- How are you exploring your essential question; is it different from what you expected? If you don’t feel like you’re answering your essential question, what is happening that’s different from what you expected?
- Are you surprised by any of the challenges that you’ve faced so far? How have you met those challenges and what can you do going forward to deal with them?
- Writing on your essential question: What have you learned about your essential question so far? What further questions do you have? and/or Has your essential question changed? If so, how? What do you want to know more about?
I’ve decided to take a slightly different approach to my senior project, going straight to work on music production so I can create more songs rather than just one song. I’ve made this possible by having one of my songs be a music project I never completed last year that I plan to finish for this project. I’m expecting I can fit in one or two additional songs into this project because of this.
I’ve been surprised over how many of the song projects I have abandoned during this process, despite having parts of the lyrics and instrumentals started in some cases. I’m assuming this happened because I have much more time than usual to dedicate to songwriting, which has caused me to be more critical of my work in order to produce higher quality music.
On Saturday, I met with musician Chris Crocco to discuss songwriting and theory. This gave me a much stronger understanding of the songwriting process. One of the biggest things Chris told was in regards to writing chords in songs. Specifically, Chris told me that minor songs have the freedom to change from sad to happy, and major songs can do the opposite, without changing the key signature. Chris explained that this is based on my choice of chords, how starting with mostly minor chords in a verse, for example, then followed by a chorus with some major chords introduced can really add more “color” to a song. This will be crucial for me in my attempts to create songs with unique verses and choruses.