Song a Day-ish 3 (Elec Piano Idea)

Youtube Link

Back Story

• This song came from a piano riff I had been sitting on for months. I saw all the song ideas that I had sitting in my phone's Garageband as the things to tackle first before working on anything new. The backlog of ideas felt like they were the blockages in my creativeness, and they were the first ones that needed to be addressed before I could get to writing at a constant and natural flow.

Music

• Like I said, this one started as an idea that I had previously recorded months before but never was able to bring myself to take on. The main piano riff and bass were already there along with the first 8 bars of drums.
• I took the bass and piano and just copy and pasted a few times to figure out my direction. Luckily it brought me, for the first time to a glockenspiel, which I end up using a lot in the earlier songs!! It’s main melody was the piece that tied the whole song together for me.
• The drums I did the same as the last song where I used a drum machine, put them in the slots I wanted (to get the pattern I liked), then did fills and crashes on my own.
• The bridge is interesting though because I started writing it with the glockenspiel first, then built the whole section around that. I changed the drums a bit in the machine to get a different feel but used the same drums I made for the fills. They mixed well with the machine's fills giving them a whole new life too!
• Now, I struggled for a while trying to find a way to get it back into the song after the bridge and somehow I stumbled across the ‘Day Spa’ synth and it worked well. If you're wondering it's the sound that makes the hike or sweep at 2:39. And this was a weird choice for me. The key change that is, because I normally don't like them, they are overused and just littered throughout the music of my childhood (Disney Channel music, songs catered to my age group at the time, etc.) and they felt and still do feel childish to me, but for some reason it was the only thing that made sense as the transition. I always try to take the "cliché" songwriter approach of, "let the song tell you what it wants," and sometimes that means doing something you generally stay away from. 

Closing

• This was one of the first of the Song a Day-ish I showed my brother and he loved it! He said he always had ideas but never did anything with it, but he stills enjoys it from what I can tell. :-) There's a true feeling of gratification that comes with listening to this song because it was really when I started to feel like I was gaining traction and raising my confidence level as a musician which then eventually translated into my everyday life! I can really pinpoint this one as my first times being excited for a new song, chopping into the block of old ideas and getting something I was proud of.

If there was really something to take away from #3, it's that by trying to write to it, I was facing my fears. My fear of self judgment, my fear of failure, and mainly of my own worthiness (I told you, rough time in my life lol). It was really an accomplishment on a psychological front, a "Confront your fears, you'll surprise yourself" sort of thing.

If you missed last week's song "80's Synth Song" <---LINK

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Twitter: nandomolinar97
email: songadayish@gmail.com

P.S. I hope I'm not giving anyone the impression that I was like suicidal during this time. I was definitely in a state of depression you could say, but never to the point where self harm was even considered. Was I happy? No, by no means, but I've always been fortunate enough to have a positive (positive enough in this case) outlook on my life regardless of what I'm going through. I mean, just pushing myself to write all these songs is indicative that I was well enough to help myself for the betterment of my own future (and that's exactly what it did).

Song a Day-ish 2 (80’s Synth Song)

Youtube Link for Song 2

• Backstory
• This one was the first song I wrote on my phone on BART, Bay Area Rapid Transit for those of you not from the Bay. It was on my way to work out in SF, which was great because I can always get about 45 mins in the actual train from my house. The song was just as a brand new idea I heard in my head and just rolled with it. There’s not much backstory but it was one of the first songs where I took whatever looped around in my head and forced myself to write in order to get the clog of my creative juices out so they could get to the point of flowing normally. It sounds counterintuitive, I know, but it really worked to get a bunch of songs out, then once I was comfortable again I could get into really writing ones I could be genuinely proud of!
• Music
• The original idea for the song was the Organ that you hear in the verses prominently. The entire song is built off of that chord progression.
• The bass line came next, which I would later use as a starting point for the main synth melody track. I found it pleasing to the ears to have them carry the same notes/main run, but the bass has more to do because I really enjoy specific bass lines that have a lot going on, a busy bass line you could say.
• The next thing I put in were the drums. There were two tracks of drums (one I played on the phone’s built-in MIDI and the drum machine), I knew what I wanted them to sound like but I was too lazy and made the drum machine do it for me. So I put them in the slots that made the sounds I wanted and just looped them accordingly. But the drums that I wrote by myself were the intro drums, all the crashes, the first half of the bridge and finally the fill that brings the chorus back from the Bridge at about 2:38.
• In the Chorus, The last thing written was the electric guitar countermelody. I had it virtually mirror the bass so it could be something different and cool to hear, something that would make you go, “Oooh thats cool!” And in looking back it really became something that is now like a Nando Molinar signature sound. 
• With the bridge I started off with the bass then piggybacked the organ. Once I got them to my liking I found the direction of the bridge and put the drums in. First half were done by hand and the second half were taken from the verse drum pattern. I then used the synth for an extra layer, finally figured out some chords to get back into the chorus.
• Closing
• This song was really cool cause it only took me about 45 mins to complete, that was the fastest I'd ever written a full song and became my norm for most of the earlier songs that were done on my phone. Not to mention, it's unnecessarily loud on Bart, full blast volume on Apple earbuds was my best friend for many of the first songs lol. I do remember at this point I was still trying to get myself out of the mentality that none of my songs will ever be as good as someone else’s, or even my own past songs (when we get to the song that I finally got confidence back, I'll let you know). It was interesting because I was really proud of what I had made but was still in the transition phase of starting to see my own worth as a musician. So this was like the first taste of the conflicting emotions that came from the hundred.

With this song I always saw a melody that was the same as the synth in the choruses. In the verse I had no ideas, and still don’t, but if anyone wants to try they are more than welcome to, and can probably come up with something really cool. There’s a good amount of wiggle room in the song as is! As well as it was really different from what I had previously thought I was able write and this time. I remember thinking, “Doing something new is hard but really rewarding! ‘Keep Challenging Yourself!!’”

If you missed last week's song "Wait and See" <---LINK

Song a Day-ish 1 (Wait and See)

Wait and See on Youtube!!!

• Backstory:
• This song came from my first real inspiration in over half a year. Oscar Night, February 26th, 2017. Now those of you who really know me know that I’m like 100% in love with Moana’s voice actress, Auli’i Cravalho. Like school girl level lol. I saw her for the first time glammed up and I literally could not keep still and my heart was pounding so hard that I was sure my parents could hear it across the living room! All I can say is every time she was mentioned or was shown, I swooned a bit internally (and maybe externally if I'm honest). What I’m trying to get across is that it made my inner Kiddo super excited and I had to express it somehow! It was undoubtably a catalyst!
• After the performance and the Oscars finished, I had this riff in my head, it was slow but the notes were all there. That would end up becoming the first part of the guitar solo, but it started off being almost morbid (like a sad song) until I realized I was getting nowhere with it. I was trying to come from a place emotionally that I couldn't even imagine being at because of how happy I was that night. So I put the riff in my mind to the guitar and found the chords to fit them, went on GarageBand and just opened a new session (the first one ever on my new laptop). It really was just the perfect way to kickstart these 100!
• Music:
• So it’s now around midnight and I'm working on this song without a mic (all guitar parts played acoustically off my Telecaster and into my Beats headphone’s microphone) and just a crappy USB MIDI controller keyboard. I kind of just let the song take me and it went to a surfer sort of vibe. 
• I’m not really sure how I came up with the bridge section but it came fairly naturally if I remember correctly, and I just had fun layering guitars and Clavichords with some chorus effects on them. The solo, which has the same chords as the choruses came next, and I added the Bridge section to the back of the solo on a whim just to give it some color and it worked perfectly. Experimenting started paying off and I was loving what I was hearing. P.S. I cheated and used a drummer from GB cause I wasn't good at hearing drum patterns that fit the songs yet (think that lasted for like the first ten songs or so).
• Side note: You’ll notice it’s honestly not that great of a recording but it was my first time using GarageBand on my laptop and was still figuring it out. I didn't even know how to use quantization (putting notes in time if you don't know), but I keep it the way it is in order to remind me where I started and How Far I’ve Come. (yes that was a Moana reference)
• Now the words actually didn’t come into fruition until I was on like song #60. I always intended to have words on it but it wasn’t until that far into the whole 100 that I felt ready to try. I really don’t have much to say about the lyrics, mainly because they were just filler words that I molded into a story, so I can’t really even say it has anything to do with me. But the melodies started with the chorus, then verses and finally bridge.
• Closing
• I was and still am such a fan of this song because of what it represents for me…Regaining the feeling of control in my life back, my love for music and the love of creating music. It’s simple and nothing extraordinary but it's such an important song in my life and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

This is where I figured out what I wanted to do. I remembered the TED Talk and thought, “Now’s my chance, but don't be so tough on yourself, a song everyday is just too fuckin hard and would ruin the creative process for you so the ‘ish’ will give you at least a little leeway. But you can’t stop writing just cause you’re allowed to take a break. ‘So Stick to it!!!’”

P.S. This is gonna be the only song with lyrics until like 80, so if you’re expecting lyrics you have come to the wrong blog lol.

The Beginning

Hello there!!

So I really just wanted to take the time to write all these stories down, share my music, and give you a little window into my process and myself! So let's start where everything starts, the beginning. February 27th, 2017 to be exact. It had been a long time since I had last written a song, over 8 months more specifically (and that last song I had written came from a place I'm not happy about to this day). All my music felt forced and it came to the point where I started to hate the idea of writing and that I was even capable of creating something so below my own standards. It manifested to the point of resenting myself, not only as a musician but as a person too. I completely had lost my identity, who I was, but most importantly…what I loved. I luckily pinpointed the start of it, which was the end of my first, and last, semester of college. I couldn't stand myself, I hated every minute of getting up, traffic in the morning, 10 classes throughout the week, music professors who only made me feel farther from what I wanted to accomplish with music, coming home in traffic…you get the idea. I was miserable. Once that semester ended I left, never checked what I got in those classes, basically suppressed every memory, and stopped talking to all the friends I had made. All those things just put me deeper and deeper into my hole. But it wasn't until a couple things came across my path (thank you Universe, yes this is gonna be a bit spiritual, get over it) that I started to piece my situation together:

1st: Watching videos on Youtube one night I came across a TED Talk about a man who just drew a drawing everyday, some were extravagant, some were…well…not, but they were all from him and that got me thinking, “Maybe just trying again is all I need to get back to my normal self.” TED TALK

2nd: Moana. This is what introduced Lin Manuel Miranda to me. (I'm obsessed with Hamilton too if you wanna fan girl with me, I'd be happy to lol) I found him fascinating and just every bit of the musician that I saw myself to be in the future. He became a role model of music for me instantaneously. His role in the music for Moana (of course along with Opetaia Foa’i and Mark Mancina) was the first Collection of music that I can definitively say that I fell in love with and appreciated at the level that I used to love music with. It was a blessing to say the least.

They don't seem like much at first but that was all I needed to get started…All I needed was some inspiration…..

Now some logistical stuff before we get into it. First, down below is a link to the Youtube channel that I'm gonna post all the Music to. I would recommend listening to the song before reading what I have to say in each post. Just so everyone can have at least an idea of what I'm talking about in the more technical section of writing. Second, the Instagram account's name is listed there. I'm gonna tease bits of that week's song, and who knows what will be on that in the future! Cause I for sure don't lol! Finally, all the songs are copyrighted already, so if you wanna use them just email songadayish@gmail.com and we can work something out! For now, I'll just upload the songs to Youtube until I figure out how to put them on like iTunes or Spotify. Other than that, I can't wait to share all these songs and my story with you all!!

Youtube Channel
Instagram: songadayish
Personal Instagram: 2jnandomolinar
Twitter: nandomolinar97
email: songadayish@gmail.com