Having worked my way thru notating five of the seven acoustic tracks I’m hoping to finish up the last two before the end of the month. ‘Old Tin Drum’ is proving quite difficult to fit within the double sided A3 format I had initially set as a limit for each of the songs.

I just about fit its 40 measures onto the two pages by reducing the size of the margins, unfortunately thou this means there wont be much space for decorating the borders. Once I have the notation finished I plan to get back to some songwriting again, particularly some phrase based tracks using the Vox Dynamic Looper pedal I picked up two years ago. These loops will be created live using guitar and voice so it’s going to take a while to get used to the unusual, real-time, method of building a song using phrases and overdubs. That said the Vox Dynamic Looper has some handy features such as part muting and the ability to cross-fade between tracks. Also these wont be overly-busy arrangements, at the most two phrases going at the one time alongside live guitar and voice.
“With any luck this should help me better assimilate the pages of notes I have on part-writing guidelines”
Due to some technical issues in the studio (instrument loading in Kontakt) I got delayed finishing off the instrumentation for the three minute composition I wrote for the Brothers Grimm story ‘The hand with the knife’. As these compositions are taking longer to orchestrate than I initially thought they would I decided to put in an extra few hours each week composing on pen and paper or via the excellent freeware Musescore v2.0 notation program (an update I’ve only recently discovered – which has an amazingly intuitive feature set). With any luck this should help me better assimilate the pages of notes I have on part-writing guidelines which I’ve struggled to memorize.