I haven't created a post for the longest time. In fact, to be honest, I haven't done much work on the site for a while now at all. I'm not going to try and make excuses. It's just that I've been massively sidetracked by things that seemed to be much more important, mostly to do with my children.
It's all been going on in my family. My daughter left University and got herself a nice job straight away! Very proud of her. My son did his A-levels. Then we all went on a fabulous holiday Spain. Then my son went off to Uni in Guildford to study Creative Music Tech. So both my kids have gone and left me and my husband all alone! It's actually quite sad. I'm pretty devastated to be honest.
But the thing is, I now seem to have loads of time on my hands. With both children away most of the time, I seem to have tons of spare time. I want to get back to playing more but there isn't a lot of work around at the moment so I don't know how that is going to go. I have to wait and see I think. But in the meantime I can really get down to some serious composition which is very exciting. I have been doing a bit of composition recently, writing for a friend of mine who is creating a new string tutor book! It's very exciting for her. I've created a few pieces for violin and teacher with backing tracks.
But I think it's time that I got back especially to thinking about this blog. I'm also writing some new music for the site, so that when I have a bit of a relaunch people aren't seeing the same things they saw before. I think that easy pieces for full string ensemble are the way to go, and so I intend to compose a few pieces for beginner string orchestras. I guess it's easier to run a string ensemble with everyone in it than to always have small groups. I think I'll have optional piano parts and piano backing tracks. I even thought of having optional backing tracks created on Ableton, but I just think that's a bit overboard because it will take forever. I'll see how I feel. And another plan I have is to have some of my music printed. I think it's probably much easier to have an actual piece of printed music in your hand that you can hand to someone and ask them what they think, rather than just telling them to look at the site. I've been in a few positions recently where it would have been great to show people the music straight off.
One problem with my son going away is that I've lost my Ableton mentor! I was really panicking about this at the start but actually I'm doing ok.
I decided to compose some music for a YouTube channel I have which is called VIOLAGIRLMUSIC. I managed to download loads of samples that would be suitable and with these samples I've produced a cracking piece inspired by Halloween. It was so much fun to create. I used synths and singing as backing and then added all the scary samples. It's doing pretty well on YouTube so I'm quite proud of that. This is the link to the channel: