Good Friday

coal country

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

Good Friday – a lovely, crisp autumn day, and I’m journeying south along the coast to Woonona, about an hour and a half out of Sydney. My tafe teammate James lives here, commuting to town three days a week, but today I’m commuting to him to begin recording my song. The train passes through green valleys, bushland, seaside hamlets and the occasional old coal silo rigged for rail transport; the view ranges from idyllic to panoramic but the train windows are dirty and my photos can’t do it justice.

returning…
The recording process is simultaneously stimulating and draining. You’d think a day was enough to complete a 4-minute song, but it’s not even close. By the time you factor in travel time, meal time, setting up and faffing round time, the public holiday train timetable and my commitment to dinner with Drew’s folks who eat at 6, there was only a couple of hours real work time left. We talked through the parts and the dynamics I want, James got a clearer feel for the song and we set bpm rates for the 2 parts. I chose which string sounds I wanted, we sorted the keyboard strings wash for the prelude verse and I practiced the keyboard string solo. We managed to get guide vocal and guitar lines down and burnt me a CD without the vocal so I have a practice track, but are we even halfway through? I don’t think so.

*sigh*

The scary part is that the time we have left to complete this project is rapidly shrinking, but what I have to get done in that time seems to keep on expanding. I honestly can’t see it all coming together…

but it’s always like that at this stage, isn’t it?

this is my workstation

this is my workstation

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

this is the keyboard that caused the word ’shonky’ to be reintroduced into the vocabulary of today’s youth. my sister bought it for my niece shiara at a garage sale and i used my status as a grown-up to do a shamelessly profitable swap for my much cheaper, nastier and more basic keyboard.
so now, introducing the sankei stereo entertainer… when all its parts worked (sometime back in the ’70s) you could choose a beat, play along to it on the keyboard (with or without an excruciatingly cheesy vibrato), sing into the microphone and tape yourself on the built-in cassette recorder. and it has a radio for good measure.

it also has a rather loud and increasingly intrusive drone in a pitch that varies from day to day. alas, the sankei’s days are numbered.

but if that’s not low-tech enough for you, my other beloved instrument of interpretation is a bottom-of-the-range analogue four-track cassette recorder. i fear its days may be numbered too, because though it works fine it takes metal tapes, and they’re getting hard to find…

note the Q encyclopedia of rock stars on the shelf beside the cambridge companion to music…

i have to work with these people

i have to work with these people

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

james doesn’t always look like a fruitcake.
sam does, though.

these are the other foundational members of the TAFE course group doing a music theatre performance project for our ‘music project teamwork’ module. you can see just from looking at us that we all bring very different skills and strengths to the project. it’s bowling along well and has gained two extra members, louise and bridget.

now we are 5

From 4 we reduced to 3 but we have lately grown to 5, happily in a format that doesn’t increase my or anyone else’s workload. (Actually it probably does increase James’s but he doesn’t seem to mind.) Two other girls have joined us, 36-year-old Louise, a k d lang fan who did the group project unit last semester and wasn’t going to do it again but I think she was feeling left out and so asked to join us. She has a sweet, melancholy confessional ballad to contribute, which fitted perfectly into the format we’ve evolved, so she’s slotting in between James and Sam.
Then there’s Bridget. Bridget is a smart 17-year-old who lives in Manly with her boyfriend after moving out of her mum’s place cos she has (no kidding) ‘independence issues’. For some odd reason she was under the impression the course started a month later than it actually did, so she’s only just joined the class, slightly confused but unabashed. She has easily the best voice of us all, with a lot of vocal tuition already under her belt, and she too has a folksy guitar ballad to throw into the mix, so another waif comes under our wing. Rehearsals to workshop the dramatic business between and during songs begin next week.

tafe week 3

As week 3 dawns I have begun writing music; prosaically, what I think is the most sophisticated melody I’ve ever written came to me while tackling a huge stack of washing up. Now – the challenge I’ve set myself – understanding what chords I’m hearing with it… and why.

tafe week 2

It’s week 2 and gears are grinding into action. Wednesday Simone came to us and said regretfully that she had found another group she could fit into and would no longer be working with us. Her decision was accepted without rancour, not only because it was infinitely better to lose her sooner rather than later but also because she was doing me a favour. Simone’s leaving meant that the project – music presented in a theatrical or cabaret format – had to be scaled back significantly; in fact the plan as it stood would have to be scrapped and the whole project rethought. To be honest, I’d been arguing with myself all week about its feasibility – not whether it could actually be done (it could), but whether I could achieve my original aims in signing up for this course – develop my music literacy and composition skills – when the bulk of organisational duties (script, choreography, direction, production, etc) would devolve to me. I could hardly back out of the plan myself since it was my bloody brilliant idea, but I was kicking myself for this display of impetuous ambition that was threatening to scupper the main agenda. To put it straight out, Simone’s caution saved my ass.

off and running in ultimo

Yesterday we got off to a flying start on a fairly ambitious project: a music theatre piece which will be our music teamwork project, our performance project and our recording project all in one. ‘We’ are Simone (vocals, guitar), Sam (vocals, dance, a bit of piano), James (vocals, guitar, production) and yours truly (vocals, script and direction).
The show will comprise 4 songs, a couple of spoken word sections with or without backing vamp, and some dialogue and movement. Each of us will take the vocal lead in one self-written song, performing live to a backing track. As for the plot, we brainstormed themes and characters and are evolving a kind of dark morality tale about love, freedom and money. Well of course.

Today got off to a more tortuous start: overnight Simone had got cold feet. She wanted to change the project or possibly back out, feeling that music theatre was too ambitious and beyond the scope of the course. Sam and I exercised our persuasive skills to reassure her, sorting out the areas of insecurity and negotiating solutions, with the result that I’ve promised to have a working draft of the script for everyone by Wednesday next week.

Yesterday I inquired about performance spaces on campus and was told of a theatrette somewhere, maybe building N. So today Sam and I went to look at the theatrette… read the comic farce of our search below.