Reason as a compositional tool

I am becoming more confident in my abilities on the piano and now find myself composing on it as the instrument that the composition will be performed on. It think it is also useful for me to seperate the process of scoring the individuals parts for ensemble works seperate to this piano composition phase.

I have spent the last few nights composing on a MIDI keyboard hooked up to Reason. I have just been hitting record and playing for the whole 40 minutes, improvising and experimenting with different note combinations, and being free to leave decisions about what is worth keeping until some later point. There is still a lot of conscious effort being put in during this time trying to find the best ways to put notes together, and the beauty of recording everything is that I will get a chance to hear more of the unconscious playing when I listen to it.

Musique concrète on a parlour guitar

A mate recorded me doing some improvising on his parlour guitar last night. I played it fingerstyle and tried to push the tempo of some arpeggio finger exercises that I've been learning. I cut the best phrases from my improvisation and pasted them together using audio editing software. He was rather amused with this particular approach and what resulted from it. I stopped as soon as I lost the enthusiasm and flow that I started with and saved the audio file for listening some other time.

I had a pretty productive composing session tonight, even though I had to stop the clock half way through to answer a phone call. I am composing more quickly and freely now without worrying about the structure, dynamics, expressive techniques, etc. I am really happy to just focus on getting as many of the notes down as possible at this stage.

Piano lessons are going really well. My practice is scheduled in such a way that I only focus on learning, not revising. I have a list of new scales and cadences to practice each week, and I only ever spend a maximum of 5 minutes on each one. I take 2 minute breaks in between each short burst of intense learning to clear my head with some light reading. I save learning new pieces for the very end as a reward. I focus on 2 new pieces a week and spend 10 mins a day on each. I got this idea of time limits in my practice from a book called Chord-Tone Soloing by Barrett Tagliarino. I find that it keeps practice sessions focused and is proving to be highly effectice.

Lastly, I would like to suggest an activity. Put on some headphones, go to Rainy Mood and find a piece of music to listen to in combination with the sounds you hear. Try and adjust the volume levels of the rain sounds and the music so that you get the optimum mix between the two. Shift between listening to individual sounds and the overall combination. Write down how this makes you feel. Describe any urges you may have, or any images or colours that you can visualise. How is the music affected by the rain sounds? Do you hear the music now in a different context? Do you favour different parts of the music now over the ones you do normally?