I decided it was time to return to gigs...so that I could get some money to spend on costs for Intertwined ;) While it's lovely to be well enough to gig, I find that I still get wiped out after one. I have to pace myself in the lead to and in the aftermath of a gig. My body feels a world away from where I used to be when I sometimes gigged 3 times in the one weekend (pre-Lupus diagnosis!)
There were many things that happened in the coming months for my family - some good, some very challenging, some things I share openly and some are not my stories to tell.
The next couple of months were all about trying to fix up the original digital soundtrack which I'd written on an iPad in Garageband. I knew I'd need a way to get sheet music for each song and I had to have the songs accessible digitally for my cast and band to listen to. So I worked backwards from there.
I posted a couple of questions on FB and my brother-from-another-mother Shane Kerr suggested I export my tracks out but I needed a Mac for that. Another question to my FB mates, and two awesome music legends (Genni Kane and Jon Wilby) offered me their old Mac. I was blown away by this act of generosity and kindness. I took it to the local computer repair store and had the appropriate hardware installed (is that the correct digi talk?!) and this meant I could now export out the entire digital album of songs I'd been working on in my tiny ipad.
The next challenge was trying to fix up each song in there. Shane suggested I use a trial version of Logic Pro which I did and that was a great help. I realised I needed a keyboard though and lo and behold, a digital Roland keyboard popped up for sale on FB Marketplace in the next town over for $100! Bargain! So grateful for this level of provision and kindness which has been shown to me throughout this project.
I spent countless hours trying to get the songs to where I needed them to be. I exported out each one into Soundcloud, creating 52 vocal guides for each melody/harmony line. I created a thumbnail image for each of these songs then shared the links into the back end of my website into the 'Chat Space' forum I had created for my cast, band and crew to use.
Here's a tiny tour of that if you are keen to see what that kind of thing looks like:
This shot was taken when I was still nutting out songs on Garageband, sitting on my bed in between restful moments. I recorded all the singing using my son Ethan's old gaming headset and a jack adapter thingy (technical term) ;)
And within a few months the music had developed to look more like this:
Shane showed me how to export from Logic Pro into Musescore so I could create a written score of each song for my cast. That was again another level of tricky (even more so since I can barely read music!) but I have the basics for each song and if I need to have those developed further down the track then I can do that.
One day I shared this photo (above) to my socials with the following words:
Process over perfection.
Stories over showmanship.
Enthusiasm over ego. This project has stretched me in ways far beyond my imagination. Sometimes I feel completely and overwhelmed by it and out of my depth and other days I feel like the small steps I'm taking
are crafting out a path that I can see is taking shape.
So grateful to everyone who is helping me along the way.
And when I say stretched me...some of the songs had 39 pages each (I'm sure I had too many parts included but that's again a problem for future-Lusi to sort out ;) )
I was going to share more but I think that's enough for this post! I would love to know if you read this and find artistic process interesting like I do. More another time, Lusi x
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