During the last week I’ve been mulling alot over ways to speed up and improve my composition workflow. The study I’ve done over the last two years has definitely sharpened up my awareness of harmony but I still find it slow going when filling out a melody with counterlines above and below. I decided not to use a MIDI keyboard while composing, its slower going but it forces me to pay more attention to how singable a line is and the melody is also less prone to my bad keyboard habits (something I’m not very good at playing in the first place). I use a Kontakt based piano for playback and roughly notate the piece by hand to check the harmony. In order to make this process quicker I thought I might use a few color pencils to more easily separate out the various notes: passing tones, dissonances and chromatic notes etc. It’ll take a good bit more experimenting but this might also come in handy for teaching basic orchestration on the KDMC course.
Elsewheres in the WB studio I decided to change around the live area of the room some more by removing the old DJ stand and replacing it with a wall of shelves. This means I’ll have to pop-up a table each time I’m practing but on the plus side I can now move my vinyl collection into the room and have some permanent space available for shooting the KDMC related tutorial videos :)
