how do you start?

Mir

Member
when you feel like to creat, how you usually start working on it? do you first have an idea, and only then you go and creat it?
or you get your idea as you decide to comppose something?
and if you do, whats the process of it for you?
what you start with?

:) thank you
 
when you feel like to creat, how you usually start working on it? do you first have an idea, and only then you go and creat it?
or you get your idea as you decide to comppose something?
and if you do, whats the process of it for you?
what you start with?

:) thank you

I have been involved in music repro and recording in a small way all my life (now 74) and in my late teens and 20s was a fair "chugger" on guitar but a better bass player. I was involved with a couple of bands, mates mostly and did Beatles covers and standards but never got anywhere.

Later I helped my talented son in a technical way to do recording. In all that time I have never written a song and indeed the muse has never caught me! Son has composed loads of stuff but does not think it worth doing anything with.

So, I don't think you can learn to write songs, anymore than you can come up with a groundbreaking scientific theory. The Gift is there or it is not.

Just my 2penn'oth.

Dave.
 
All my writing has always been a need for something I couldn't find. I'm also stupid and say yes when common sense says no. I find if I need a piece of music that lasts 2:20, has to be sad and traditional sounding I can go to the studio and have to finished to 'saleable' quality pretty quickly. What I have trouble with are up tempo modern bits of music. Slow, sad and moving = easy, but if somebody needed guitar, drums, bass and keys in a modern style - despite being able to play that kind of stuff, I cannot write it. I also can't do lyrics. Melodies are fine - but writing words is impossible.

If I'm doing my favourites - the slow ones, then I tend to write with right hand chords, and left hand bass, and find a sound to start with and a tempo . So I'll maybe use something like Absynth - and find a weird evolving pad and then play to a click, moving from chord to chord live, with the next ones appearing in my head. I find that what happens is that the piece grows in 16 bar chunks. Oddly, I find that I don't follow the contemporary intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus-verse-playout route or the classical music A-B-C prescriptions for classical style music - I just do what comes to me, and then it often falls into one of the formal categories.

So for me, the sound drives the composition. Some sound classical, some more r+b, but the thing that surprises me is that I can do string quartets, jazz stuff, even poppy stuff, but some genres are totally alien to me - club style dance music won't be there, nor anything metal. Oddly - I quite like big band and swing, and while I have the musical experience to write it, and the kit - every attempt suddenly becomes something I've heard. Two or three times I have scrapped a project because I suddenly realise I have the chord sequence from one well known song, with a new, but too similar melody to a well known song.

I've also done a few old fashioned pieces based on the style and sound of old recordings - A church organ piece of all things, and a Erik Satie style piano thing. I also have to be very careful to avoid Elton John chord sequences, they sneak in sometimes, and a piece of music I wrote about 20 years ago often pops up again, and I have to go back and uncompose it.

I can sing - but I never do, and never really want to. That's how I work, and it works pretty well for me.
 
For me, it takes something to trigger a song. It might be a newspaper article, an old memory. I've written two birthday songs for a good friend that I used to work with. They've never been anything commercial.

Usually it starts with a phrase or some lyrics, and the tune will come from that. I don't play piano, so they are all guitar based. If my buddy who plays bass and piano ever retires and I can get him over to the house for some music time I may be able to flesh out some of these songs.
 
For me it starts with a seed.

The seed can be anything . . . a phrase that pops into my head, a fragment of a tune that I hear somewhere, a suggestion made by someone, an image, a dream, an emotion, a story told to me . . . anything could be a trigger.

Sometimes the words will come first, sometimes the tune.
 
thank you Dave , i don't agree with what you said though about writing songs. of course some people are more talanted from others,
and it might be easier for them t start, but everyone can write and composse something, it's about if they decide they want to be doing this and puting time and efort in it, and trying to really express something from their mind.
every1 ah their own way of thetting the muse, was curious to hear these ways
and about your son, f he has a lot of stuff he made, maybe you can encourage him to share this
 
thank you
about the styles you cna't composse, maybe you should lsiten to this type of song for a while, to get more familier with the style,
if you're interested ofc with compossing such styles.
and yes, sound deffenetly drives and brings ideas!
 
like
you get an idea in the shower
you keep playing it in your head
and then you go and bring it into reality?
dont u forget your ideas?
 
does it happen to you that, you have song in yor head aready and you go and creat this idea, or you buld it up through the work?
 
I don't think you can learn to write songs, anymore than you can come up with a groundbreaking scientific theory. The Gift is there or it is not.
It's not so much that I couldn't agree more with this....it's that I couldn't agree at all with this !
Virtually every human being that has ever written a song has learned to do it. I'd say that there are dozens if not hundreds of different ways that people learn to write songs, but make no mistake, it is something one learns to do. Sure, it comes a lot easier to some than others and there are also some that no matter how much they try, they just can't seem to come up with songs or a song. But those that do learned how to do it. They may have started by copying something that a band/artist they like has done. They might have been doodling about on an instrument. They may have just been messing with some poetry or a song or sequence of a song may have just flown, apparently from nowhere, into their heads. They may have started as kids, as teens oras young adults. Or even as older, mature adults. It may even have initially come naturally. But everyone had to, at some level, learn how to do it. Same way that speaking our native language does not just happen, it is learned, writing songs too is learned.
Incidentally, there is no reason why, if one is interested in the various branches of science, one could not come up with a groundbreaking scientific theory. Imagine for a moment that the person who supposedly has the "innate ability" is never introduced to science. That would scuttle that idea. But once introduced to the medium, the scope is there for all levels of deep thought and practical engagement.
Songwriting is a bit like that. What's that old cliché; 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration.
 
For me it starts in the shower...
I have lost count {actually, I never started} of the number of songs or fragments of songs or melodies or instrument parts that have come to me while I've been in the bath or the shower. Because I'll spend 2 to 3 hours reading in the bath, when I'm on a roll, I'll take my dictaphone into the bathroom with me. There have been loads of times when I haven't though, and I've had to shout really loud to one of my kids downstairs {an achievement in itself as they're often on headphones} to get my dictaphone up to me as an idea has come and I know that unless I get it down there and then, I'll forget it. Actually, it's not so much that I'll forget it, it just won't stay lodged in my head. I'll keep humming the part over and over but distract me for a minute, or if I'm thinking about the deoderant or remembering the perfumed oil for my feet or whatever, it's more often than not, gone. And on occasion, I've had to jump out of the bath and soak up the house running downstairs in the Noddy Holder:eek: because no one was in and I had to get to the dictaphone !
Dang and durn that inspiration !
For me it starts with a seed.
The seed can be anything . . . a phrase that pops into my head, a fragment of a tune that I hear somewhere, a suggestion made by someone, an image, a dream, an emotion, a story told to me . . . anything could be a trigger.
Sometimes the words will come first, sometimes the tune.
This is me all over. There is simply no one way a song will come. Pretty much every song I've ever written or co~written has a story attached, most of which are long, involved and convoluted !
For example, in my sig there's a link to a song called "Bath days." That was the last song I ever recorded on my Tascam 8 track cassette portastudio, back in 2011. I even remember the date I wrote and recorded it ~ 22nd September. I'm almost sure it was a Thursday, just because of where I was on my delivery round. I remember the date because I have three friends with that day as their birthday and I was thinking of them when the words:
"Bambi, Varuni and Ammittai
Shared birthdays on the same day."
They were their real names {well, Bambi's wasn't but everyone except me called her that. Even her parents and 4 sisters used to call her Bambi. I don't think anyone even knew her actual name, but I did because I'd asked}. Funnily enough, I'd included Varuni in a song about 13 years previous to that called "Varuni's bag." My initial intention was to write this deep and meaningful song about life and friends and strained or broken friendships and growth and loss and the things we pass through that make us who we are. But after trying for a few minutes, as I was driving, to come up with the next line to take the song on, I just came up with:
"But I simply couldn't be bothered to work this song out
In any depth or in any meaningful way !"
and in a bout of warped humour, I changed the "birthdays" to "bath days." I had a good laugh at that but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it so I decided that was going to be it. Deep and meaningful could go with some other song. I wrote it down on one of my delivery sheets and then this cutey pie melody came to me and I thought "that'd make a nice bit of lead guitar" {It became the intro}. The whole thing was done in about 15 minutes, but it is a very short song. When I got home, I worked it out on guitar and recorded it just like that. Put some harmonica on it and called it finished. I was pleased with it because it was written in a period where I was consciously trying to write really short songs. My tunes were generally anything from 6 to 35 minutes and I was curious as to whether I could actually keep a song interesting {to me} in just 2~3 minutes. At first it felt like they were so incomplete. My intros were sometimes longer than that !
 
does it happen to you that, you have song in yor head aready and you go and creat this idea, or you buld it up through the work?

It's a bit of both. It's so rare that I have sat down with the intention of writing a song with absolutely nothing there that off the top of my head, I can't remember the last time I did that. I'm not even sure I've ever done that. Things have come when I'd be practicing bass or guitar that didn't exist before. So I suppose it's happened by accident.
But once an idea is there, and it only needs to be a fragment, then there have been plenty of times when I've just built it up through the work, as you put it. Sometimes I'll have all the parts hummed before I even record the song but because I had to work around the availability of whoever was playing drums, I'd often just record a batch of guitar/drums or bass/drums. Right now, I've got loads of songs recorded in 2009, 10, 11 and 12 that are just guitar/drums or bass/drums. I have an idea of other instrument parts for some but not for others. Time will tell how they'll come out and sometimes, old ideas that I had, I'll discard, either because something I consider better has come or because I haven't got a clue what I was thinking of when I may have hummed a particular melody or instrument line. It might have been 15 years ago !
A few years back I was looking to buy a bike and I knew where there was a bike shop so I headed there. On my way back to my van, I noticed a few doors away was this shop called "Kosher Cuisine." Even before I'd pulled away, this melody beginning with the words "Kosher cuisine" just jumped into my head. I hummed it into my dictaphone that I always used to carry in my van and soon came up with a verse. At home, I played about with it on my bass and soon my friend who is a drummer and I recorded it. It was left to ferment for a while and every so often little bits and pieces would come and I'd add them as instrument lines. It was a long time before I came up with a second verse, months. And they came in one spurt, at a most awkward time as I had a delivery on a really busy road that had been one way for the 12 or so years I'd been delivering there which had recently been made into a two way road. I was trying to remember the lyric more than I was watching out for the traffic !
So yeah, some songs I really have to work at, others have parts that just fly into my head.
 
It's not so much that I couldn't agree more with this....it's that I couldn't agree at all with this !
Virtually every human being that has ever written a song has learned to do it. I'd say that there are dozens if not hundreds of different ways that people learn to write songs, but make no mistake, it is something one learns to do. Sure, it comes a lot easier to some than others and there are also some that no matter how much they try, they just can't seem to come up with songs or a song. But those that do learned how to do it. They may have started by copying something that a band/artist they like has done. They might have been doodling about on an instrument. They may have just been messing with some poetry or a song or sequence of a song may have just flown, apparently from nowhere, into their heads. They may have started as kids, as teens oras young adults. Or even as older, mature adults. It may even have initially come naturally. But everyone had to, at some level, learn how to do it. Same way that speaking our native language does not just happen, it is learned, writing songs too is learned.
Incidentally, there is no reason why, if one is interested in the various branches of science, one could not come up with a groundbreaking scientific theory. Imagine for a moment that the person who supposedly has the "innate ability" is never introduced to science. That would scuttle that idea. But once introduced to the medium, the scope is there for all levels of deep thought and practical engagement.
Songwriting is a bit like that. What's that old cliché; 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration.

Ok Grim' maybe I was a bit simplistic in my comment. Of course, if you never learn to read and cannot experience books you are unlikely to win a Booker prize!

Also, not quite true that I NEVER tried to write a song. I made some starts but always realized they were a re-hash of stuff I had heard.
I once had most of the chords down for Lovin' Spoonful's "Daydream" but then heard it on the radio a few days later. So, did I hear it sublimilarly earlier?

So, ok, I defer to the musically gifted here. Take no notice of me OP! (I'll stick to me valves!)

Dave.
 
Slightly OT but moot perhaps?
I recall seeing the first Sony Walkman in the electrical store where I was a service engineer. "***K ME"! I exclaimed. "I could have thought of that!"

By now I would be a miwyonair. (* not what you know it's WHEN you know it!*)

Dave.
 
I recall seeing the first Sony Walkman in the electrical store where I was a service engineer. "***K ME"! I exclaimed. "I could have thought of that!"
I've long said that I invented the walkman ! In 1977 I did quite a bit of flying to and from Nigeria and from Birmingham to London and I used to lug my cassette recorder with me on my travels. I was 14 at the time and I'd never seen anyone do such a thing. When I saw a walkman in '81, I thought it was a great invention. But it was a variation on a theme that I'd gone with long before. It didn't occur to me not to do it ! I was the same with electronic windows. Winders were often stiff and I used to think "why doesn't someone make electronic ones ?" Now there are no winders ! And when the electrics go and the window can't go up, one is stuffed !
Be careful what you wish for. I used to think "I wish I could write songs." Since I wrote my first ones, I've never been able to stop !
I made some starts but always realized they were a re-hash of stuff I had heard.
I think many people that write songs will find that they may be getting very close to something that already exists in a song or piece of music. That's natural and is part of the process of learning how to write. We could do a whole thread on songs that are a rip or witty steal of an already existing song. Many professional songwriters freely admit to nicking parts from other artists. A couple of weks ago I saw Ritchie Blackmore saying that one of Deep Purple's songs came from a section by Bach and he talked also about how he cribbed the riff to "Black Night" from a Ricky Nelson song. I remember one of my earliest attempts at lyrics being driven entirely by the rhythm and melody of Purple's "Speed King" and another one you could sing to Kiss' "Strutter." Fortunately, the former died a sad, lonely, painful death and never was resurrected. It was beyond dreadful. The latter {"Don't hassle me with your sighs"} never made it to music but I actually had the lyric lying around up until not long ago. I might still have it. It was about an old flame and many years later, we bumped into each other and in the midst of a few conversations, I mentioned it. I did so with trepidation because it was anything but complimentary but she said it was very honest and good expression and she could see where I had been coming from. I was surprised. I thought some violence might be coming my way !
 
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but everyone can write and compose something, it's about if they decide they want to be doing this and putting time and effort in it, and trying to really express something from their mind.
For a very long time now, I have been of the opinion that songwriting per se is overrated. I think way too much credit is given to the writer as opposed to recognizing that the writing is merely the beginning of a process.
For the song to exist as a recording {and really, most of what we're talking about much of the time is final recordings}, there are quite a few parts to the process. Arranging is as important, if not more so, than the writing. And capturing that arrangement into something coherent and understandable and followable is just as important as the writing. Not to mention actually performing the song, perhaps the most crucial part of the process.
For a couple of decades now, we've had time to get used to the concept of the bonus track on an album and both with alternative takes and demos of songs we love, we can see just how important the arranging, performing and recording of the song is. Many demos were just done with one instrument and a voice and sound a million miles from the album or single versions that we've often grown with. It's like watching a movie. Rarely does one praise the writer. One is moved by the actors' performances. Neither does it by themselves though. Much art is actually brought to us by committee.
about the styles you can't compose, maybe you should listen to this type of song for a while, to get more familiar with the style, if you're interested with composing such styles.
I've never come across a style that I thought I couldn't compose but whatever I do end up with is never a direct copy of any particular genre, but what I call an approximation, my idiosyncratic version of it. My approximations are rather odd because they don't sound like the genre/style that may have been in my mind when I began thinking about the song. But they're more interesting that way. My stuff ends up having all kinds of influences and genres weaving in and out. When people say to me "What kind of music do you do ?" I never know what to say because a hard rocker may have an orchestral intro, one folky chorus, a jazzy bridge and a reggae outro !
 
I would say the first problem with song writing is you have a preconceived notion of what that is. I say this as over the last 20+ years of hearing various different music, (because I actually was looking) I have been amazed.

Let's go through this:
Traditional folk music - All tribes (which is the early form of folk music)
Clasical trained composers - the Mozarts and sorts
Recording music then was a form of the above
Modern music creation (I am jumping here)
To what I know, I was listening to the Cars, most of the words didn't really make much sense, but it worked
Then music created to be recorded - check this out: Soundbreaking: Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music
Then I heard a song "Pump Up The Volume " from 86' WTF! Great stuff
Then everything begins to change again

What I am hoping to say is, I think it was Grim who stated it, it is a process and a vision that you just have to undertake and see where it leads you. I find that is the most exciting way to compose. It doesn't have to be a traditional process, just get started. I would say a loose rule is, it has to have a beginning, middle and an end as it can't go on forever. But I am sure someone will break that.

The longest part of any journey is the first step, and I think that is very true in creating music.
[MENTION=10844]Grim[/MENTION], glad to see you back on the board.
 
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