Tha Thursday Night Free Write
Well, it's 11:00 on a Thursday night, and I'm here at home sitting in my recliner. I've spent the evening exercising, cooking supper for tomorrow, and eating supper for today, as well as doing some after hours work for a customer of ours. Just upgrading a domain controller to server2022. But now that all that's been done, I don't feel like sleeping. I'm still not tired, so I decided I'd just up and write a blog post.
You may have noticed, whoever the heck you are, that I have not at all kept my goal of posting once a week. I thought I could, but usually whenever I think about getting started on a post, my lazy side kicks in and I'm always like, "Man that's a lot of words I'd have to sit down and write." When I write a post, I want it to be interesting. Both in what it's about and in the way I write it. That post I wrote about having a piano, for example. I would consider that very interesting to read and to read about. But some of my other posts seem to be just average quality writings, and they aren't fun.
Fun writing is fun to read. I enjoy reading comedy because it's so well written. Dave Barry, for example, is one of my favorite authors. I enjoy his style a lot and it's not only funny to read his books, but fun to read the way he writes them. It's storytelling, is what it is. Some people just can tell a dern good story. It's a gift, really, to be able to tell a story about something and do it in such a way that it pulls the reader in. I don't pretend to understand how that works, sometimes I can just do it. And as with anything, I'd really like to learn about the mechanics of a good story, details, phrasing, etc. But, yes, making a story interesting is an ability some people definitely have.
Comedians are excellent examples of this. They can take ho-hum events that happened to them, and add the exact sort of embellishment, rhythm, and detail to their retelling so as to make people laugh at it. Yes, rhythm is actually very important when telling stories. Again, I don't understand how, but you can definitely feel a different flow when somebody is just recounting something that happened to them versus retelling it in an interesting way.
I guess my point was that this is how I want to be able to write my posts, and since I don't quite understand how to write them the way I want every time, I just sorta... don't write them at all. Because who exactly cares about stuff that I write about? If it's not interesting to read, who's going to want to read it? It needs to be engaging. It needs to make the reader want to actively keep reading. It needs to be fun.
I want to make art when I write, that people can appreciate. Not necessarily poetry, but art. Weird, right? But that's the standard I aspire to. This also seems to be why I don't ever finish a lot of my ideas, because I can't figure out how to make them as artful as they should be. Blog posts, programming projects, or songs. I get hung up somewhere or other and stop because it's not artful enough. It's simplistic or boring or not unique. It's something that people have already encountered before, or it's something people won't be interested in.
Again, I'm some random guy on the internet. What point is there to reading anything I post? Unless it's interesting, it's just about me. Who can relate to it? Who cares? It should hold some value to the reader. And I don't feel like most of my posts do. Most of them are about me. But that's what a blog is, right? Your own page on the internet? Meh, whatever. IDC.
I just wanted to make a blog post though, and here I am doing that. I had no idea when I sat down what it would be about. I had some ideas but nothing really jumped out at me, so I just started writing. And here we are.
Sometimes it's fun for me to just write wherever my brain takes me. So heck, let's do it again.
This week, I've been playing the keyboard that I bought. Oh yeah, I bought a keyboard. It was a yamaha P125, and I'm happy with it. It's exactly what I was looking for, and it'll probably do me just fine for now. Until I outgrow it, and then I'll buy something higher end.
So I've been playing it, and one of my favorite things to do is, funnily enough, play wherever my brain takes me. Sometimes I call it playing my feelings, although I don't know the piano good enough for it to be an extension of me yet. More accurately, I'm playing whatever musical phrase my brain comes up with that would sound good after the one I just played. Usually, I end up playing very slow, melodic, pretty chords and melodies. Or at least I think so. It's quite fun to just sit down and play with no context.
In doing so this week, I thought of combining two presets on the keyboard together to make an especially beautiful instrument. I layered the rhodes ePiano and the strings paches together and suddenly had this glistening, lush sound that I really had a lot of fun with. I came up with quite an interesting progression that stuck with me, but now I don't know what to do with it. I'm not sure how to present it in an artful way, so until I figure that out, I guess it'll just be something else that goes into the vault for me to pull out whenever or wherever it might fit.
I sure seem to come up with some interesting chord combinations when I'm just playing. I don't know what any of them are, but sometimes I recognize that they would sound interesting if I were to put them into a song that somebody else wrote. This is known as reharmonizing, and doing it with gospel hymns is one of my favorite things to spend time doing on a piano. In some cases, I have reharmonized the hymn to such a degree and played it like that so many times that I forget how the original goes. I have a hard time not playing my swing version of "Leaning On the Everlasting Arms," for example.
There is really no point in doing this other than that it's fun. Unless I was the only one playing the hymn, none of my chords would fit the arrangement because everybody else is playing the standard one. Still though, I've always wanted to have somebody sing while I played some ridiculous reharmonization of a song to see what it would sound like. Usually when I reharmonize something, the melody stays the exact same, I just change up the flavor a whole lot by substituting other, spicier chords. Sometimes I replace all of them, sometimes I just add an especially tense passing chord to the arrangement to change it to the way I think it should sound, in my head. It sure is fun to do.
This has been a blog post. Thanks for reading, if you read it.