Reflection: The Creation Process (Candy/Waving Flag)

Yes, the final two song. These song are my favorite, and I looked forward.

By this point, June 4th was impossible as a performance date. I mean, that's today! So now it's at the 18/19th of June.

The Process

So, how did the process go. We started focusing on the song recently, and it obviously did not take as long as Greased Lightning. In the short few weeks, we were able to arrange most of the song well. The song at this point was finished until the end of the second melody.

During the process, we arranged the second verse and the final melody. The song gets quite heavy on the brass section, and it would be impossible to recreate it all with one low brass player. The kolintang joined, which made the part easier, but we had to compromise and make some parts simpler. As of today, the song's progress is on hold, but it is nearly presentable.

Waving Flag so far we've only worked on for two days, so this will be very short. In summary, we started organizing the drummers (even though they are quite disoriented) and sound terrible. The kolintang and the rest sound pretty good considering it's the first day we played together.

The Verdict

So, what do I think? Well, it's hard to say about Waving Flag considering how little time we've given into it, but Candy was done well except for one part. The part after the second melody sounds quite disappointing, especially when we omitted the brass part. Aside from that, the songs sounds good and I feel that with a little touch-up, the song would be good to go.

The progress we made so far is great, but we could have made more progress, especially with the dancing. I mean, none of the dancing is complete. By now, we should have started to organize the dancers together. Granted, Candy has one dancer, but still, there's Greased Lightning.

All I can say is, good luck. 
 

Reflection: The Creation Process (Greased Lightning)

After the initial creation process, we decided to focus our efforts into one song, which was Greased Lightning. For this song, I also play the Baritone. Mostly in the solo, but I follow the basic chords and join up with the kolintang in the solo.

So Greased Lightning is by far the most difficult song we have. For once, the complex (relatively) arrangement and high tempo make the song quite the challenge. Then there's the solo parts. Still optimistic about our chances here, we can do it all in time for June 4th.

Enough Talk, to the Process

So anyway, now that the basics are clarified, let's start the reflecting part. The aspect that I know the most about (obviously) is the instrumentals. Over the insanely long time it took to get anywhere with this song, we finished most of the song. Emphasis on most.

The verses and melodies up to the solo parts went well, and are in my opinion the best parts of the song. The solos took the most time, logically, and after weeks of trying, we were able to recreate most of the part.

The Verdict

So with that over with, what is my opinion on our performance this time around. Considering the difficulty of the song, I think we did well for the most part. Our biggest failure was not focusing enough through the process. I believe we could have done more throughout, but the progress we made is still quite good.

Reflection: The Creation Process (The Beginning)

So far, the creation of our songs has been quite rough. We had quite a journey to come to this point, and we're not even done. Not even close. Don't forget, we have the dancing part still. I don't know how we're going to do it, but it's going to be finished one way or the other...

The Beginning

After we finished the chart  (This one - Roles Chart) we went off on our way to start these songs. Now I am only one person, and I can't see everything, so I'll tell this from my perspective.

The song that I worked on in this stage was Candy by Robbie Williams. I played that bass part that is ever so apparent at the beginning, and that was the only part I had for a while. Anyway, back to the song. For a while, we had the beginning nailed down, at least to the second chorus. After that, it kind of fell apart... Overall though, it was a good starting point to creating the arrangement. We probably should've at least tried to figure out that second half, but I think it'll end up just fine.

Greased Lightning I know nothing about, at least until we started to focus exclusively on that song.

The third song is Waving Flag, by K'naan. I know a bit more about. The song made some process, with the legato-style opening mostly done. The rest of the song would have to wait until later.

The Verdict

So, what do I think about the progress we made at the beginning. Frankly, it was pretty good, considering how much of a mess the process would become later as we focused on one individual song.

In my opinion, the progress we made was pretty good was because of the amount of effort put into the songs and how they later turned out. Candy had by far the most progress, but that's a given considering how simple the arrangement was. Greased Lightning would turn out to be one big mess to handle later on, and Waving Flag started well. (I have nothing about Waving Flag because we're only beginning to work on it.)

So that's a summary on the beginning of the creation process. There's a lot more to come, so stay tuned...

Reflection - Voting

Our voting process took some time, and we were very indecisive about, but we were able to make up our minds and vote for a topic. The voting process went relatively smoothly at first. We narrowed down the ten topics we had two finalists. They were Acting Music Videos and Songs That Changed the World. This is where the chaos started...

We first tried voting without any additions, but the result was debated upon many times. We then tried to convince each other to vote for whichever topic we preferred, and we went through many ideas in this stage, including mashing the two ideas.

After that, we went through the final stage of voting, and we came up with Acting Music Videos as the winner. This is only a summary of the voting process. There were many other events that I honestly can't remember. With that done, I believe we had a good voting process, but took longer than needed to finalize our topic.

Investigation - Classical to Modern

Here is the Classical to Modern presentation, by me and Sean.

Roles

Greased Lightning (Haseef) (D)

Band (Edo)	Dancers (Haseef)	Kolintang (Almira, Nadia)
Edo (Drums)	Alexa	Nadia
Lachlan (Bass)	Mira	Almira
Jovi (Guitar)	Adam	Carlo
Eojin (Piano)	Haseef	Jeza
Sean (Guitar)	Chan	Stacia
		Kenneth
		Nabil
		Minjung
		Si Won
		Ajie
		Dwana
		Kenneth

Candy (Adam) (A) (Bb)

Band	Dancers	Kolintang (Alexa,Lala,Anastacia)
Haseef, Adam (Vocal)	Chan	Ajie
Mira (Piano)		Carlo
Sean (Guitar)		Nabil
Edo (Drums)		Jeza
Lachlan (Guitar)		Alexa
Rashya (Baritone/Euphonium)		Lala
Se Hong (Violin)		Anastacia

Wavin’ Flag (Ajie) (C)

Band	Dancers	Kolintang
Edo (Ctrl. Box)	Jeza	Si Won
Lala (Vocal)	Kenneth	Dwana
Jovi (Drums)	Haseef	Carlo
Se Hong (Violin)	Adam
Minjung (Flute)	Stacia
Alexa, Mira (Piano)	Ajie
Nadia, Almira (Guitar)
Chan (Vocal)