There are many reasons I focused on composition when I studied music in college, but as I'm working through these demo recordings, perhaps one has come into greater relief.<\/p>\n
I'm a terrible performer.<\/p>\n
I keep saying how I'm not a singer, but the extent of my lack is apparent when I try to tackle some of my own seemingly deceptive songs. For the last two days, I've been doing battle with a song that's in 3\/4 time, with a lengthy melodic phrase. The rhythm is pretty much quarter notes, but the phrase is such a length that a trained singer may find it tiresome. A no-talent such myself finds it excruciating.<\/p>\n
I've also written songs where closed vowel sounds like "ih" and "eh" get long notes. The wider you can make your mouth, the better long notes would sound. But those vowel sounds lose their character if you open your mouth too wide.<\/p>\n
Another song leaps from A to E-flat — the Devil's interval.<\/p>\n
Why do I do this? Because I'm not a singer. If I sang more, I would probably stay away from scales with diminished and augmented intervals. If sang at all, I would make sure long notes were matched with open vowels, and I would keep phrase lengths manageable.<\/p>\n
But I'm a writer. A songwriter, a composer, what have you. I'm the kind of person more interested in what a melody would sound like with diminished and augmented intervals. And as a lyric writer, I don't care if open vowels ended a phrase — I'd just want the right word to convey whatever vague mood or message I want to establish.<\/p>\n
And so I end up creating music that I can't really perform myself.<\/p>\n
But if I catered my writing to how I perform, would I really be engaged with compromises?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are many reasons I focused on composition when I studied music in college, but as I'm working through these demo recordings, perhaps one has come into greater relief. I'm a terrible performer. I keep saying how I'm not a singer, but the extent of my lack is apparent when I try to tackle some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkgj-1D","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}