Music Shapes Up Quickly

Yesterday I sat down and made rough recordings of all eight songs for John.

As I went through each song I discovered in many cases that the music wasn't really finished. So I had to finish composing before recording the tune. And in one case I realized that I had never written anything worth keeping. So I wrote music for that song in about fifteen minutes and quickly taped it.

Next step was putting the songs into a computer and making mp3s. Then I emailed them to John so he could see what I'd done with his lyrics. This is always a nervous time for me, as I'm hoping he'll like everything. On the other hand, I'm often unsure about the quality of my work and I really want him to catch the stinkers.

In this case there was one song he absolutely hated. So I've started over this morning on that one.

In several cases he had specific comments, such as, "I like the feel and melody of this song, but the first and third lines of the verse don't seem to work." In this case, the first and third line of the verse were the most distinctive part of the music. Sigh...

So I'm rewriting and I'll phone the changes in to John. Then tomorrow I'll notate the song for the singers and record the songs they'll be doing. I'll have transposed the songs into approriate keys for the kids, since I haven't worried about that so far. Right now the songs are in whatever keys they came to me, which means they might be too high or low for the average child to sing.

The cool part of this is knowing that in a week I should have a finished recording---and by early March teachers across the country will begin receiving their copies to share with their students.