Evaluation...

Within this evaluation, I will critically evaluate my final performance from my Independent Composition Task. My idea was to write a song, based on a poem that I could potentially develop at a later date into a 4 part harmony.

One strength of the composing of my piece was writing the lyrics. As I struggle with song writing, I took inspiration from a poem and wrote a song based on the words in the poem. This meant that I didn’t need to spend longer than necessary on writing my song, which in turn meant that I could spend more time on putting my accompaniment with my lyrics and making sure it fit together how I wanted it to.

A strength of my choice to record and present my composition, rather than perform live, was that I didn’t have to worry too much about trying to get playing the chords in time with singing. Due to recording it, I had as many takes as it needed to get a good recording to present. This meant that while I needed to have a good timing between singing and playing the next chord at the right time, I didn’t need to worry about getting it right under the pressure of performing it well.  

One weakness within my final composition was the quality of the recording. I used Audacity to record my piece. Using this software made it difficult to get a recording of my backing track and then a recording of the vocals and layer them in time. When recording, I had to play piano and sing at the same time which is quite a hardship, especially if, like me, you don’t often play piano and sing at the same time. This meant that the recording of my composition wasn’t as good as it could have been due to trying to concentrate on playing the chords of the melody and trying to sing as well. To improve this, I could have used a different piece of software, like Cubase, to record my composition. Cubase is a more developed version of Audacity and would have allowed me to work more on my composition, specifically on layering my melody and vocal recordings.

Another weakness I found in my recorded composition was that, as a person who isn’t trained in piano and is self-taught for the most part, writing a piece of music was a struggle. Struggling to write an accompanying piece of music for my composition, I chose to just play the chords I had decided to use in my accompaniment. Just having the chords as my accompaniment meant that there wasn’t much ‘colour’ to my song. To improve this, I would ask someone who is trained in piano to help me make my musical accompaniment more colourful using the chords I have selected for my piece. This would make the song more interesting to listen to as it would have a tune rather than just block chords. I could also, in my potential development of turning my composition into a choral piece, add in parts for different instruments. This would again assist in giving the composition a more interesting sound.