A pot on the stove and a pencil in my hand…

After a long time I’ve finally been motivated to start writing and recording music again. I’ll be honest, this has been partially inspired by last week’s tragic event. I’d been planning this since my own challenging news but Steve’s passing really accelerated me wanting to make this part of who I am again. Writing music defined who I saw myself as for most of my life up until about ten years ago when life got a bit more complicated.

I’m curious how FMs approach writing music. So far I’m sketching out bass and guitar riffs on GarageBand… noodling away, not really getting too precious just getting structures on tape. I’m about to buy the Alt Rock pack of drum sounds recorded at EA.

So how do you do what you do?

Edit. I just discovered I need to buy EZDrummer to use the Alt Rock set… I talked about this in the Tech Room but are people here using EZDrummer? Worth it?

Yeah I've used a ton of EZ Drummer. It's pretty... easy to use (duh). It goes on sale frequently, hopefully you can get it for under $100.

As far as process, there's really no one method I stick to. But if you're stuck, try mixing it up somehow:

-Write in the inverse order you normally do (lyrics first perhaps?)

-Change up the sound or tuning of your main instrument, or try writing on something else entirely.

-Forget what you "should" be or sound like. Get outside yourself, like the Paul McCartney method around Sgt. Peppers: *points to album cover* "let's play as if we're these guys"

-Don't be afraid to subtract things. Not everything will work and nothing's precious.

-https://obliquestrategies.ca/

Most songs of mine start with a riff or chord progression. I’ll record something on whatever guitar I have laying around on my phone, maybe give it a silly name just so that it’s not “New Recording 27” or somesuch.

Also in my phone I’ll have a running list of potential song titles or lyric ideas, but very rarely will I have lyrics written before I have the skeleton of a song thought of. When I do get into lyrics, I start out with the song title, and usually with that I’ll have some idea what I want the song to be about. Sometimes at the end of it I’ll have kept that intent and the song title intact. Sometimes I’ll have gone wildly off-course from where I started. Sometimes if I’m having trouble cracking a particular lyrical nut on a song, I’ll write out several paragraphs of prose about what I want the song to be about, then try to condense from there, picking out little snippets as they make sense, until I get to something resembling lyrics.

When it’s time to demo it out in Reaper, I’ll usually start with drums. I use the free MT Power Drum Kit 2 VSTi for my fake drums. I’ve gotten pretty good over the years at drum programming but MT has plenty of built-in grooves that I can plonk down into Reaper and then edit to make sure that the kick drum/crashes/etc are in the right place. I’ll then record guitar and bass over that—the basic version of Guitar Rig 6 is free with their version of a Marshall Plexi, and for bass I’ve used a free VST sim of a Sansamp Bass Driver. Usually, because it’s just a demo, I’ll just record guitar or bass parts piece-by-piece and copy/paste or loop them as need be. If I’ve got lyrics at that point, I’ll record those too.

At that point, I’ll have taken those demos to my bandmates to learn them and hear how they sound in rehearsal. Their contribution will generally be to work on the arrangements and dynamics, as that’s when they turn from my home demos into something we actually all play together. Sometimes I’ll try to stick to whatever arrangement is on the demo, but more often than not the guys will have ideas that take the demos into different, better places from where they started.

Usually for me it starts with lyrics, or a good song title.
Riffs and melodies come later. On the last album I recorded, the drumming for the songs were done towards the end.

Just recently I've been recording little riffs/melodic ideas on my phone. I don't know why I didn't do this a long time ago.

At the risk of boring people, I'll mention some context: at the end of 2013, I learned about a community doing a weekly composition/recording challenge, and getting involved seemed like a good idea. I was commuting, kids were young, and days were long. Having "just do one piece each week" seemed like a low bar, and I'd at least be making something, instead of waiting for inspiration when I was out of energy at the end of the day. Maybe I'd make something that was all right. Maybe it'd suck, but that wouldn't hurt anybody.

In the last couple of years, I've had less time to fuss over these pieces, and my process got more efficient. I've been doing three or four tracks of guitars against a click. No bass, no drums. (Up through mid-2021, I'd often do the full-band arrangement kind of thing. Then one week I did just guitar, and it felt complete. Hey, a slightly less arduous way of working.)

So I'll decide to write something, and rummage around for a feeling of a pattern. Maybe I hear that in my head, or maybe something emerges in the first few minutes of picking up the guitar. So I'll record a little clip on one track. Looping that, I'll record something on another track to accompany it, or offer a counterpoint. Then another. Then I'll mute one of the recorded bits, and repeat the process against the others. Sometimes I'll mute everything and start a rather different section for contrast. Once I've built up between six to eight different bits on each track, I might have enough variation to collage these into an arrangement in sections. (Color-coding the clips seems to help--it's easy to tell which ones were tracked together.)

Overall the process is very intuitive, and gets me around the overthinking process I'd go through if I Sat Down To Write A Song.

For me, it's either just playing around on the guitar until something sticks, and then seeing where it goes. Or, a melody will pop into my head and I'll try to work it out. Sometimes, it's a completely different instrument, but not as often as guitar. No matter how it starts, my instruments are always record ready, so I will record all the noodling I do. I'll usually spend some time away from the instruments afterwards and just let my mind wander. I find it's less distracting than trying to figure out where to put my hands next or what chord will work. I'll just let my imagination drive for a bit. Often, I will have several ideas and try to mix and match and see what meshes well together and make adjustments. Albeit, it's more of a building process, but that's just how my brain works.

Ezdrummer 3 is fantastic, and the grid editor for composing is stupidly easy and enjoyable to use. Alt rock ezx dark mono drums fit on nearly anything.

I use ableton, ezdrummer, and some preamp pedals and vsts for guitar and bass. There's some random synth vsts if I want them, too. I've got everything in a way that just needs the mini PC to be switched on and a guitar plugged into a micro pedal board running into the scarlett interface. I always like doing things in the living room, so the mini PC runs into my TV, with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and the mini guitar board, interface, headphones and random pedals, midi controller and cables are all hidden in an ikea TV unit. I've a guitar in the living room and can be recording an idea in around five minutes. It's quick, easy, and the most productive way I've found of doing things with a small flat and a full-on job. The thought of setting up stuff could kill any chance of me bothering to record, so being able to open two doors on a TV unit and be recording has changed my life recently. And when the doors are shut it hides all of the sort of stuff that drives partners mad.

As for writing, I usually need a jumping off point. A song title is a good one or a guitar or bass part that I like. Maybe it's the sort of feel of another song or a band. Sometimes it's all out theft. Hearing something in a song that I want to repurpose or adapt. Fuckit. It happened enough subconsciously anyway.

For band stuff, a lot of the time it starts in my head. Usually on the bus to work or in the shower. I'll get a rough drum pattern, vocal line or basic riff in my head then voice note it on the sly. Later, I'll try to do the drums in ezdrummer or try work out a guitar line.

I sometimes struggle with lyrics and vocals. They either happen almost instantly or I get blocked on it for months. I tend to think about them when I can't sleep. I'll usually end up lying in bed, thinking about lines or ways to deliver them, before writing things down on my phone to assess the damage in the morning. If it's potentially worth waking my wife up for, I'll voicenote it.

It never is.

1. I write something.

2. I throw it out.

Pretty much been this way for about 15 years now.

jfv wrote: Tue May 14, 2024 3:09 pm 1. I write something.

2. I throw it out.

Pretty much been this way for about 15 years now.

This is the way.

free meat wrote: Tue May 14, 2024 1:50 pm
I use ableton, ezdrummer, and some preamp pedals and vsts for guitar and bass. There's some random synth vsts if I want them, too. I've got everything in a way that just needs the mini PC to be switched on and a guitar plugged into a micro pedal board running into the scarlett interface. I always like doing things in the living room, so the mini PC runs into my TV, with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and the mini guitar board, interface, headphones and random pedals, midi controller and cables are all hidden in an ikea TV unit. I've a guitar in the living room and can be recording an idea in around five minutes. It's quick, easy, and the most productive way I've found of doing things with a small flat and a full-on job. The thought of setting up stuff could kill any chance of me bothering to record, so being able to open two doors on a TV unit and be recording has changed my life recently. And when the doors are shut it hides all of the sort of stuff that drives partners mad.

This but instead of anything that involves any digital programs for mixing, I have an Orange Micro Dark and and Orange 8 inch speaker. I like to record on my phone or a tiny old voice recorder. I usually play around with the song parts and record them in separate takes, transfer them all to the laptop and cut them with any mp3 cutter that is on my computer or maybe online. I play around with the parts until they kinda make sense one after the other, or sorts. That would constitute a skeleton of one song that I then send to our bassist and drummer for further inspection and drum parts. I have some 50+ guitar parts in my folder that I usually work with.

As a true bachelor that I am, I have no issues with that last part, ha!

free meat wrote: Tue May 14, 2024 1:50 pm I sometimes struggle with lyrics and vocals. They either happen almost instantly or I get blocked on it for months.

Oh man, tell me about it. I can write good chunk of lyrics all the time, but I always struggle to "implement" them properly on time and I always wait close to a recording session to come up with something useful.