Explorations

The Explorations project let the Junior Freestyle students explore their own passion and improve the 21 century skill they selected. For my explorations project I chose to write a song with my band Feminoid to explore my creativity in a form I haven’t done before.

Process

The process of creating the song and artwork definitely had it’s easy and hard parts. For starters, writing the lyrics was relatively easy since I had inspiration for the song already. My lyrics are inspired partly by the comic Deadly Class which I was reading during the time I wrote “Not What I Imagined”. Coming up with the instrumentals specifically the lead and rhythm guitar parts was also easy since my band had been working on them previously and just needed lyrics to fit with them. Once the lyrics and instrumentals were finished, we headed off to the studio to record our song with Mr. Florendo. This was a really cool and educational experience to have with my band as we had never had recorded anything before. Mr. Florendo was extremely helpful and suggested guitar and drum parts that in the end made our song better. He was very supportive and we are grateful that he spent that time with us to help make our song more dynamic and come to life. After the recording sessions were over, Talia, Feminoid’s drummer mixed our song in Pro Tools and we had our final product!

Process Shots

Finished single cover for “Not What I Imagined”.

Messing with some band logos.

Reference photo I took and used for the final cover.

Infographic

Infographic I made to demonstrate three common songwriting structures and what parts of a song mean. I also included songs that demonstrated each song structure from punk bands that I enjoy.

What I Learned and Valued

The explorations project really showed me the amount of work that goes into a song and how many changes a song goes through before you get the end result. It also was a great bonding experience for the band as we watched our first single be produced and got to see and hear people’s reactions. I think we all grew as musicians and as a band whose still discovering their sound and identity.