Individual Assessment Evaluation

For my individual performance, I chose to write my own song and create my own melody to compliment it. In Daniel Levitin`s book ` The world in six songs ` his theory being  there are six types of songs for knowledge, friendship, ceremony, joy, comfort and love ( Levitin 2009), I chose to base my song on one of those theories. Before I chose my own theory I read an article online called `Different lyrical styles` (C.J.Watson), this article is about various styles of song writing techniques and talks about what makes good lyrics, this article refers to writing lyrics based on personal experiences and advices to write lyrics from the heart ( C.J.Watson). Because I was going through a rough period in my own love life and was very emotional at the time, I decided the theory of my song was going to be love. I then researched what inspired my favourite artist Adele Atkins to write the lyrics to her song `Someone like you ‘and the technique she used to write those lyrics (Doug Waterman), after reading this article I was so inspired that I decided to use the same structure Adele used to write her lyrics. On a scrap sheet of paper I scribbled all my thoughts and feelings down, and then I built sentences around the quotes and words, I found this a brilliant way to write my song lyrics and it wasn’t long before I had a verse and a chorus, once I had these I had the foundations for my song and carried on to complete the song, by adding another verse and bridge.

After writing my song I began to think about creating my own melody, as I’m not experienced in playing a musical instrument I found this to be the most challenging part of the assessment task. I decided I wanted to use a guitar for the backing music. I looked at various videos on you tube based on how to play a guitar from basic, as I had no idea how to play a chord, I used this video and learned the basic chords http://youtu.be/7dXUW2wBS3I Knowing the basic chords I used the guitars in the basement at University to practice my tune.  I used the chords G,D,E minor and D to compose my tune, and played about with these chords in order to find a tune I was happy with. Once I found a tune I practiced playing it, I was all fingers and thumbs and no matter how hard I practiced I kept making mistakes, which got worse when I tried to sing and play the guitar at the same time, so I asked Chloe to play my music on the guitar during the assessment performance.

The final performance went really well, because I had practiced singing the song and breathing exercises on a daily basis, I sounded more in tune than I had done during my rehearsals; however it wasn’t perfect so I am going to join a choir to gain more singing experience. I was happy with the tune I created, but I felt disappointed that I wasn’t skilled enough to play the guitar and sing together, to improve on this I am planning to buy a guitar and practice at home and also take private guitar tuition lessons.