Instrumentals

grimtraveller

If only for a moment.....
Does anyone here write instrumentals or have you written instrumentals ? Did they start off deliberately as instrumentals ?
What was/is your approach to them ~ is there any particular way you go about them ?
 
With my musical collaborator, our first CD was all instrumentals, as was our seventh. That was a deliberate choice, so they were all planned to be instrumentals.

One of our approaches is to start with a feel, i.e. we hear a song or a tune and we think, "that's a cool sound, can we do something like that?" From there we try to work out the techniques that were used, then try something ourselves.
 
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The first song I wrote is an instrumental. It was 1975, I was in my first apartment, no TV and of course, no internet or streaming - just a kick ass stereo and my beat up first 6-string Epiphone acoustic. It was mid morning and I was getting high and the next thing I knew I was strumming away. The little intro came first.. just popped into my head as things were want to do in those circumstances. That's all there was and I just improvised off the end of that which flowed into the next part with absolutely no thought.

I got stuck at the lead break. I had no formal music training and knew nothing of progressions and didn't know which chord to hit next. There was no help in my head because I was stuck on the previous melody. Finally, I asked our guitar player and he suggested the next chord and after playing with it a minute or so it took off on it's own and that pretty much finished it. Later, the band filled in the rest.

In our band at the time, I played bass. On this song, I played rhythm on the other guitarist's Tele and he took my bass. When we did this recording in a home studio, I played the Tele and added an acoustic.

Wow.. this version has been copied from master 8-trk tape to stereo cassette then mangled in Audacity before arriving in mp3 which I uploaded to Soundcloud then Dropbox. The cymbals, except for the bell hits, are destroyed. Sorry about that, chief.

Dropbox - Saturday Full Band.mp3 - Simplify your life
 
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I can't say I start out with that intention. But if vocals or words don't help it, I keep it instrumental.
 
I've been writing and recording them since the early 70's. I write vocals as well but most things start off with no intentions of adding lyrics.
 
In going through stuff I've written over the years the other day, I was flabbergasted to note I'd written 41 instrumentals. Most of them came from jam sessions or warm ups, very few were actually crafted as instrumentals beforehand.
I don't know why it didn't occur to me to use a footswitch for about 18 years but in the days before I did, I got quite adept at turning the play and record buttons on with my feet so when my friends on drums and I were recording we'd have a little warm up just to get our levels and get into the right frame of mind and quite a few times, we'd hit on something and I'd record it, often without any of them being aware of this. Sometimes, they'd be cadged as the intro to the song we were actually supposed to be recording but on a number of occasions, I'd make an instrumental out of it later.
On other occasions, I'd take a harmony I came up with to a well known song or hymn, and use it as an instrumental melody and write other parts around it, usually slow it down or speed it up and put it into a different rhythm or time signature from the song I was originally singing so there'd be little chance of it being recognized because even I wouldn't recognize it by the time I'd finish with it !
 
There's a song that I have been picking around on for a year or so. Nothings been recorded, I figured eventually I would come up with some lyrics that seemed to fit. It never happened, but now I can hear it as an instrumental.

I'm not a particularly prolific songwriter, so it might be my one and only instrumental.
 
I have written only a very few instrumentals. As I think about them, they have come about through two approaches: 1) A particular "chord lick" on which I happened to "stumble on" while knocking on a guitar, bass, or keyboard; 2) a novel use of some electronic or novel recording technique. Of the second class, I recorded one song on which I featured "reverse playback" of a four-bar melody line on the lead guitar. That took a bit of doing because I had to first play that melody section "backward" on my guitar, then use an old half-track mono recorder to play the track backward so that the guitar attacks occurred at the ends of the notes and they faded in for their beginnings. In another case, I used a Motorola HEP-583 JK Flipflop to divide the pitch of my guitar by two to get a very crude likeness to the commercial devices such as the Polyphonic Octave Generator. My version was quite flaky and unreliable; but with practice, I got fairly good at playing just heavy enough to get reasonable duration on the note and its octave below. Interestingly, if I played a perfect fifth on the guitar, it generated a "resultant 32-foot" (borrowing from pipe-organ terminology) giving a pitch an octave below the lowest pitch from the system. That function was also unreliable, but it happened often enough for me to notice it. I won't try to explain here the interaction of pitches in a nonlinear system such as passing the notes through a digital flipflop, but the process is something like this: If you feed two signals at a frequency relationship of 3 to 2 into a purely digital circuit such as a flipflop, their interaction wil generate the "difference frequency" of "1." Thus if you feed 200 and 300 Htz into something like a flipflop (a pure perfect fifth is i the relationship of 3 to 2), you will also get the difference frequency of 100 Hz.

Yes, it is at times interesting what can happen when one is playing with a bit of knowledge and a junkbox full of spare parts!
 
personally i normally find a nice sound, sit & play around with chord progressions.. that inspires me for everything else:)
 
I write and listen to quite a few instrumentals. The best music in the world is instrumental, really. I like the idea of letting the listener decide what the music is about.

If done right, instrumental music can be much more engaging than music with lyrics. I love the unusual structure that many instrumentals have (more progressive.)
 
Well...everyone's opinion is valuable....and should never be discounted. I can't say that instrumental music is more...or less...moving or visual or motivating or emotional or engaging or...whatever you want to add here.

It does seem obvious, however, that if instrumental music was more of the above than music with lyrics and vocals...there would be more of it being sold and consumed. There's something to be said about what's popular....especially when the tally is not close.

Just my 2 cents worth.
 
Everything I write is instrumentals. The hard thing is to write a melody that sticks in the listeners ears. I can write guitar-centric stuff all day - music that relies on the beauty of the sound of the guitar, but melody is more difficult and melody is what makes something worth listening to.
 
Charles Manson.
Beware letting the listener decide for themselves what your lyrics or your music means ! ;)

Ultimately the listener always hears what they want to, i'm afraid.

As for the idea that music requires lyrics to connect i would put forth jazz, symphonies, ballets, soundtracks, edm, well you get the idea
 
I generally write instrumental pieces to perform a specific function in a collection of songs. A bridge between songs to set up tempo or key, or the introduction of a theme, etc. I think I've only written one or two standalone instrumentals.
 
I can't write anything. All songs are accidents while jamming. If someone told me to write during a dedicated time, i wouldn't be able to do it. Instrumentals happen when i can't think of any lyrics.
 
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