The Beginning...My Fall/Winter project this year is to produce a Web-Based Album. I'm calling it a "WAlbum" for now... By the Dec. 31st, my goal is to write, record and publish 10 tunes for an online platform... I'll be journalizing my progress here on the blog with the idea that the process is an integral part of the album. Right now, I have nothing; just an idea. Let's see what happens.

Week I ....Deadlines can be an artist's best friend. It's partly why I started the WAlbum project... Nobody is asking me to write music, and if I don't write music, nobody cares. I need to create and make music...

Week II A tune snapped into place this weekend. Well, at least some of it did. It's a simple progression that came out of my "spread-voiced" triads practice, and resides in sort of a big "4" groove with atypical rhythmic hits. Now comes the hard part: development. I don't have a melody yet and I don't have a B-section. I've had this idea for a couple of days without progress, so I think I'm just going to write it down and come back to it later. It's a little early to be fighting so hard with a tune. I've got some time on my side.

Week IV This week wasn't very good for my WAlbum project. I've been hitting my head up against a wall of a tune and I haven't got very far. I made a little bit of development, but then I forgot what it was, and then when I remembered, it didn't seem so cool anymore. I basically don't know what to do with this one riff that I have. I keep trying to move onto something else, but it sucks me back in each time. I want to have an idea or a concept, but I just can't find one. I've been listening to a lot of Ralph Towner & Pat Metheny for inspiration. Unfortunately, they only make me want to stop what I'm doing and practice more... So things are a little tough right now, but truthfully, I'm not surprised. The deadline is far enough away for anxiety, but not close enough for inspiration.

Week V I had some ideas for arrangements, possible duets, possible genre switches, etc. Too many ideas if you ask me. I thought the project declaration and it's impending deadline would focus me, but it seems like it's too much of blank canvas right now...

Week VII At the beginning of this week I noticed that the whole thrill of the WAlbum project had waned. All of a sudden it was no longer fun. It was now a deadline and a responsibility. Too bad for me. I'm booking at date for the concert debut of all this music that I haven't written yet. Maybe that will get me re-motivated? Either way, I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm not always inspired when I'm practicing or composing music. Sometimes it's just not that exciting. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't do it.... I've got to stop looking for the epiphany moments when I practice. Things come slow for me and they often come together when I least expect it.

Week VIII I'm writing just about everyday now. I'm titling the tunes by the date I've started them. Not all of them get past the first day... I took some tune ideas over to Tim Miller and he gave me some good suggestions for development. Just listening to the way he interpreted my tunes was helpful. I didn't realize how possessive I was about certain aspects of my tunes. It was keeping me from developing them. It was very helpful to get his perspective and advice.

Week IX I'm getting into the swing of things now. I've got deadlines ahead and very busy schedule right in front of me. I'm very happy with the whole idea of the weekly blog journal entry. It keeps me accountable. Fear is a good motivator... I wrote a couple of flubs, and then fell into a nice tune. I'm trying not to get to attached to anything I write. After a couple of days or weeks I might be able judge things more clearly....

Week X I've got a handful of song fragments right now and amazed at how much they sound like each other. I've been working on spread voiced triads for a couple months and they are showing up in just about every tune. I feel like I'm writing spread voiced etudes.... In the writing process, I'm getting stuck on melodies. I'm bored with my own ideas. I have the same problem with improvising (which I'll have to look at soon enough). Everything I write sounds like a children's song. And not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just I'd like things to sound a little more sophisticated... I've written a tune that reminds me of Celion Dion's hit from Titanic (I can't remember the title right now). As I'm writing the chords and melody I feel like I'm drawn into a black hole of soft-pop cheesiness. Help!

Week XI On Tuesday I started a new tune. It's kind of like a fiddle tune for solo guitar. I feel like this one has promise. I started writing it by going for a walk to stir my creativity. I ended up humming the main riff of the "A" section plus a superimposed melody. I can't remember the melody now, but I have the riff written down. It just may end up being the riff anyway... I've been trying to work on distancing myself from my tunes. I'm trying to look at them from someone else's perspective. It helps me stay open to change and development. Just because I want a tune to go in a certain direction does not always mean that's the direction it should go. Just because I love the first line written doesn't mean that it has to stay.... This WAlbum project has caused me great stress and great satisfaction. Every once in a while I get really stressed out that I won't have enough tunes or that I've squandered all the time I had to write and record tunes. I get stressed that I won't be able to finish the project, or that the 10 tunes I write will be terrible. But then other times, I really get into the groove and write some tunes that I didn't know I could write, let alone play. When things hit just right, this ends up being a really great creative challenge for me.

Week XII I would like to be further along into the project than I am right now. I wanted to have the songs written by Thanksgiving, so I could focus on recording in December. But now that I think about it, I must not know myself very well. I can write & record at the same time. Plus, I'm not the kind of person to have things done ahead of time, just because it would be make sense. I'm a deadline pressured person (even if I wish I wasn't).... I hate all my tunes again. I'm totally stuck on development issues again. It's like I forget how to be creative. It makes me a little sad when I think about. Have I really become that uptight?... As I end this Thanksgiving week I want to make sure to give thanks for this project. It's got in me a frustrated place right now, but my compositions are coming along and my playing is getting better. Resistance is always good.

Week XIII I also started work on a new tune this week. I was having dinner (chicken noodle soup) and typing ideas into Sibelius. The next day I fleshed out some of the lines on a piano at the Brookline Music School in between lessons. And later that day, I worked out how they would fit on the guitar with harmony. My next step will probably be back to the computer. I like this idea of bouncing around song fragments to different formats. I often get stuck running in place with one way of writing. Switching things around seems to free me up.

Week XIV One of the things that I like about this whole "WAlbum-Journal" thing is that it's a great way for me to learn about myself. It's hard to hide from my procrastinating tendencies when I'm left with 20 days to record 10 tunes (let alone finish the compositions), and I had given myself 4 months to do it. It's also showcasing my over ambitiousness (or at least that's how I feel now). I have big ideas, but big ideas need big action; otherwise I'm just another dreamer.

Week XV I began this week by pruning my song ideas. After throwing some things out, I have 17 scored tunes (or tune fragments) and 2 or 3 songs that i haven't written out yet.... I've been suffering from quite a bit of stress and self-doubt the past few days, but I saw shinning ray of hope this morning as I played through some of the tunes that I have. It's coming together. My songs sound like songs and they have a sound that I can say is me. I currently have 4 songs that I've finished writing. I've got a little work to do on the improvisations and have to figure out some blueprints for recording them.

Week XVII I'm noticing that things aren't fully ready yet. I have 5 tunes that are fully recorded, but I've got nothing loaded into the computer for editing, mixing & mastering. hmm... Okay, so things aren't going to happen for 12/31/06. New deadline: 01/31/07. 31 extra days to clean up my mess..... How did I get this far behind on everything? I need to have a talk with myself about procrastination.

Week XIII ...today I did a lot of editing. I trashed 3 tunes and wrote up a list of some things that I need to re-record. The tunes that I do have sound good.... I'm thinking about going back to some of my tune fragments that didn't get off the ground and reworking them into tunes, but that may be my over-ambitious nature creeping in again. We'll see what happens next week.

Week XIX This week is the performance debut of the WAlbum music. If things were going as planed, I would have had all 10 songs written, recorded, and published online by now. As it currently looks, I have 6 tunes ready to go. For a while I was feeling pretty bad about not reaching my goal of 10 tunes. I even thought about digging up some old tunes just so that I wouldn't feel embarrassed for coming up short. Instead, I've had to come to terms with my own procrastination and poor planing. I've also recognized that I set misaligned priorities for this project. My big goal was to write some music and stir up my creative juices. But instead of thinking of that, I was focusing on the specifics of the project rather than sum of it's parts. Thinking and worrying about the quantity of tunes wasn't connecting me to my vision for this project, it was just causing me more and more anxiety. As I prepare for a concert this week, I'm looking at the tunes I have and I'm proud of them. I've very excited to perform them, and pleased to have had the opportunity to write them. What more could I ask for?

Week XXI Procrastination is becoming an understatement to describe my adherence to a production schedule.

This week was mostly editing and re-recording. I'm a little behind (as usual) for recording all the tunes, but I think I can finish it up this week. I'm so excited to get the finished product out there. If all goes as planned, the WAlbum will make it's debut on Wednesday, 2/31 sometime before 11:59pm. Cross your fingers!

Week XXII A week has past since I finished the WAlbum project. With what little distance I have from the experience, here are some thoughts:

OBSERVATIONS:

- This was a lot of work.

- I’m proud of some things and embarrassed of others.

- I learned a lot about myself and how I work.

- It was great fun and very satisfying to create work that I could share and perform.

- This project stressed me out a lot; though, that was kind of the idea. I needed a push to get this project done. The blog helped so much with that. It was my weekly accountability marker.

- “Weekly Blog Posts:” I decided early on that I wanted to do weekly blog posts to give myself motivation with a deadline. It was great way to use peer pressure to my advantage: tell everybody I’m going to do something, and then go get it done.The problem was that I don’t work this way. I often dive headfirst deep into a project and let it consume all of my free time and thoughts. My last project like this was my web-redesign. I worked so intensely, that I injured myself. I know I work this way, but rather than I embrace it, I tried to hide it.I wanted to show off that I could work disciplined and diligently on something to produce a product just like the “real people” do, with deadlines, work reviews, brainstorming meetings, etc.
In the end, it didn’t work out that way. The weekly post showed how difficult it is to go against the grain. I ended up procrastinating and working from the wrong direction on a lot of this until it became too much.

- “Shared Development:”
I feel like I missed the goal of sharing my creative process. I wish I had shared more of how a fragment gets developed into an idea, and then fleshed-out into a composition.

I feel grateful for the experience and for the lessons learned. It gave me a lot of inspiration, motivation and stress. All in all, I’m happy to have completed and excited to move on.