Cover arrangement reflections
Reflection 1 - 28th March 2020
Being stuck in quarantine is really boring and I had nothing better to do so I started my music assignment! I decided to change the structure and tone colour of Marvin Gaye by Charlie Puth feat. Meghan Trainor. I looked up the chords and sheet music for the melody online and practiced strumming in time with the song and recorded some of the chords. For the bar chords, I had to use a capo because my fingers aren't long enough for them. Then I got my flute out and tried playing the melody. This was tough, and I resorted to practicing my scales - chromatic, arpeggios, octave jumps, etc, because it had been a long time since I picked up my flute. Last time I played flute, I didn't have my braces, so I had to practice playing around them. Because the braces get in the way, you have shape your mouth and articulate differently. Will practice more in the week so I can notate the score on the weekends.
Reflection 2 - 4th April 2020
Tidied up where the instruments would play and started notating in Noteflight. I decided to cut out guitar and replace it with a synth piano on garageband because I felt like it would take too much effort to learn and record the guitar chords really cleanly. I used a score premade in Musescore to help me notate but did some by ear because it sounded funny on the flute. Considering replacing Meghan Trainor's singing with the clarinet.
Entry 3 - 13th - 18th April
The first thing I did was decide not to use the clarinet because I barely know how to play it and this assignment was already hard. I started notating the melody, referencing from musescore. Then I got rid of the recorded guitar bits from the week before and started and finished notating the piano accompaniment. I finished notating the bass line and started practicing, tweaking any bits that sounded funny as I went along. I decided to use a rhythm for the first page then I decided to just use simple whole notes for the second page to give a sense of finality
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Reflection 4 - 20th - 25th April
Because I had finished notating, this week I started and completed inputing the piano accompaniment into garageband. I tried to find if I could somehow change the key signature but there was no function for that so I had a hard time making sure that I put sharps in the right place. Inputing the notes was a big challenge for me because I had to refer back to noteflight then notate it in the piano roll, making sure that the notes that had sharps had sharps, and every now and again I would get lost, and sometimes I repeated a bar, then I had to delete that bar and move everything across. Additionally, the piano accompaniment was written in bass clef because it was for the left hand. This was an obstacle for me because I am not used to reading bass clef so I would get the notes wrong.
Click for score
Click for piano accompaniment so far
Reflection 5 - 26th april - 1st may
This week I had my second check - in and realised that the due date was a lot earlier than I realised. Nearly gave my teacher a heart attack by telling her I was nowhere near finished and hadn't even started recording. Also I thought I had no amp but after looking around the house I found one. Originally I was going to use a bass guitar, then an acoustic because a bass is hard to hear without an amp, but because I found an amp, I will be sticking to the original plan. The bass was quite difficult to record because whenever I made mistakes it would impact the whole arrangement so I had to start again. Thankfully, the due date was extended to Friday, and now all I have to do is record, export and write a comparative analysis and I'm all done.
Reflection 6 - 2nd - 8th May
Last week I finished recording the bass, so this week I started practicing and recording the flute. But, because I hadn't picked up the flute in about a year, I realised I have more practice to do than I thought. Firstly, I tried playing with the noteflight soundtrack and recording it, however it sounded really bad and rushed, so I got my metronome out and I am practicing playing at speeds 100 and 110 before playing at the original tempo 120. I struggled with eight notes and swings because there were a lot of sharps making the fingering difficult. Once I had figured how to play it, I still made a lot of mistakes when I was playing along with the tracking on noteflight, so I gave up halfway and decided to do it bit by bit. That worked a lot better than trying to do it all at once, that way, if I messed a bit, then I wouldn't have to record the whole thing again. Then I had to record the harmony. The harmony wasn't long but parts of it was very difficult, so it took 1 and a half afternoons to record it.
