I thought of sick new band name, Soundhole, but of course some deranged band nobody has ever heard of already took it. I’m thinking of taking it anyways though.
The lead guitarist was being super mopey and depressed the other day, so I finally bit the bullet and asked him if he wanted to cover a song other than Basket Case, and he said yes. Which was annoying because I had been practicing that for a while, and to just pull the plug like that irked me.
Anyhow, we switched over to Eight Days a Week by the Beatles, which I already had experience playing. It’s a pretty simple song that repeats itself throughout most of it, but when it came time to rehearse, we were a mess. I played alright for the most part but would occasionally forget the lyrics. There are parts of the song where John and Paul sing in unison which I wanted to recreate, but somehow both the lead guitarist and the bassist are impossibly bad singers. We sounded awful singing as one.
Our bassist somehow keeps losing track of where he is and can’t figure out how to rejoin so he just gets lost at the bridge and stays silent for the remainder of the song. He’s playing bass on a keyboard too, which should be especially easy. I can’t imagine his performance on an actual bass guitar. Those bass strings are thick, and he was boohooing over just the soft nylon guitar strings.
Our lead guitarist isn’t very clean. There’s not much else to say about his playing except that. It sounds very messy.
Anyways, our lead guitarist suggested we make a Christmas song, which I thought might be a good experience, and perhaps we could even release a festive EP in time for the holiday season. So I got to work on the songwriting, but it turns out songwriting is very hard. I have a very baseline understanding of music theory, which I figured would be enough, but apparently I need to further my studies because I could not figure out anything past the intro. My idea was to start with a traditional, slow, choirlike Christmas carol akin to Silent Night, before introducing a poppy electric guitar riff and transitioning into a faster, more upbeat Christmas song.
I set it in the key of A major. I don’t know how you’re supposed to choose the key, or why you would pick one major key as opposed to all the others, but A major seemed pretty Christmas-y, so I went with that. I decided the intro should be a piano or organ, since those instruments also felt very festive and fitting. I figured I’d start with chords and go onto the melody based off of those chords. I’m not sure which is supposed to come first, but I just figured it would be easier to build the melody off of the chords instead of the other way round. I settled on a simple I IV V I chord progression because I thought that sounded very churchlike. I layered a melody on top of that, and then I got stuck. I couldn’t figure out the transition or anything after that or if what I had written in the first place was even good.
Here is the intro:
Then I got distracted trying to write a midwest emo intro riff, which I actually think ended up sounding pretty good despite not sounding very midwest emo. I even figured out how to use Garageband so I could layer the lead guitar over the rhythm guitar. After that I tried to write the verse and got stuck again.
I don’t know if it’s my phone’s mic or if Garageband is just genuinely awful, but I couldn’t get the sound quality to sound right. And I didn’t know how to share a Garageband file so I just screen recorded this. But here is the intro I wrote:
I spent hours listening to pop-rock that I like and they made writing catchy melodies seem so easy. I tried to produce something that was similar but I only ended up copying them one for one.
I guess what I am trying to say is that music is hard.