“Devil Scratches”
So I’m writing most* of the music and lyrics for The Clockwork Quartet, and Ed asked me to write a post introducing myself and explaining a bit about my end of the project.
My name’s Patrick, and about a year ago I decided to write a steampunk anti-musical, for want of anything better to do. A mutual friend (who is also doing some photography work for the show) told me that Ed was forming a steampunk band, and arranged an introduction in an awesome but slightly dank London member’s club. We nominally agreed to team up to create something that wasn’t quite either a band or a musical, and once he’d shown me his cog jewellery and I gave him a first draft of The Watchmaker’s Apprentice, the deal was pretty much sealed.
The general process for writing the music is as follows: After a bunch of discussion about the story that a particular song needs to tell I’ll go away and write some music that seems to fit the mood, and shape it into a structure that roughly fits what needs to happen in the narrative. I use full notation (or “Devil Scratches”, as Ash of the House Of Strange calls it), scoring everything except the percussion. I’ll then go back over the music and using some serious creative tools try to fill in the lyrics.
Once I’ve got a draft I’ll use Sibelius’ sound banks to render a not very convincing audio file, then record the guitar part on top, plus possibly sing the vocal line onto it as well if it’s in my range, and add a bunch of sampled mechanical/industrial percussion noises. When this is all mixed down into an mp3 “demo”, I’ll put it, plus a pdf of the score and a text file of the lyrics, onto our Box.net account (an absolute must for online collaboration), and get Ed and Hugo to listen and give me feedback. Depending on what they say I’ll either throw everything away and start again, or write another draft based on their feedback and show it to them again, or very, very rarely, mark the song as finished first time round and go have a nice cool drink.
The next step is to distribute the parts to the band and start rehearsing and recording. I’ll post more about that side of things later.
In the meanwhile, I leave you with a snippet of the latest piece I’ve been working on, a bodice-ripping military adventure called “The Eagle of the Empire” (in no way related to the book about Napoleon of the same name that I just found out about through Google).
Here’s a little MP3 snippet: eaglesections2and3draft1demo
And here’s a little bit of score (actually it’s just a screenshot of Sibelius – hence the red marks):
One page of the Eagle score
* But before anything else I should point out that substantial contributions to both music and lyrics come from Ed and Hugo.
