I've been practicing daily for a couple of years now.
This year I had a pretty big break-thru in terms of coming up with my own music. A big issue i've had is a distaste for learning other people's music. A good guitar song makes me want to play, but not play the song. It's someone else's song! It's one hell of a mindset, but I only look up published songs when I want to know how they created a specific music phrase, and I generally avoid it. I feel strongly about this for some reason.
But I am kind of stuck. I have some chord progressions I play in, and I have a handful of snippets that I always repeat and lean on to give the stuff i'm playing a loose structure, but turning these progressions and "pieces" of song into a proper song is driving me insane because it's not clicking in my head.
I thought maybe I need to find some folks to play with, and yeah, I do, and I've put out feelers locally for people to play with, especially other trans women, but I've also been searching for advice on songwriting.
What I find really isn't helpful. For one, I am not starting with a melody; a ton of this content assumes you are.
Two, a lot of it just really doesn't discuss the- I guess philosophy and approach? Mechanically i'm already at a point where I can play a song, but I haven't been able to self-discover a process for taking my own material and whipping it into shape, and focusing it up?
I have very little formal music education, i've just been playing every day, pick up a chord or two as I experiment, and stringing together sounds that I like, but I'm really keen to find somebody or someone that can help me develop a more functional creative process, and I'm wondering if this comm might have anybody willing/able to help me work through this stuff?
I have some music theory. I know how to find what key i'm in and stuff - I have some material that's in G#m that I supplemented with a scale in C#m, for example. I can do a basic amount of that kind of manipulation with music theory. When I find new chords I tend to use online tools to reconstruct it to figure out where I'm at, and find likely places to go if i end up developing whatever i'm playing more.
But I'm not gonna pretend I have a lot of depth there - I know enough to fill in a lot of gaps as needed.
What is some composition software you recommend? I have Reaper and Audacity, that I use to record my electric and fiddle with it, but I'm pretty unhappy with Reaper, and Audacity is just too limited in scope obviously
Guitar pro is by far the best. It's the standard for both pros sharing comps with the band as well as pretty much all tabs online (like if download from songsterr or ultimate guitar). A lot of official tab books are just printed out guitar pro lol. If you can't justify the cost I'd just try to pirate it. Tuxguitar is free but a complete mess in comparison.
Ah shit, what's wrong? That would also be my rec for home recording. It's definitely a bit more open ended at first but great once you get a work flow settled. Don't have any alternate recs there as it's the only DAW I've ever used in depth.
Hey that's fine and a good foundation to build on. Lot of guitar players out there to just refuse to learn even basic theory or practice to a metronome.