YouTube Changes

The more observant among you who also watch my YouTube videos may have noticed things have been a little bit different over there since the new year rolled in and I decided it's probably time I explained a few things.

You may have noticed that videos have been going up weekly at around 6pm on Monday nights. I've not made any kind of announcement that this is going to be a schedule because, to be perfectly honest, I'm not great at sticking to schedules. It is definitely not set in stone that I will be uploading every week or what I will be uploading but I do have a vague idea of what I would like to do to guide myself a little bit.

My plan so far, which will probably change very quickly, is to have an outline of what I will upload every month. My plan at the moment is that the first Monday of every month will see a new original song that I've written recently and I'm still deciding on the others, meaning they are the ones that are likely to change. I'm considering doing a mashup on the second Monday of every month, a song that I've been requested to cover on the third and then having the last Monday of every month (or last 2 when that happens) as a bit of a 'wild card' where I can upload whatever I feel like uploading. These could be just a song I'm really loving at the moment, a song I've always loved but never got around to recording and uploading or maybe even a vlog if I feel the need (although vlogging really is not my forte, I'm far more comfortable with a guitar/ukulele at hand).

As well as this, you may have noticed my thumbnails for my videos have suddenly become all fancy and wonderful. This is thanks to my lovely friend Ishani who, if you read my book blog you'll know, designs pretty much everything I need designed. 

The quality of my videos has also changed a little. I tried filming on both my normal video camera (a very old sony 'bloggie') and my phone, an iPhone 5C and noticed that the quality of the video from my phone was far better. It just looked brighter and more colourful so I've decided to film on that from now on. I know a few YouTubers who film on their phone and you can never tell as there really isn't any difference and I'd rather do that and have brighter videos than have to worry about how bad the artificial lighting looks!

Hopefully, this year my YouTube channel will start to be what I wanted it to be when I created it all those years ago: a place where I upload regularly, don't really worry too much about what it is I'm uploading as long as I like it, and somewhere where I can share the music I love and the music I'm creating to more and more people. 

Lucy x

New Years Resolutions?

To start this blog post, I'd like to wish a very happy belated New Year to you all. I know I've been a little rubbish with posting on here recently but, as always, school and life and everything else has just got in the way a little. 

A new year always comes with thousands of blog posts and YouTube videos from people sharing their New Years Resolutions and since I've been struggling with ideas of what to write about recently (another contributing factor to my lack of blog posts), I thought it was a pretty good idea to steal. I've already written a similar post on my book blog about my reading resolutions which you can see here.

I've not set myself any specific resolutions this year, but I do have a couple of things that I'm going attempt to do in 2015. I know that if I call something a resolution and set it in stone I will probably never do it, so instead I've decided to have a few ideas that I'm going to try and pursue, without any pressure on myself to keep them going throughout the year. The reading resolutions in the other blog post are examples of this. I've decided to not put any emphasis on how much I read, but more putting emphasis on reading what I want to, not just things that I feel I should read.

I'm also going to try and worry less this year. This is an on-going aim of mine and anyone who knows me probably knows I can be quite an anxious person, although I am very slowly starting to manage the anxiety. Most days I find that I feel anxious or worried about something at some point and I'm going to try and find ways to prevent this throughout 2015. It may or may work, but it never hurts to try.

Another aim I have is something that may or may not stick, but I'm hoping it does. Inspired by Danny Gruff's #ontaw (one new tune a week) that he's doing this year, I'm going to attempt to write 50 songs in 2015. I wrote 46 songs last year so it's definitely an achievable goal but this year I'm going to attempt to share more of them on my YouTube channel. Normally I write a song and it stays in my little songwriting book and only gets heard by a few close friends but this year I want to share more. I love letting people hear my music and there isn't a reason I don't upload to YouTube more so I'm going to stop trying to make excuses and just do it. I've decided to aim for 50 songs in the year rather than one a week because I find I go through phases of writing something every day and then not writing for a while and that's absolutely okay. I don't want to force myself to write when it'd not the right time but I do want to encourage myself to finish things I start, which aiming for a certain number of songs in the year should do.

I've started off well with this one as I've written 2 songs in the first 9 days of 2015 and have uploaded one of the songs I wrote at the end of last year to YouTube and the feedback has been positive on it so far! You can watch it here if you think it might be your cup of tea or you're just interested.

Here's to a great 2015.

Lucy x