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At the prod­ding of a friend, I’ve started writ­ing some new music for the hymn “Does the Jour­ney Seem Long?” The melody actu­ally just sort of came to me when I was walk­ing home from stake pres­i­dency meet­ing this morn­ing, and I wrote it down, fleshed it out, revised it a bit, and started adding in the other parts (since I want it to be SATB). I’ve really missed writ­ing music. :)

The fact that it just came to me, though, makes me wonder: am I actu­ally com­pos­ing some­thing new, or is my sub­con­scious just regur­gi­tat­ing some tune I’ve heard in my past? I really don’t know. And I don’t know how I’d find out other than fin­ish­ing the piece and get­ting it out there and then wait­ing to see if anyone comes up to me and says, “Hey, you stole that from so-and-so!” ;)

Anyway, for the tech­ni­cally curi­ous, I’ve been writ­ing the music out by hand in a Mole­sk­ine music note­book, but since I don’t have a piano or key­board at hand to use as a ref­er­ence, I’ve been using GarageBand’s musi­cal key­board to figure out what notes I’ve got flying around in my head. I’ve also been using BarFly to notate — and it’s so fast. I was able to enter the melody for the whole song in around thirty sec­onds, and that included being rusty on my ABC nota­tion. It’s awe­some. (I mainly use it to make sure I’m notat­ing the rhythm cor­rectly; I usu­ally get it right, but every once in a while my brain will short-​circuit and I’ll write a whole note when I really want a dotted half, or some­thing odd like that.)

What usu­ally hap­pens at this point is that I forget about the com­po­si­tion and leave it half-​baked for who knows how long, lan­guish­ing in the back of the pantry until it turns green­ish white from the mold and fuzz. Hope­fully that won’t happen this time. I really need to just finish this hymn and upload it. I would do it tonight, but bedtime’s already here. :)