For the third year running, together with NPO “BEYOND EDUCATION”,  I have the privilege of creating music with this great school.  What a start!  My second week in was a blast.  Over 13 kids came to the session.  2 were working on loops (had brought their own netbooks with fruity loops loaded), one was working on his own rap with his cell phone headphones on, one group was working on a song & another group were working on creating lyrics for a backing track I had played for them.  What a blast!  I’d love to have more than 1 classroom and get different thinks happening (styles/ genres).  It would also be great to train those who are interested in the rudiments of recording & making loops with Ableton Live & teach them about mixing & mastering – wouldn’t that be a great investment into their lives?  I think it would…

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What a great start to 2011!  Around 30 of us wrote a BOMB of a song, capturing the heart of the Grade 8 & 12 boarding house girls.  For every one of them, 2011 is a year of great change, challenge and opportunity.  Their song “We will Remain” more than captured this.  Well done, Rustenburg, and thank you for letting me in on the journey – have a fantastic year!

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And not just amazing chicken!  I had the privilege of working with their ‘mal’ marketing team.  We created, composed, performed, produced, recorded their first team CD!  A GREAT song which combined all the elements of who they are – fun, multi-cultural, a leetle bit “out-there” and, yes, a team with focus & energy.  If this song is anything to go by, hold onto your hats for their next campaign!

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I am SO excited! Today I have finished being trained to do personality profiling using the i3 [individual instinctive indicators] profiling process. Experiencing is believing! What an incredible, uplifting, edifying profiling system – I sincerely doubt there is anything like this.

As individuals, we ought to celebrate our uniqueness – i3 profiling puts celebration of uniqueness on STEROIDS! Combine this process with a real-time observation & feedback following a song-writing team-building process a-la-outloud, you have… well, you have something, dare I say… LARGE.

I am amped, as you can see, so stick around for more of the adventure. Thanks for joining me on the journey.

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What an amazing afternoon with the Customer Operation Leadership Team… what a great team.  Once again, I am amazed & inspired by the creativity that emerges in these song writing sessions.   I did things differently today:  Instead of my standard process [create lyrics THEN compose arrangement], I went in with 10 backing tracks..more of that later…

The song writing started, as usual, with a blank page [literally], onto which we wrote down words/ ideas that expressed the culture & aspirations of the team.  What emerged was a wonderful metaphor of warriors raising a ‘standard” [flag] in the midst of battle.  What fascinates me every time I have the privilege of helping teams write their song, is how unique each team is and how original each song is.

“Armed” with a metaphor and many random ideas, the song writing process is ready for its initial construction, this taking the form of writing down lines of thought, linked to each other, where possible.

A trap most people fall into is the “Rhyme Trap” – the drive to make each line rhyme – I think it’s something we carry with us from childhood – it makes for good nursery rhymes, but can be a real hinderance to creative expression [I'm not saying rhyming is bad, only that it has a time and a place in the process of writing a song].  Rhyme is an extremely powerful tool, when applied well, but can actually hinder creative thought by “micro-managing” the song at a point when it should still be seen in its entirety.  Rather, leave the rhyming to a later stage when the thought/ heart is captured.  At that point, get out the thesaurus [if needed] and find words that rhyme, but capture the meaning.

Once we had written down & linked the lines/ ideas, it was easy to swap things around, find other ways of saying the same thing, but with more impact.  It was also not a difficult thing to identify which lines were verse & which were chorus.

Now for the music.  Up until now, the process is more “creative writing”, than “song writing”, but here is where the magic happens – and this is truly a magical & marvellous thing!  Only if you have “been there”, will you understand what I’m saying.

Today I provided 10 self produced “backing tracks” [music, no melody].  I allowed the team to sample them & choose the track that best captured the “feel” of their song.

Crafting the rhythm of the words to the beat of the song takes some practice, but we DID IT!  We created melody, oh, so simply [really!] and proceeded to sing our verses & chorus in no particular order.  This took us 15 minutes after which everyone had tea.

Within 20 minutes I had cut/ pasted/ mixed/ mastered the creation – I’m still amazed [as are the RCS team] at how quickly that happened.

This was, again, an incredible experience with an amazing group of people.  Thanks again RCS!

We, we are warriors!

[PS one vital thing we forgot, was to "give the baby a name"! - what do we call the song guys?]  Til next time…

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OK.  Seems there’s more than one person out there who seems keen to hook into the adventure of writing their own songs.  I’ve decided to run a series on writing our own song.  If you stick with me on this one, I reckon you’ll have your own song ready to fly in no time… and I would have done what I love doing most – open a door of creativity for you to walk through.

Task 1: Make a list of things that you “feel” about – something that interests/ excites/ angers/ motivates/ troubles/ makes you laugh OUTLOUD/ etc you… [or just any old thing - like the International school group that randomly took the concept of "SHAPES" and now have produced a fun rap song!]

And let me know if you’re in for the ride – drop me a comment.  I have so appreciated your comments to date… and, if you want to hook up with a friend and get writing together, all the better.  My experience shows me that creativity works even better if it isn’t in a vacuum – the tyrrany of individualism – for those out there, UBUNTU – I am, because we are.

We may have a challenge in cyberspace when we get to the melody of the song, but let’s cross that challenge when we get there.  Please send any questions you may have, & I’ll do my best to help out – song-writing is an art, not a science, and will always be full of “vague-ities”… it is the language of the soul.

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I found this helpful, and stumbled upon it as I’ve been writing songs with corporates in a team building scenario.  Once you’ve settled on the lyric, the easiest way to crystalize the melody is to start with getting the vibe/ feel/ melody sorted on the chorus.  From there, step it down a bit to get a “generic” – this wil help you loads in opening up your verses & bridge [if needed]…

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This has got to be one of the craziest 2 months I have experienced, can I say, ever?  As things have been quiet on the corporate side [2 gigs this year - both outstanding, but to few to be profitable [financially - aargh, that creativity should have a price tag - 's'pose it's a neccessary evil!] I took on a contract teaching post which has been a literal “freight train” of activity – beginning to end.

I was telling my colleague that it felt to me as though I had been dropped in the middle of a stampeding herd of Wildebeest & had to run to keep up.  I suppose the fact that I’m establishing a new niche concept while teaching does kinda chew up the daylight hours!

On the music production/ song-writing front things are still bubbling at the 2 schools where I have been coaching [after-hours - long days].  By next month [July] I will have the next Bloubergrant album ready – thinking of naming it “Human” after the awesome title track – written together with approx 12 kids.

The International school album only produced 2 songs [in 5 weeks] as the group split into 2.  We also had school tours & sickness slow things up.  A fun rap song ["shapes"] & one seriously powerful song entitled “Jack & Jill.  The lyrics came already loaded, but I trust I had a part it getting it to OUTLOUD status.

Thanks too, to anyone out there who is reading this stuff & taking the time to comment [just been inspired by the "Julie & Julia" movie...] your comments inspire me.

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Started again at the international School. 6 kids, 5 weeks – the goal is 4 songs. 2 groups each starting a song today – for the first time. One is to be a thoughtful look at life using the genre of a children’s “innocent” nursery rhyme, a song that in reality has quite a sinister message [eg. ring-a-roses – Black Plague) Life’s journey will always take us from innocence to a harsher reality. Pretty deep stuff!

The other song looks like it could be a Rap looking, on the surface, at different shapes as a metaphore of the uniqueness ofevery individual on this planet.

I’m excited (as always) at where thisall will lead.

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I had this thought the other day & “thought” I’d bring you in on it…  For me, naming a song is a bit like naming a baby.  Some people choose the name before the baby is born, others as it is born and others after a few days [or in our case weeks!]  I have discovered that, just as a baby has a personality, each new song also does.  Don’t sweat over the title, as it will float to the surface as soon as the song starts to “breath”.  A word, or a phrase, will become clear.  It’s really quite exciting…

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