This is an opportunity to focus on musical detail, authenticity, stylistic understanding, technical proficiency. You are asked to produce a finished piece of work that is complete, arranged, coherent, orchestrated, and ready for stage or studio and would be received with credibility by the target audience.

My initial ideas for the summative assignment primarily revolved around how to differentiate the live and recorded versions of the same song. One of my first ideas was to make the produced version of the song first, then approach the live version in a stripped back ‘NPR Tiny Desk’ way. So taking the original version and limiting the orchestration for a more bare composition. For instance instead of having layers of distorted electric guitar I’d have just the one acoustic/electric guitar. Other examples of stripping it back include, replacing the drums with something quieter like a cajon or using only one vocalist with any unison lines/harmonies being removed. My alternative idea for differing the two versions was inspired by Led Zeppelin’s subtle changes in their live performances. Due to the limitation of the band only having four members, Zeppelin would have to adapt the parts in their studio recorded tracks to fit within their live context. Bass parts would get transposed onto the keyboard and the guitar overdubs would get melded into the main riffs. Other than that, Zeppelin had a habit of adding new sections entirely and building on their original studio versions. Their cover of ‘Dazed and Confused’ originally came in at 6.29 minutes on their album, whilst some of their live versions of the song could last up to half an hour long with these added sections. So these two ideas are definitely options I should consider moving forward into this brief. 

I started by trying to write a chord progression for the first half of the song, and came up with two possibilities (shown above): 

1st progression: A / / / | C# / / / | D / / / | E7 / / / | 

2nd progression: F#m / / / | E / D / | Bm / / A | A C#m B / | 

I also wrote a little spoken word passage that could fit somewhere in the song and could help outline a potential theme for the rest of the lyrics: 

Final song choice: 'Leadfoot'

Now that I had finally chosen a song to work on, I started to think of possible collaborators I could use for the performance/recording of the song. My mate Nathaniel Bishop is a great and versatile drummer, who also has a drum recording set-up at home, so he could possibly record drums for my DAW track. Will Graves, another friend and the singer and bassist for local doom metal band Outback, was a possible vocalist option. I also happened to sit in on Nathaniel's performance class, where I watched a number of singers perform the song 'Cochise' - Audioslave. As that song was similar in style to my one (hard rock) it was actually the perfect opportunity to see any potential singers who were strong in that genre that I could reach out to later. 

Most of the feedback praised the song’s chill atmosphere, saying the chord progression and embellishments were lovely and the song made them want to dance. Much like my previous song though, the composition was in need of some tension and release. My playing also seemed a bit tentative and the embellishments I had written seemed too rehearsed and had the potential to get stale. The room was split on whether the song would sound better with a female or male vocalist also (John Mayer’s buttery vocals being suggested as a way to go). Quilla said the song reminded her of like the 90s girl R&B groups and also mentioned ‘From This Moment On’ - Shania Twain as a reference point for that. 

I got a lot of positive feedback from this track, praising the stylistic versatility I’ve shown throughout term as well as how solid of an idea I was able to make in a short span of time. Although Jade did say the idea was definitely derivative of a time (being compared to the 90s Power Rangers theme) she did say I was able to combine different elements from other genres really successfully. Once again the question of vocals came up and yet again I didn’t have a clue of what to do with them. The house band seemed to like it too and Theo said the song lent itself very well to odd time signatures. An idea I might try and implement into the song as I keep developing it. The song ‘Rosemary’ - Deftones was suggested by Steven (the house band’s guitarist) as an example of how I could go about writing an odd time signature section. I think the lack of preconceived notions about the track helped this session a lot. Unlike my other two songs, I had written this specifically as an idea to bring to the house band which I think allowed the band to more comfortably suggest and implement their own ideas (such as Theo's odd time idea). This I think led to a more productive and creative session.

The structure for the song goes:
intro drum fill (2 bars) - bass riff (16 bars) - verse 1 (16 bars) - chorus (16 bars) - guitar riff (16 bars) - verse 2 (16 bars) - chorus (16 bars) - guitar solo (16 bars) - transition (1 bar) - 7/4 section (8 bars) - 5/4 section (9 bars).

Other notable aspects of the song are the drum fills that occur in the start of the chorus.

references:
- Martin Faux. B, Mulley. E (2022), This Town Is A Graveyard, Distrokid.