Home (WR 20)

This past Friday I went on my 5th mentor visit of the year. Every time I go on a visit I am learning and experiencing many new things and ideas. This is especially true for my most previous visit. We talked and discussed many topics, but two main ideas stuck out to me. The first idea we talked about was the concept of a countermelody. The second takeaway I had was the idea of ‘home’ within a song.
The first big thin Jonathan explained to me is the importance of having a countermelody. To put it in context, we were working on one of my songs and there was a long guitar solo. He said that while the solo was good, there should be some things added to support it so the listener does not get board. Jonathan had a really good analogy to illustrate this. He said the guitar or main melody should be like the road of a road trip. Most of the time you are focusing on the road, but every now and then you look off for a moment to see a mountain or lake. The counter melody is the mountain/lake. Its something that distracts the listener for a moment but doesn't take away from the road.
The second takeaway I had was the idea of having a ‘home’ in a song. Jonathan said that every song should have a solid home, but the song should have a good amount of time away from home so that when you return to home, it truly feels like home. He said its just like a real home, your home doesn't feel special until you have spent time away from it. Like when you go on vacation, and then return to home it really feels special to be home. In a song, Jonathan explained that you can achieve this by having parts of the song that feel unusual so that when you return to that home, it feels special and has a greater emotional impact.

Final Product Calendar (WR 19)

One assignment that was due this week was the final product proposal and calendar. The proposal is simply an overview of what my final product will be and the calendar is the schedule of dates of when each segment of the final product needs to be completed. When I was completing the calendar, I had a couple of eye openers. The first and most important is that I do not have as much time as I thought I had. I initially thought, "I have plenty of time, its not due until the end of the year" which is partly true. The project is due at the end of the year, but that is only about 2 months away. I now know that if I want to complete this album (my final product), I need to start ramping up the amount of time I spend working on it. This means putting my other projects on hold for a few months and focusing on this album. Another thing I realized from completing the calendar is that planning ahead is very crucial. For example, I want to have physical copies of my album at FPN (final presentation night). For this to happen though, I have to have the album complete and sent off a couple of weeks prior to make the copies and get it published.

Original Work (WR 18)

This past Friday, the Original work project was due. For this project, I had to do primary research and write a report summarizing my findings. I decided to conduct an online survey asking people about their musical preferences and how/why they like to listen to music. I then gathered the 130 results and looked for correlations and links between different factors. I ended up finding some important links, some of winch even surprised me. Once I had looked over all of the data, I then wrote an assessment about my findings. Along with the assessment, I created numerous graphs to aid the assessment and give the reader a deeper understanding about the data and the correlations between the data. Besides a few printing issues, the project went really good and I learned a lot about how/why people listen to music. Now the reason I decided to conduct this survey was to better prepare me for my final product (album). I now know a lot about what people prefer in a song, what kind of music videos they like, how most people listen to music, etc.