Background
It’s been a long time since I’ve written a song by the ‘traditional’ method of sitting with a guitar and making something up from chords, then adding words. Not that I don’t like that method, but now I prefer doing that with someone rather than alone. On songwriting workshops I’ve done that usually leads to some excitement and momentum; on my own I tend to fall into the same old ideas.
This method is how I’ve been working for the last couple of years, with a new element added this year. It’s a mixture of composing and arranging on the fly. I’ll play around with virtual instruments, samples and loops in Reaper until I find something that works as a ‘unit’ lasting a few bars. I’ll then add more and more elements to that loop. Next, I’ll duplicate it a few times. Then the real arrangement works begins – removing some of the elements I’ve added – maybe removing almost everything from the first duplicated section, then remove one or two from the next, leave everything in the next and remove some from the final section – for example.
Then I’d look for vocal melodies – what sections could I sing over? Maybe make room for the vocal by removing some instrument or other.
Finally, if no lyrics ‘appear’ as I’m doing it, I’ll pillage old notebooks and my huge collection of text files with lyric ideas to find something I wrote when I was in a word-writing mentality. That will be the starting point and I can usually write my way out of it from then.
The sonic journal
This was a new idea, from the Brian Eno songwriting workshop I did in January. He will spend most of his time creating short pieces – mostly instrumental – with no plan or target in mind. He’ll then do a mixdown and catalogue it in a system custom built by his assistant including its key, its bpm, the instruments used and some notes about its emotional associations. He can then, maybe years later, play it and see if it sparks a new idea. Nothing is wasted.
I created a simpler version for myself. I save the mixdown of the experiment – usually created in one to two hours, no longer – and save it with the date and a descriptive title. I then create at text file with the same title that has more description in it. So when I view them together in File Manager I don’t need to open the text file, it appears in the preview pane.
Screen from my Sonic Journal
In this series of videos I’ll record the process as I move from an experimental piece to a song. Since it is experimental, there’s no guarantee it’ll be any good, or even be finished, but it might be interesting to follow it.