Songs against the undertow

Intro

Hi! My name is Elena Stalnaker and this is the wiki page for my 220C project. It's an album I was originally going to make as a Chappell Lougee project, but then the pandemic hit, so I'm very glad I get to work on it now!

I'm hoping to learn more about music composition/recording in general as I work on this project throughout the class, but especially mixing, song structure, and percussion, since those are the areas I feel least comfortable with.

Here is the link to the first song I have drafted for the project ("Orange"):

https://soundcloud.com/elenamss/orange/s-tgszAd02klJ

Progress Updates

Week 2:

~ Touched up "Orange" for presentation in class, accumulated feedback

~ Inventories all ~50-60 voice memos (~23 songs and fragments) and lyrics relevant to the project, selecting which songs to finish writing and producing during the class

~ Finished writing and learning on 2 most incomplete songs (brought together 2 old fragments I’d almost forgotten about for 1, and brought together 2 separate lyrics on a similar theme only one of which had a melody for the other)

Week 3:

~ Recorded and began mixing "Spring! (Finally)"

~ Finished writing "No Pain"

~ Requested classical guitar from Julius for "O Sleep"

~ Got tips on how to work faster in Logic - using templates and making time to watch more workflow videos than I already do, potentially read the manual

Week 4:

~ Collected field recordings for "Spring" and other projects

~ Watched a bunch of logic tutorials on templates

~ Started mapping out ideas for "O Sleep," played around with tempo and key

~ Listened to Julius’s version of O sleep

~ Created first Logic template

Week 5:

~ Recorded vocals for O sleep in both octaves, played with cutting and pasting low take to align differently with the high take at different times

~ Made another kind of template

~ Recorded lead vocals for "No Pain"

~ Started on harmonies and doubling for "No Pain"

~ Recorded lower doubling for O Sleep, spent a lot of time getting it in sync with higher vocals only to decide I liked what I made on Tuesday better

Week 6:

~ Created a production plan for "No Pain," with all the voices and notes for each section drawn out on paper similar to how Eoin Callery taught us in Music 101. Brainstormed how I wanted to make sections contrast each other, and what I wanted the overall arc of the song to be.

~ Kept working on "No Pain" til it was about half done - added a primary beat to the verses and chorus and some more fleshed out percussion to the bridge, added some field recordings and background vocals.

Week 7:

~ Got "No Pain" up to the point of being a draft I want to share with the class and get general and/or detailed feedback on. It isn't polished, but I have worked on it long enough that I now need to either step back for a while or get a second opinion because I am getting lost in it.