Since my midterm, I believe that I have grown a lot as a singer/ukulele player. I have continued to play 20 minutes of ukulele, 5 days a week and have been attending weekly 45 minute vocal lessons. My final musical growth goal was to write my own song but I still have been learning new techniques on my ukulele. For example, right now I am learning how to play “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beetles which includes a lot of finger picking. I have been watching an online tutorial by “The Ukulele Teacher” and have slowly been getting better at finger picking. Also, I have been spending a lot of time exploring different ukulele songs on https://www.ukulele-tabs.com/ when I need a break from song writing.

Writing this song took me a lot longer than expected, but I feel like I learned a lot about myself in the process.  Last year, I wrote a song for my EDCI 306A class and I read a few articles on song writing to help me with the process. I learned that you should start by finding the chord progressions for the song and then write poems to find the lyrics.  So, I started by playing different combinations of chords to see which ones I liked best.  While I strummed, I would just sing “la” in tune to get a basic understanding of what a melody would sound like behind the chords. My favourite combination of chords was F, Dm, Bb and C.

After I knew which chords I wanted to use the hardest part came next- writing the chorus and 2 verses. I started with a mind map to figure out what I wanted my song to be about. Next, I started writing poems and spent a lot of time looking up what certain words rhymed with.  I found that the chorus was very easy for me to write but the verses were more difficult.  I soon realized that writing a song is like writing a story and you have to make sure that story makes sense.  Due to this, I ended up changing my chorus because it did not flow well with my verses and the storyline did not make sense.  For my strumming pattern, I decided to do DUDUDD because it is a strumming pattern that I am most comfortable with and I found it flowed best with my song. Most of the song is sung in my mix/head voice so I would write my next song to fall more in my chest voice range.