SCP #60: Of Smoke

Two months of songs down, and it took me all this time to do something on ukulele. I have never really enjoyed playing uke, as I find it uncomfortable to hold, and just use it for teaching. But yesterday I finally went and got a strap button installed, and it made such a difference. While I was studying at the VCA Jo Lawry gave a master class, and spoke about the advantages of writing songs on an unfamiliar instrument. For her it was guitar, and she enjoyed just putting her fingers onto the instrument and letting sounds guide her. The ukulele plays a similar role for me, as I find its tuning very foreign. This song came about from simply putting my fingers in random places on the instrument and letting my ear be my guide.

SCP #43: Read My Heart

For this piece I took a fragment of yesterday's melody, wrote the notes on scraps of paper and pulled them out of a hat to create a new melody. The first time I pulled them out, however, they were in perfect ascending scale order, so I discarded that melodic idea. If I were really giving myself over to randomness I should have gone with that first attempt, but I found the orderliness uninspiring so I had another go. Really, I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to make something interesting out of half a scale, and I didn't even give myself the chance to try. Next time I'll stick to my guns, and work with whatever material my methods throw up.

SCP #42: Some Kind Of Crazy Novelist

One of the reasons I started this project was to give myself permission to create whatever kind of music that day inspired. After releasing my debut album Twelve Moons last year I spent a lot of time struggling to categorise the music I liked to make, and trying to fit it into predefined genre boxes (folk? jazz? experimental?) that it was never quite the right shape for.

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