Welcome to the second post in the Twelfth Night Journal. If it’s your first visit, it might be useful to take a look at the first post, just to put things in context… or not.

I’ve always had a weird, internal alarm clock. Whenever I set an alarm for a morning wake up, it reliably wakes me up ten minutes before the alarm goes off. This alarm also kicks in in a different way when I’m working on a project. It reminds me that I have work to do by waking me a little bit earlier every morning, starting fairly reliably at T-minus 3 months. Guess what? The time has arrived.

“A little bit earlier” doesn’t sound that bad but multiplying a little bit earlier every day by 90 days and pretty quickly I’m wide awake in the middle of the night. No sense wasting the newly found time though, right?

What works in the morning? Creatively for me, it seems to be a good time to work on some of the “structural” aspects of music like creating/modifying chord progressions (always a slow process for me), modifying drum patterns and “playing” with new instruments/sounds to add to the sonic palette for a show.

What works at night? Melodies. This is something I can’t seem to get analytical about. I just sit down and improvise on the EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument, more on this soon) for a few minutes. Then thinking about a context (love theme, scene transition, chase, tension, etc.), a couple of melodies will just sort of pop out as I play. Sometimes it’s against a chord progression I’ve been working on. Sometimes it’s the first piece of a new song and then I have to work on chords that fit. I don’t really understand how this works but I choose to just go with it.

Do you have times that you are most creative? A majority of my theater friends are most creative at night, which makes sense given the art form. I have to admit it can be tough when I’m up early writing AND up late collaborating during rehearsals. Did I mention naps?

Snippet of the day – a few bars of an instrumental version of O’ Mistress Mine, which is a “must have” song in Twelfth Night.