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How to compose a piano piece when you haven't written music in over 12 years:



1. Gather Inspiration: Drive home from Cleveland singing at the top of your lungs.  Usually this requires imagination (and earplugs for the cars surrounding you) as you undertake a solo attempt at being the entire cast of Phantom of the Opera. 

2. Tickle the Ivories/Warmup the fingers: Typically, this means playing said Phantom of the Opera music on piano.
        2a. Consume good wine during warm-up session.  

3. Become convinced you are Mozart. (this may or not be alcohol induced.)

4. Realize you really like the key a particular song is in.  Start improvising.  Acknowledge you just actually played something kinda awesome, but have no idea what you just played.  Realize you probably should "write this shit down" because, hey, you're Mozart. 

5.  Print out blank music staffs: This must be done quickly so you don't realize you're really not Mozart.

6. Play. Write. Play what you wrote. Erase half of what you wrote down because you wrote the wrong notes. Play.  Write. Make a cheat sheet of where the notes lay on the lines and as ledger lines because apparently, even Mozart needed cheat sheets.  Play what you wrote again.  Repeat.   Use weird notation, not proper musical notiation because, I bet Mozart didn't use all the correct stuff in the beginning, either. 

7.  Holy crap, its almost 3 a.m. Realize you are utterly exhausted. Go to sleep. Wake up and avoid said compositional piece because you are terrified you really AREN'T Mozart this morning and whatever you wrote will sound terrible. Spend most of the day avoiding the piano.  

8. Play what you wrote last night.  Hey, this isn't so bad... What was that scribbled notation in the margin and why didn't I use the correct musical notation last night?!?

9.  Play. Write. Play what you wrote.  Erase. Write. Play. Play from beginning. Again. Repeat. Play "finished" piece. Repeatedly.  Make changes.  Think "I wish I could just do this on the computer.  It would be so much easier."

10.  Remember you have musical notation software somewhere.  Spend 30 minutes looking for it.  Pray it will load on the new version of Windows.  It does! Do a happy dance. Start trying to put your scribbles down into actual correct counted measures.  Slam laptop shut when you realize you'd rather just keep playing your new piece over and over and will deal with trying to figure out all the actual musical counts later.  
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