You've reminded me Nick that it's a couple of months since I updated this thread. I like your point about instinct.
Instinct is something that has highlighted itself as hugely important in my view when I've been studying the two recent on line songwriting courses. Instinct being an attribute that seems rarely mentioned by academics but is often mentioned by professional musicians.
Anyway- regarding this project - in the last two months I've managed to keep up my one new tune a week
, despite the distractions of songwriting courses, though only a few of these tunes have made it to my soundclick account.
DADGAD, Open G, and Gsus2 tunings have recently been joined by Gsus2 and Gsus4 in my attempts. I have found the most recent of these, Gsus4, rather trickier in that it doesn't seem to lend itself to open strings resonating along with notes higher up the fretboard as much. Maybe I've just still to get my head around it - I did only start looking at it yesterday.
I'm even more convinced now by how major an influence rhythm and phrasing is on whether a piece sounds at all like music. I've linked below my first attempt at a tune in Gsus4 uploaded to Soundclick today. This time yesterday it wasn't even in progress or being thought about. But the deadline was the end of today so I had to get my skates on. Without any real sense of phrasing, a couple of hours before recording, it sounded much less musical. While I can confirm I will keep on playing it and polishing it so that it will get better and flow better in the future, I'm happily amazed at the positive way the phrasing that is there so far moved it on from what it was such a short time earlier. Not much chance of good flow in 24 hours!
"Glimmering"The bottom line of this post is that I am enjoying this project a lot and the weekly deadline, while it is too tight to get polished "gems", means I'm getting lots of practice and I'm getting rid of that blank mind syndrome when confronted with a blank sheet of paper and a desire to create some music. It may be a good way for others to get something positive too. It does seem to be a technique that a lot of writers use to keep writers block at bay, so why not apply it to writing music too?
Mark