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 #37: Navigate Our Love

I considered leaving this to tomorrow morning to record, simply because I would have had more fun if I could crank my amp a bit. Once I start doing that, however, there's nothing stopping me from putting the writing off until the morning too, so I stuck to plan and recorded as quietly as I could.

SCP #32: Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers

Today marks the first day of month two of this year-long project. I should probably write a bit of a reflection on month one, but I might do that as a separate post tomorrow when I have a some free time. Today I'll keep my writing about my composition, and I might get a little nerdy in today's post. If you're one of my non-musician friends you might want to skip through to the bit about the lyrics.

SCP #23: There Is A Song

As I start to write this it's just gone 1am. I think every song so far has been written and recorded before midnight, but today I didn't set up my camera until well after 12am. I started working on the song at about 8pm with lots of enthusiasm, but that quickly turned to frustration and I spent far too long languishing in pages of failed ideas.

SCP #19: Dandelion

There are several recurring themes that are emerging in these pieces, and one is clocks. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with clocks, but they seem to be right at the top of my unconscious mind all the time and keep springing into my writing. This morning while I was teaching a singing student the clock in my studio fell to the floor and smashed. This was completely down to my inappropriate choice of 3M Hook size, yet it still felt somewhat significant. Perhaps the clocks in my house are sick of me writing about them? Or maybe they are crying out for attention in our age of digital devices with time-keeping capabilities. Either way, I chose clocks as a starting point for today, which led me to memories of "dandelion clocks" from childhood - when you would count the number of puffs it would take to empty the flower of its feathers and that would tell you the time

SCP #18: Fig Tree Slumber

I worked out today that I have been writing songs for about fifteen years, which sounds like an amazingly long time, and I feel I should be much better at it than I am by now. One chunk of that fifteen year period was plagued with horrible writers' block, which was largely due to not knowing how to write about things that were not highly and specifically personal. Learning how to separate myself from the songs and treat them more like works of fiction really helped me to get past that period, and now my writing tends to draw as much from my imagination as it does my own life experiences. Opening up space for my imagination means I can turn to books, films, mythology, poetry or art for stories and ideas, without having to wait for something in my own life to throw me a spark of inspiration.

SCP #17: Briar Rose

I dived a little way back in to my secret past with today's piece. My music degree was my fourth attempt at tertiary study, and the only degree I managed to complete. When I was much younger I studied almost all of a textile design diploma, but gave it up because it was destroying my love of making things. I'm not sure why studying music didn't do the same, perhaps just because I was older and more sure of my path.

SCP #14: Waiting...

Today marks the end of week two, and I'm feeling awfully burnt out already. I'm mentally, physically and vocally exhausted from a six hour gig yesterday, and all I wanted today was to have a day off. I have to be kind to myself though. This project was never going to be easy, and will ebb and flow with my mental and physical energy levels, and it's something I have to learn to work with.

SCP #12: In This Room

Today is the first day I really didn't want to sit down and work. Really, really didn't want to. My schedule has been fairly light the past few weeks as most of my music teaching doesn't resume until the school term starts back again, but I am playing at a wedding tomorrow and spent most of today preparing for that. I had considered building rest days into this project - one day a month perhaps - but momentum is an easy thing to lose. One day off the wagon and you start to want another, and another and another. I have no idea when I'll fit tomorrow's song in, but that's a challenge for the morning.

SCP #10: The End Of A Feeling

I don't have a lot of brain space left tonight, but I'll do my best to bash out a few cohesive thoughts on this piece. Today was an exercise in learning that something is enough. This one is not very long, and there was far more I was playing around with, but it got to 11:30pm and I decided to just record the most cohesive part. I tried to treat it like a finished piece in performance, and just making that mental decision seemed to help solidify it as a composition that is complete in itself regardless of what it wanted to be originally

SCP #9: The Taste Of A Stammer

Today's contribution starts to stretch the definition of music a little, but it falls within my use of the term. This was a purely lyrical endeavour, and came from the line "tripping through streets in insensible shoes" from yesterday, which I found myself turning around in my head long after I'd finished the recording. I decided to take the dominant sounds of that line, S's and T's, as my starting point. After brainstorming a whole lot of words that featured those sounds I put them together into random sentences, and the one I really liked the sound of was "the taste of a stammer". I used that as the starting point for a narrative, and fleshed out the text with other words from my brainstormed list, weaving them together in ways I liked both alliteratively and narratively

SCP #8: You And Her

Day 8, and I still haven't quite got my inner critic under control. It sneaks up on me in the middle of experimenting with an idea and tells me it isn't good enough. Or it's not "me" enough. Or it's too much like something else I've written. Or it's just not very interesting. There's a very strong personal element that comes into play too, the idea isn't good, original or interesting enough and therefore you as a person aren't either. If you let them take over, these feelings can stop any kind of creative progress in its tracks.

SCP #7: The Sun Makes It Grow From Your Feet

Today marks the end of the very first week of this project, and perhaps the end of the honeymoon period, as it's getting difficult now. It's a little surreal to realise I've churned out seven new musical ideas in as many days, and terrifying to realise I still have to find another 358 to make it to the end of the year.

SCP #5: Swing-Song

I have a young guitar student who is incredibly cute, and likes to take off his shoes before he starts his lesson. He says he's "just not comfortable" until he does. He always informs me while removing his footwear that he has tan-bark in his socks, and he inspired some of the lyrics for this piece

SCP #4: Hard Heart, Soft Hands

I felt like playing some mandolin today. From yesterday I took the idea of a square, which has four sides, and played around with intervals of a fourth to find the simple accompaniment pattern. Phrasing that same melody in groups of five over the top creates a nice bit of tension that eventually resolves. It's quite refreshing where such a small idea can lead, and although the result is very simple I can hear all kinds of possibilities for expanding it and arranging it for an ensemble.

SCP #3: A Linen Square

Today was hard, and it's only day three. I had about four hours sleep last night and spent most of the day as a zombie, but at about 11pm I pulled myself together enough to get this one out. These videos are the kind of thing I'd usually keep to myself, and not share them to become a public record of my experimentation. A huge part of this project, however, is about learning to put my inner critic on hold. Besides, tomorrow is another day and another chance to create something new.

SCP #2: Lydia's Needle

I completed my Honours year in music at the Victorian College of the Arts last year, and studied with my friend Joanna Kerr who is a wonderful vocalist and composer. Her research was looking at "seeds" - small ideas that inform compositions, which in turn inform improvisations, which in turn offer up new material for composing and improvising with. I'm definitely over-simplifying her work, but that basic idea is central to this project. There are times when I find getting started on something impossible, often becoming paralysed by procrastination, and this project is attempting to circumvent that by offering a ready-made starting point. So far it seems to be working, as getting started today (day two) was much easier than yesterday. I'm still in the honeymoon phase of course, so I'll have to wait and see how long that lasts

SCP #1: The Number Of Petals My Heart Has Left

The tyranny of the blank page...

It turns out there was a fatal flaw in my plan for this project: I didn't have any kind of starting point for the very first song. I'm naturally an excellent procrastinator if given the chance, and I almost decided that my announcement of the project would count as today's work. But I made a late dash to the finish line after dinner and emerged triumphant.

The Song-Chain Project: an introduction

The Song-Chain Project is a year-long creative mission that commences January 9 2017 and will run until January 9 2018. Each day for 365 days a new piece of music will be written, recorded and posted online, and the process documented.

Song-Chain ProjectErica Bramham9 January 2017Song-Chain Project, creativity, songwriting, composition

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