ITT: Talk about your songwriting\musical process

[teh b0lly!!1]

i remember chuckling at how Elph said a couple months ago something along the lines of "i love how even the most battle scarred netphorians here are tender singer-songwriters".

many of us are musicians. it would be interesting to hear how you guys go about writing your songs, or how you do whatever it is you do.

besides, it would give us all a chance to feel important, like we're being interviewed for VH1 Behind the Albums or something, amirite? :

[teh b0lly!!1]

i'm just about to leave the house and go party with my friends pretty much for the last time before i go back to my own private hell, but the idea for this thread came to me when i realized lately i had developed a sort of very stream-of-conciousness approach to my songwriting.

i used to work and re-work songs literally forever, years of tweaking songs and never being completely satisfied, but recently i have been writing songs fairly quickly - in a couple of days, maybe even a couple of hours when i feel inspired. just come across a riff i like, start 'speaking' over it, rather than try to come up with a seperate melody and then slap words into it, and try to spice it up a little and make it musically interesting with the next choices i make.

[slunken]

How was the party? Did you party heartily?

[slunken]

Oh wait you're partying right now. Woah bro.

[Disco King]

I don't have much of a process. Sometimes, I'm just practicing scales or chops and I end up playing a little lick I like, and I go, "hey, that could be a song," and I go from there.

Or, I pick a random key, and start just playing random chord progressions until I like something. Or random notes until something sounds like a good riff.

It's rare that I hit upon something I like, but when I do, I add a few parts to it, but then get stuck, because I can't find acceptable parts to add to it to bring it to completion. It stays unfinished forever.

It's like, if I have a chorus I like, I'll try to add a verse in the same key, but it always feels like I just added a random piece of music in the same key that could just as well be for another song. It never feels like I'm taking the song where it actually needs to go and where the first piece of music is building toward. It just feels like an arbitrary thing I stuck on because it fits the key.

I never even get to the lyrics stage, because I don't finish the music. I have notebooks of unfinished lyrics for no songs in particular, but they are all awful and I can never revisit them because it makes me cringe just to read them.

[run2pee]

If I have a sympathetic drummer and a bag of weed, writing songs for me is nearly automatic. It just happens when I pick up a Mexican strat, hear a compelling beat, and start to explore the fretboard through multiple amps with various distortions, maybe some wah and delay.

I also have a bundle of like maybe 100 riffs from dicking around solo, but the best songs don't usually come from those, frustratingly. In fact, the more something is prepared in advance, the harder it usually is to complete with a drummer. Maybe because I've already married myself to some story that I think the riff wants to say, and resist efforts to steer it elsewhere.

tl;dr good drummer + weed + guitar = song

[run2pee]

Originally Posted by Disco King

I don't have much of a process. Sometimes, I'm just practicing scales or chops and I end up playing a little lick I like, and I go, "hey, that could be a song," and I go from there.

Or, I pick a random key, and start just playing random chord progressions until I like something. Or random notes until something sounds like a good riff.

It's rare that I hit upon something I like, but when I do, I add a few parts to it, but then get stuck, because I can't find acceptable parts to add to it to bring it to completion. It stays unfinished forever.

It's like, if I have a chorus I like, I'll try to add a verse in the same key, but it always feels like I just added a random piece of music in the same key that could just as well be for another song. It never feels like I'm taking the song where it actually needs to go and where the first piece of music is building toward. It just feels like an arbitrary thing I stuck on because it fits the key.

I never even get to the lyrics stage, because I don't finish the music. I have notebooks of unfinished lyrics for no songs in particular, but they are all awful and I can never revisit them because it makes me cringe just to read them.

http://www.morethanturquoise.com/wp-...ploads/mtm.gif

[Sonic Johnny]

find a nice chord. find another nice chord that sounds good before or after the first one. Keep finding chords till you've got enough of them. Choose a few, whack em in an order and pick a BPM. Throw some drums underneath to find the groove. Loop the chord progression, diddle on top until you find a nice complementary riff or counter melody or whatever. Stack extra guitar parts as many times as you feel like. Repeat.

[vixnix]

1. stop taking medication
2. wait for sickening, overwhelming desire to express myself
3. sit, play, sing
4. ignore everything including my kids for a week refining initial work
5. burst into tears and fix the shitstorm left in the wake of me checking out of real life for a week
6. See doctor and go back on medication

[teh b0lly!!1]

Originally Posted by vixnix

1. stop taking medication
2. wait for sickening, overwhelming desire to express myself
3. sit, play, sing
4. ignore everything including my kids for a week refining initial work
5. burst into tears and fix the shitstorm left in the wake of me checking out of real life for a week
6. See doctor and go back on medication

[teh b0lly!!1]

Originally Posted by Sonic Johnny

find a nice chord. find another nice chord that sounds good before or after the first one. Keep finding chords till you've got enough of them. Choose a few, whack em in an order and pick a BPM. Throw some drums underneath to find the groove. Loop the chord progression, diddle on top until you find a nice complementary riff or counter melody or whatever. Stack extra guitar parts as many times as you feel like. Repeat.

unsure if this post was delivered in a dick-like manner, but it sounds interesting tbh. kind of like that old story of thom yorke pulling random words from a hat for writing lyrics.

purposely disjointing the process and categorizing it might yield very different and interesting results. and i've been wanting to do that lyric hat thing for quite a while now.

[teh b0lly!!1]

in the past my process would pretty much be like, develop the chord progressions for the whole song (or at least verse-chorus) because writing only music is fairly easy for me, but then i would enter this stage where i would struggle enormously with finding the right melodies and lyrics.
i would keep the song in my head and would hum, sing and mumble to myself all day long for a while, trying to find words that seem to sound right, working on seperate parts rather than thinking about it as something that needs to be seamless and flow convincingly from start to finish.

i definitely like some of them now but i see now that as an approach, it's definitely too high strung - i mean, you need to just let go and let the music reflect who you are. you can't stop at every turn and question yourself, it's first-degree self sabotage. i try to resist that urge to stop and start tweaking and changing unless i really feel like it's necessary. when i feel inspired and i'm starting something up, i try to go as far in as possible as i can, and lay out as big a part of the song as i manage, and then later, when i revisit it and keep working on it, it makes more sense rather than some disjointed piece of idea that i thought i had all figured out before, and assumed i'd just remember it all later and be able to pick up where i left off. well, that never happens.

i find that for me, i gotta finish as much of it as possible on the first go, when it comes to you easily, before your self conscious critique mechanisms gel and make it almost impossible to add or detract anything from what is, in the end, a crappy recording of a sketch on your iphone or whatever.

[Elphenor]

Originally Posted by Sonic Johnny

find a nice chord. find another nice chord that sounds good before or after the first one.

This is it basically

[redbreegull]

I'm pretty sure we had this thread recently and I wrote a whole essay on my thoughts on songwriting

then as I was playing around with some things I've been working on, I realized I very often break the "rules" of the process which I have in my head. So go figure.

[slunken]

I know a lot of artists that try to recreate a song that they like - knowing that the end result will be totally different. even if its something obvious like michael jackson's "bad".

I once stole the chord progression from goo goo dolls' "name" and nobody would ever know.

[Disco King]

Originally Posted by teh b0lly!!1

in the past my process would pretty much be like, develop the chord progressions for the whole song (or at least verse-chorus) because writing only music is fairly easy for me, but then i would enter this stage where i would struggle enormously with finding the right melodies and lyrics.
i would keep the song in my head and would hum, sing and mumble to myself all day long for a while, trying to find words that seem to sound right, working on seperate parts rather than thinking about it as something that needs to be seamless and flow convincingly from start to finish.

i definitely like some of them now but i see now that as an approach, it's definitely too high strung - i mean, you need to just let go and let the music reflect who you are. you can't stop at every turn and question yourself, it's first-degree self sabotage. i try to resist that urge to stop and start tweaking and changing unless i really feel like it's necessary. when i feel inspired and i'm starting something up, i try to go as far in as possible as i can, and lay out as big a part of the song as i manage, and then later, when i revisit it and keep working on it, it makes more sense rather than some disjointed piece of idea that i thought i had all figured out before, and assumed i'd just remember it all later and be able to pick up where i left off. well, that never happens.

i find that for me, i gotta finish as much of it as possible on the first go, when it comes to you easily, before your self conscious critique mechanisms gel and make it almost impossible to add or detract anything from what is, in the end, a crappy recording of a sketch on your iphone or whatever.

Yeah, I think my process is similar to your old one, and that's probably why I'm perpetually stuck.

I think I need to find a way to just let go and just express myself and not expect everything to be groundbreaking, because that just immobilized me. One musician who I really respect is a guy from the Oboard who went by Aztec_Litany_Service. Like, he has no pretensions whatsoever when writing material, no filter at all. He'd record pretty much anything that came to his head. And for that reason, he has a considerable output that he is perpetually uploading to Bandcamp or whatever. A lot of good songs in there, but a lot of it was silly shit from the top of his head. I feel like, I could never write songs the way he writes them, because I'd be like, "wtf, I can't write a song about eating a spicy falafel, that's not a real song," be he does that stuff, and he's 10 times the musician I'll ever be, because he actually cares about the craft of music enough to always be creating, rather than just naval-gazing about what a good song is. He even told me that when he first started playing guitar, he barely tried learning any songs, because he was more interested in writing them. He just loves songwriting, he's not trying to "be" somebody.

I guess I also respect Regina Spektor in a similar way. She's also the kind of person who just loves songwriting and will write a song about anything with no pretensions.

Originally Posted by slunken

I know a lot of artists that try to recreate a song that they like - knowing that the end result will be totally different. even if its something obvious like michael jackson's "bad".

I once stole the chord progression from goo goo dolls' "name" and nobody would ever know.

I think I may have a couple songs where I would steal a chord progression, but transpose it to a different mode. Changing the mode changes the entire feel. When I keep the same progression, or only change the key, it sounds way too similar to the original to me, but that's probably because I'm just not a good enough songwriter to create something unique with the same progression. I'll just default to a similar melody to the song I'm aping.

[slunken]

Originally Posted by Disco King

One musician who I really respect is a guy from the Oboard who went by Aztec_Litany_Service. Like, he has no pretensions whatsoever when writing material, no filter at all. He'd record pretty much anything that came to his head. And for that reason, he has a considerable output that he is perpetually uploading to Bandcamp or whatever. A lot of good songs in there, but a lot of it was silly shit from the top of his head. .

You have to ask yourself if you want to be a musical artist or a lyrical artist. Is your music just a front for your lyrics or are you much more interested in the actual music?

I would considere Aztec, regardless of good or bad connotations, a lyrical artist. The chord changes are just a vehicle for his lyrics.

[slunken]

What matters more to you?

[reprise85]

aztec posts on here sometimes. i'm friends with him on facebook, i think

[Elphenor]

Aztec was one rad motherfucker that's for sure

[slunken]

lol wut

[slunken]

what was radder to you: all of the self loathing about hygiene or showing off his scrotum for cheap group laughs? or was it both, just the constant need for attention?

[Elphenor]

I just liked that he worked at a gas station and wrote funny songs man idk anything about scrotums

[Elphenor]

the world is a french fry

[slunken]

the key word is "editing"

some edit way too much

some not enough

[Elphenor]

I don't like solo guitar players for the most part I can only name a couple

So I'm sitting here like why bother making music that I myself wouldn't listen to anyway

need a drummer

[teh b0lly!!1]

Originally Posted by slunken

You have to ask yourself if you want to be a musical artist or a lyrical artist. Is your music just a front for your lyrics or are you much more interested in the actual music?

I would considere Aztec, regardless of good or bad connotations, a lyrical artist. The chord changes are just a vehicle for his lyrics.

yeah, this.
funnily enough (and i use that term very, very loosely ) one of my friends here is exactly one of those lyrical musicians. his guitar playing is sort of idiosyncratic and he can't sing at all, but he just bangs out songs about whatever pops into his head. in that sense, his music is true to who he is as a person, and i do admire that. one of his songs is titled "my dick hurts", i mean. or something along those lines.

anyway.

re: "lyrics vs. music", i sort of try to mix it up as best as i can - i'm definitely not one of those guys who just strums chords so i'll have a backdrop for my razor sharp lyrics, but i try to make the music interesting and maybe even a bit challenging, and write the best lyrics i can over it. that song i posted a while back is a good example of a song i'm actually really proud of, because it presents both elements in probably the best way i can do it.

i did notice that as a listener though, i love long jams that go 4 minutes without any actual singing, and as a songwriter i always tend to start off, sing my verses and my choruses, and kind of wrap it up. no real open spaces like that. maybe it's because i don't have a band. it'd be nice to make a 20 minute song.

[slunken]

i like songwriting enough, but i'm just a dumb guitar player. i'm here to make your dumb songs better.

[redbreegull]

lol I jammed with an awesome drummer last week and it had been so long since I played electric guitar with a drummer I could barely do it. We kept trying Pumpkins songs and I just couldn't keep up

I was also really fucked up

He asked if I had any songs and I do, but I had no idea how to even begin to play them in an environment with drums and distortion

[teh b0lly!!1]

lol he's the kind of drummer that lays down his sticks any time the distortion pedals are not on?