#sunhashine

Music history: Learning about all the historical stuff! Hope you like the Three B’s babey - Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are your new dads.

Ethnomusicology: What people who aren’t lily-white Northern Europeans do. Covers history and theory.

i’m sorry to hear that you’re having a hard time :( i know that a lot seems uncertain these days, especially with how the world is right now. i hope you are taking care of yourself and being mindful of your health!

i suggest taking some time to gather and reorganize your thoughts. write them down if you need to. think back on some of your former goals. what did you want to major in? what did you want to achieve? do you think you can still achieve them now? if yes, try picking them up again and giving them another shot. if no, think of other things that interest you and continue building from there. i know this might seem easier said than done, but try not to worry too much and do what you can!

please don’t beat yourself up over something that you can’t help. you didn’t choose to deal with these struggles, so of course you’re not performing the best that you possibly can. however, i’m proud of you for still hanging in there! you’ve already made it this far, and that’s a big accomplishment. most importantly, remember that it’s okay to go at your own pace. there’s no need to rush. you have more time than you realize. everything will be okay.

okay, well, first of all, you’re gonna have to stop saying you have no talent. if you start out thinking you suck, you’re never gonna recognize when you don’t. also, i don’t have any training in singing except choir and musical theatre, so you’re halfway there!

if you want to be a singer-songwriter, here’s what i recommend:

learn an instrument. seriously, any instrument, even ukulele. actually, if you don’t play anything yet i recommend learning ukulele, because they are easier, cheaper, and more convenient than a guitar or a piano, and just as functional for singer-songwriters (see: dodie). obviously playing an instrument is not REQUIRED for being a singer-songwriter, but it’s a HUGE help if you’re by yourself, and especially it’s good for keeping melodies and for taking recordings and for staying in tune and just, in general a really really useful (marketable!) skill.

listen to a lot of music. listen to so much music. listen to a ton of the kind of music you want to write, but also? just listen to all kinds of music. every song is an idea you can steal, and i mean that. (you can only steal the idea though not the lyrics)

make a list of song ideas. what that means is make a list of anything that has any meaning to you at all. big or small. you can put your mom, your dog, your favorite book, the best vacation you ever took, climate change, on and on. the list is supposed to be hella long. this is your ideas list. you can come back to it when you’re having writers’ block.

write sentences about things! i keep a document called “unclaimed lyrics” which is where i put any one-off lyrics that i think of that don’t fit into any of my current songs but i can maybe go back to and use in a future song. that’s another really good way to kick writers’ block.

as for actually writing, different people do it differently, but i would recommend the following: 

think of something that makes you feel a lot, and write about it. anything you have strong feelings about. anything you love or hate, anything that made you euphoric or tragically depressed.

write a “thesis”. obviously this isn’t a real thesis since this is music not english class but what i mean by that is that sometimes it can be easy to just start Writing Words and totally lose the plot. at the top of wherever you’re writing your song, just write a sentence or two about what the song is actually about - what’s the point? what are you saying? for example: “this song is about how my sister is always there for me.” BAM. now whenever you’re feeling a little lost or unsure of what lyrics to write, refer to your thesis to remind you to stay on message (so to speak).

try to imitate the style of artists/lyricists you really like (for example i love ed sheeran and taylor swift and noah kahan and julia michaels - all fantastic lyricists whom i recommend). you can take rhythm, chord progressions, rhyme schemes, and ideas from any singer. do it!! do it. i stole a chord progression from a julia michaels song and then just transposed it up a half-step. steal. do it. 

pick a rhyme scheme. ABAB? AABB? AABA? ABCB? the possibilities are endless but it’s good to know what kind of rhyme scheme you’re going to use so you have a little bit of framework.

rhymezone.com, thesaurus.com. these websites are your best friends. i promise it’s not cheating.

if you’ve done the melody before the chords (on your instrument of choice), figure out what chords work with it. the really awesome thing about guitar and (i assume) ukulele is that you can actually transpose the key suuuper easily with a capo, so don’t sweat whether or not the actual key is right for you.

if you’ve got a chord progression, write a melody to it! ideally with words. i guess some artists know how to write a melody and then cram words into that space, but i am not one of them. for me, it’s always easiest to know what i’m going to say before i work on how many syllables i have to say it.

Ohh man where to even BEGIN lol

Honestly you can go in any direction! All of the main series games are really great, my personal favorites are Pokemon Black/White so playing either of those would be a wonderful start! If you want to play in order tho from gen 1 to gen 7 (and soon to be gen 8 once Sword and Shield release), I’d suggest starting off with Pokemon FireRed/LeafGreen, as those are remakes of the original Red/Green/Blue games (and you can play them for free on a computer if you have an emulator and a ROM!) Of course you can always play the originals as well if you really wanna go for that nostalgia factor lol. Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee for the Switch are also kinda remakes of the originals, so there’s an option if you want to go for the original game’s story in high def graphics :’D

As for the anime, the original Indigo League series is a classic treasure, so I’d start there ^^ And after that, you could honestly just jump to any season, bc Ash starts fresh every time he goes to a new region, so there aren’t any super blaring continuity things you gotta deal with. My suggestions after the original series is the XY series and then the Sun and Moon series, both of which are SUPER great with a lot of wonderful characters!

If you feel like tackling any of the side games in the future, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is an absolute must, with Explorers of Sky being my favorite game of all time, and is a super loved by a lot of fans! I’d also suggest Pokemon Ranger which is a lot of fun, and I personally really enjoyed the Pokemon Rumble games as well so

Sorry if that’s like, a total overload LOL there’s honestly so much media from Pokemon to consume, but if you’re looking for games the main series games are always a good way to go, and the anime is great as well!