working behind the music I am playing and know why certain things work with them.

Progress 3

The song has taken a drastic change, a total change in melody, and rythm, I felt the old rythm was not really what I was looking for and I know this is now what I want in terms of melody. It has taken me a lot longer than I thought to find something that actually has made me pleased with it, it is quite simple chord wise, but I have tried to put a little twist on it rythmically and melodically. Ive also been writing lyrics over the past few months, but I find it hard to write something that fits and I have written a lot of pages however only few parts actually fit well. What I have found as well is that anything I wrote several months ago reflects a different mood because of what I was thinking about or feeling was different to what I am thinking about now, so my best bet is to write a text pretty much in one go and I will give that a shot in the coming weeks.

Reflection

After completing this activity I am kind of split whether of calling is successful or not. I definitely identified my weaknesses and my strengths of my creative ability in music. I was able to write a fairly strong guitar riff and chord progression, however on the lyrical side and singing side of things I was totally lost. I struggled writing anything that meant something to me and singing it as well. The rhythm or sound of what I wrote musically never seemed right for the sort of thing I was trying to play. Also I never stuck with a definite chord progression, I kept on finding something new that I then played. Therefore drawing upon that I think I had a lack of organisation of how I went about writing the song and progressing, as instead of moving on after writing a successful part, I always found something new and started from scratch. However I am happy that I wrote some quite different an varying riffs and chord progressions, therefore it was a partial success. On the other side I did fail to write any working lyrics that made sense to me or meant anything, I just lacked expressive skills. This is an area I will focus on in the future, however just the experience was a great learning experience, I learnt a lot of different skills throughout writing music and it was immensely valuable experience for myself.