Unleashed VI

Awww, you should have submitted that! It would have been so much fun!
I'm so curious to hear what @Mike Verta has to say about it, especially knowing your other work and being able to put it into context.

Awesome track by the way! Thanks for posting the lyrics too! Cracked me up to see the spellchecker underline almost every word because you still had it set to German I guess .



@Mike Verta: Wow, what a marathon again! Unbelievable on so many levels how you're able to pull these off, kudos to you and thank you so much for doing this for us! I hope you see and can feel proud that over the years you have been achieving your goal and singlehandedly you're raising the bar again for composers worldwide! That's an unbelievable achievement!

I wasn't able to watch live and it'll take me a while to get through it all, but the first 1 1/2 hours have already been one of your best Masterclasses for me. I sat down at my flimsy midi keyboard afterwards and felt like I'm finally starting to "get it" when it comes to re-harmonization. The examples you gave for possible developments were absolute top notch!

 

Thanks, @Mike Verta, for another marathon feedback session. Very generous. As always, even though many of the same patterns of shortcomings emerged, hearing the feedback in a variety of contexts is helpful for solidifying the concepts.

Thanks for doing this, Julian.

 

It's no problem, since I'm watching the whole thing anyways. So, it's just to note down the times and titles. Hopefully, I managed to spell them well enough.

Now, the list for Part 2 is also done and in the comments. Lots of fun pieces and useful snippets of information all around.
Overall, there were about 111 pieces. So again, it was a quite a ride through this year's Unleashed.

 

Thanks a lot for the timestamps, these are super useful!

 

Out of all the bits of wisdom MV shared during his Unleashed marathon, was there something that stuck with you more than others?

I'm still going through all the videos, but one thing that seems super helpful was when someone asked Mike if he fully fleshes out everything on the piano before hitting the DAW, and Mike's answer was that (and I'm paraphrasing) he figures out the basics on the piano, and if it's not perfect, he doesn't care because he emphasizes finishing before perfecting, with the faith or confidence that even though he can't figure out the missing pieces or the part that's not quite right today, he knows if he just keeps at it, then the solution will surely come to him later or he'll be able to figure it out given enough time with the piece.

I know from experience that trying to get it perfect out of the gate can be paralyzing, because you know the work is often very hard and you end up waiting to be your most refreshed, most gifted, most inspired self before sitting down to do the work. But that's not a good way to get stuff done.

 

My problem isn't making some new POS piece, it's turning it into not a POS piece that seems to take the work

(This is a good point, though -- the "curse of the blank canvas" and all. Beethoven apparently used to intentionally write crap pieces of music and then work on them until they were worthwhile).

 

Hey Mike,

During Unleashed, you kept mentioning taking a melody idea to the woodshed, spending hours or days finding the harmonic vocabulary of the piece and the best version of the melody possible. Whenever I do this, I always generate more material that I like than can actually fit together, and I end up thinking I need to make multiple songs that each develop the melody in a different mood.

So I'm wondering if you have any rules of thumb for how to string together the best bits into a cohesive song.

Thanks!