4:30 AM and a Tip for Composers

[Merryband1]

Well, I did it. I woke up at 4:21 this morning and wrote for a little over an hour. I have one thing to say about trying to compose at that hour.

It's hard!

Doubtless, it would have been easier if I could have turned on the computer and used the DAW to record the melody rolling around in my head, but I used the free version of Ensemble Composer on my Kindle. With earbuds, it was nice & quiet. I had to use a stylus because my fingers kept pointing to the wrong note on the staves. I spent most of the hour learning how to make the program work, making mistakes, erasing them, and starting over. However, I do have a couple of melody lines I can record later with guitar in the DAW, so it wasn't a total waste of time.

Earlier in the day yesterday, I spent over an hour analyzing song references from a couple of listings that I want to try. That wasn't easy, either, but I started a notebook to make notes. When I get the system improved, I'll do a post about How To Make A Song Analysis Notebook.

OH, and the biggest news of all: I found a website that does some of the work for you. It's called http://songbpm.com. You enter the performer or composer and the song title, and if they have it, they tell you how many beats per minute the song is by each performer if there's more than one. This wasn't entirely helpful on finding the bpm of every song reference I wanted, but it did show me some of them. I figure as we are trying to write to listings and give the song supervisors what they want, knowing the exact number of beats per minute will be a plus.

Happy composing!
Merry