How the guitar, songwriting, and music production helped me through the COVID pandemic.
Looking back, March 2020 was a crazy month. Leaving the office to work from home, the lockdown, and an end to gigs for the foreseeable future. But it was also a really productive time for me, a time of renewal. I’d got it into my head the front garden needed finishing off and the back garden needed the fence and shed painted, but really that was the preamble, the foundation for my ultimate aim: Setting up a YouTube channel from the garden shed and getting into music production with Garageband.
First off was a new acoustic guitar, a gorgeous all-mahogany Yamaha FG850. I figured the warmer tones would mesh well with my brighter voice, and I was right! From there, I quickly cleared out and set up my YouTube space in the shed, taking my first steps into vlogging with a few original songs, a video review of the FG850, and other guitar/songwriting related content.
Check out the review and the channel here:
Next, armed with the amazing sounding(and playing) Yamaha, I’d caught the songwriting bug again, it was the perfect environment really, an inspiring instrument AND the most impactful, relevant theme of all, COVID of course!
In our Hands was born in under half an hour. I made the decision to sit down and force myself to write a song about COVID, and it wrote itself really. I put myself in the shoes of someone dying in a COVID ward, what would they be thinking? Any regrets? Anger? As you can probably tell in the video, I got pretty emotional about it, but that’s the amazing thing with songwriting, especially on the acoustic guitar, you can capture a feeling, a moment in time on so many levels, and condense it into 3 or so minutes, all from the comfort of your own sofa.
Here’s the first draft of the song, again from the Shed.
Continuing on my quest to get back into music production, I then put into practice something I’d been promising myself for years: Moving over to iPad music production in Garageband. First of all, I acquired the gear: An iPad, a compatible mic, and a Guitar interface. I was all set.
We missed out on a lot of things in 2020, not least our 5th Wedding Anniversary plans, but I had the basics of a song When You’re In Love which perfectly captured what I was now planning, an anniversary gift to my wife in the form of a song. It grew into not just a song, but also my first foray into music production with Garageband, as well as my first accompanying video to go with it. In the end, I got lost in a beautiful world of music creation, polished and packaged up as a complete entity.
…She loved it, and here it is:
So there you go. Music has once again brought me comfort through times of uncertainty and sadness. It’s provided that unique dizzying sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that can’t be bought or achieved through the office job or the daily grind. In a nutshell, I got lost, drunk on music, and it made me forget about COVID, but you probably got that already.
….which leads right back to the title of the blog, and this… enjoy!
How was your Day? Drop me a comment below or visit the forum.
