One of the problems I have in making music on my own is simply getting started. I have experimented with different ways of generating ‘starter’ material for albums in the past with varying levels of success. I suppose this isn’t helped by making purely instrumental music, so there are no words to help out.
In the dim and distant past (when I mainly wrote straight to notation rather than a DAW) I used algorithmic methods for composition. Sometimes mathematical equations – if they produced anything useful – that I found in New Scientist magazine for instance. Later on I got bored with this and would just look for an interesting sound or short idea and work with that. None of those methods ever really seemed satisfactory though – despite my seemingly prolific output on bandcamp.
It always seemed I produced better pieces when working in collaboration with other people – in particular Helicopter Quartet (with Mike on guitar) works rather well and the synth (CSMA) and guitar (Glider Theory) work done with Stuart was OK. The latter could definitely benefit from a little more work, but it’s limited by how often we can meet up. It seems that having someone else respond to me in real time (and occasionally have them start the playing) makes things easier somehow.
On my last album, “Perceptions”, I tried to emulate this ‘duo’ system by laying down a backing track on my own and then working on top of it. I’m not sure how successful that was really. Some good things came out of it, but like a lot of amateurs I can get quite predictable when improvising to an empty room.
On my 2021 album “Felix Variations” I wrote a simple theme and then used characters to vary that theme in different ways – taking a leaf from the book of many classical composers before me. Musically I think this was the most successful thing I’d done to that date, and it produced several tracks that didn’t sound much like anything I’d done before (not, in itself, a bad thing). It’s also the only album of mine that has produced any PRS payments, though I’m fairly sure that’s a case of mistaken identity rather than an indication of music quality…
To the present day, and I’m still struggling to get started. On my laptop is a directory called ‘2023 album’ that contains four half-started tracks, all of which I think are terrible. So that went well.
Then I was asked to do the music for a film ‘Dear Lucifer’ by some theatre friends of mine. I had already filmed and edited the show so I was very familiar with the content. At first I was worried that my inability to start would hamper me, and I did throw quite a lot of ideas out, but eventually I took a rough idea from a TV show I thought was related (I’ll leave you to guess which – leave a comment), wrote a theme based on that and then got to work, and things quite nicely fell into place. I worked on ideas of musical ‘styles’ for the two main characters and varied those to follow the character arcs, and the main theme became a set of stings that followed the story arc.
Once I’d finished that I had quite a few ideas, almost none of which was longer than a minute. Sometimes it would be an introductory idea to set the mood for a scene or a gentle repetitive bed to give an idea of a ‘space’. It was then that I had the idea to take these stubs and turn them in to full-length pieces for an album. Not only would this give me a creative lift up, but it would also allow the music I was so pleased with be actually heard on its own rather than covered up by the dialogue – it turns out that playwrights (even when they are also musicians) are very keen on people hearing their words!
So that’s what happened. For this album I have taken several bits from the film music and developed them so they have a life of their own. Most of the time I have taken the initial idea and run with it, sometimes adding other bits in the middle or at the end. One piece, “Rainbows” is actually the whole track I did for the film. I recorded nearly 4 minutes for a particular scene because I wasn’t sure how much I would need (it was one of the first bits I did, before it was even fully cut), so that’s just the full un-cut version that I originally recorded.
One thing that this has done is that several of the tracks have a lot of ebow-ed guitar on them. That’s mainly because I was using it as a character reference and I liked those bit so much I turned all of them into a separate pieces. I hope that doesn’t make it too boring, but what goes around that guitar is different each time – because they were for different moods. See what you think.
There wasn’t much violin on the original soundtrack, apart from some octave violin masquerading as a cello and a very short part in the duet for ‘Day 7’, so I added quite a lot of normal (electric) violin to make it feel like one of ‘my’ albums.
It’s interesting to me that I spent most of a year (on and off – mostly ’off’) failing to get four tracks to a point where I didn’t hate them, yet in a couple of months I managed to produce music for a half hour film and turn that into over half an hour of music. I need to learn how to harness this process in future!
So, here is the album I came up with. The download also includes a copy of the ‘Suite’ from Dear Lucifer that contains (almost) only the bits that appeared in the film itself, glued together to make something of a whole. In general I think this is the best album I have yet done – by quite some margin. I hope that some people enjoy it.
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