What's your songwriting process like from start to finish?

B

bluesunlegends

New member
How does your idea begin and how does it all wrap up? :D

For example, personally I first make some sort of instrumental using drums, base, and pads.. Then I listen and naturally a melody forms in my head...along with lyrics usually.
Then after I get an idea of where I'm going I start to shape the lyrics into something that makes sense. And then I work on the music to fit the words. And then it's all a snowball effect from there!

How do you go about it? I'd love to know! Maybe I can try different techniques from your responses!
 
I write whenever I have inspriration then file away soon or later I will be playing a melody and go those words would be good for this
Tim
 
I usually cheat from the guy sittin in front of me.
:D



Seems like most of the time lately, I come up with a title to the tune first. That usually sums up the gist of what the tune is about but in a roundabout, kinda obscure way.
Like one I'm workin on now is called TK Drool.
It's a fight/scrapping kinda song with a semi-political twist.
Right now, I'm working on bring in the ebb and flow of the music to roll with the lyrics.

Definitely a work in progress tho......
 
What's your songwriting process like from start to finish? How does your idea begin and how does it all wrap up?
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It really differs from song to song and the way I'd write instrumentals is different to the way I'd write songs with words. It also depends on whether or not it starts with a guitar chord sequence, a bass segment or just a vocal melody.
Just as an example, I did some vocals on a song today called "In the glare of a blazing sun". It's genesis goes back to 2005 with me liking that phrase. I can't remember if I made it up or if I read it somewhere but I would tell people at the time that it referred to the moon. We see the moon because it's in the glare of a blazing sun. Anyway, the drummer in the church I was with at the time was 15 or 16 and we used to talk alot. I knew his parents well before he was even born. Anyway, he was telling me he wrote poetry because we used to talk about songwriting and a couple of weeks after this particular discussion, he turned up with 4 poems, only one of which had a title {"Greed"}. I read them and they were OK but I'm not really a fan of poetry. I noticed, however, that one of them ended with the phrase "In the glare of a blazing sun", which I thought was quite enterprizing of him so I determined in my mind to put some music to the lyrics "one day".
Fast forward to the summer of 2008 and an official from the high commission or embassy of Republic of Congo or Senegal or one of the French speaking African countries asked me if I'd teach his daughter to play the bass. The daughter didn't speak English {his family lived in Paris and came to London for the summer holidays} and my French is rudimentary at best and to be honest, I didn't want to do it. But I arranged a meet anyway and she never showed and I was so relieved. I totally forgot about it all in the ensuing year but the following summer, they turned up again and the whole process was re-enacted ! Fortunately the girl's brother spoke a bit of English so between his English and my French, I said I'd only do it if she bought a bass on which she could practice, thinking she wouldn't. But she did !
So the summer of 2009 we'd meet up on tuesdays and set up in my kitchen and I'd come up with chord sequences on guitar and show her the notes she could play on any given note. To be honest, she needed practice more than anything because she wasn't bad. Her brother would generally interpret and my kids would interrupt but we got quite a bit done. I kept the chord sequences simple and basic and she'd doodle some interesting lines. None of the chord sequences I came up were particularly memorable.......except one. It so stuck in my head that when I'd dropped them off, I raced home and worked it out properly. This coincided with the time that I was first recording on a DAW so my friends that were drummers {including the kid that gave me the poetry all those years ago} and I would lay down embryonic songs. On the day my friend and I did this song, we did three others and I remember, he hit the drums so hard and wildly that one of the overhead tracks was unusable and I had to do some serious repair work. We caught the song in one take and I was playing the 12 string electro-acoustic guitar, plugged straight in, which I don't usually like. But it was only a scratch, I intended to replace it. But I so loved the feel of the guitar and drums together. It had this irrational indefinable 'something' that felt right. And as I listened back to it as I was packing the stuff away, my head began swimming with melodies. I hummed them into my dictaphone for later review because I was undecided which would be good for a vocal melody or instrument lines. But it didn't end there !
 
Pretty much what the Grim said...ie: it depends.
The most recent thing I'm working on hasn't made it to a recorder yet as I have two chord progressions that flew into my skull within a couple of days. I've played with them in different tempos, rhythms & styles one as verse the otehr as chorus & visa versa while trying to find an organic structure for a song, (deliberately not deliberate as the last couple I did were VERY similar in structure & I don't want to get in a rut).
My basses are at the repair shop so I've also been fiddling on guitar for a bass line - & that, as usual with me, ends up being as melodic as I can manage.
I've not written a set of words for this current thing but have a bit of a back catalogue of lyrics waiting to be rewritten and retro fitted to something.
other times I come up with the words & then try to find chords to suit or come up with chords & make words to suit etc etc.
All of which is OK excpet when I forget to write stuff down & it's gone never to return.
My memory is bad but I think I may have already said that.
 
The way I do it doesn't make any sense - so it wouldn't be helpful to write about, but when I get a moment I will pop back round and describe the right way to do it.
 
Generally I just start with a beat or a riff and play it/listen to it off an on for days until other bits and pieces start to come to me.

Usually early on, I have some arrangement ideas like, "I'll bring in some distorted guitars here and open up the mix wide for the chorus", or, "I'll have a breakdown after the 2nd verse with just drums and bass", or something like that.

Once I have at least one part settled from start to finish I'll record it - usually drums. The rest generally evolves out of playing along with whatever is already there over the course of days or weeks. No real logic behind it. I wait to write the lyrcis until I absolutely need them just to figure out the timing of the changes. I normally don't spend more than 30 minutes on those. Just whatever comes to mind.

Occasionally the songs are almost fully formed in my head before I even start recording, but that is pretty rare. Normally it is more of a make it up as I go along kind of thing. I don't recommend any of this to anyone...just letting you know how it goes down.
 
heatmiser said:
Generally I just start with a beat or a riff and play it/listen to it off an on for days until other bits and pieces start to come to me.

Usually early on, I have some arrangement ideas like, "I'll bring in some distorted guitars here and open up the mix wide for the chorus", or, "I'll have a breakdown after the 2nd verse with just drums and bass", or something like that.

Once I have at least one part settled from start to finish I'll record it - usually drums. The rest generally evolves out of playing along with whatever is already there over the course of days or weeks. No real logic behind it. I wait to write the lyrcis until I absolutely need them just to figure out the timing of the changes. I normally don't spend more than 30 minutes on those. Just whatever comes to mind.

Occasionally the songs are almost fully formed in my head before I even start recording, but that is pretty rare. Normally it is more of a make it up as I go along kind of thing. I don't recommend any of this to anyone...just letting you know how it goes down.
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You beat me to it. This is verbatim what I was going to post when I said I would pop back in and describe the right way to do it. Keep in mind that I no longer actually write or record songs. I am here in a strictly advice giving capacity.
 
grimtraveller said:
But it didn't end there !
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I thought that the song was moreorless finished, it was just a case of finding a melody to fit the tune and the words that my friend had written, plus a couple of instrument parts.
There are a number of songs that I tend to think alot about and this was one of them. Heatmiser said he tends to make it up as he goes along, rayc said that he tries out what he has in different styles and tempos and I echo both of these. "In the glare of a blazing sun" was quite a laid back recording, despite it's flaws and I really dug it. But as the days turned into weeks turned into months I began to get that experimental itch and I thought of it in a reggae/ska flavoured way. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it could work. But instead of having my friend do a reggae drum part, I thought I'd have no drums at all - rather, I'd have percussion mimicking the drums. I'd been loosely thinking about that for a while. So when it came time to record it, I explained to my friend what I wanted. To be honest, I don't think he really grasped it and he found it hard to think of each part as an individual. In a way, it's a compliment to the coordinated approach of drummers. I think it's ironically easier for a non drummer to think of each individual drum and drum part than it is for a drummer because it's something a drummer rarely has to face - their skill is in being able to coordinate metal, wood and plastic into a sonically cohesive whole using four limbs. But anyway, we did it. Initially I plugged in my acoustic electric 6 string as a scratch (it's the most awful sound imaginable) and my mate played a deep drum as the kick. We used a clay pot as the snare, timbales for the toms, hand cymbals as the cymbals and some metal thingy as the high hat. It was on the third overdub that we felt it wasn't working because the initial scratch had been too elaborate and though the timing between the two of us didn't matter as we followed each other, it made it hard to overdub to. So we redid it, far more basic and tight and overdubs went OK. We finished it off the next day. I felt the "bass drum" lacked volume and oomph so I overdubbed me hitting my son's space hopper {he calls it a 'sit and bounce'} and it was much better. I used some of the percussive noises from the first take even though it was scrapped and had nothing to do with the take we kept.
I had alot of fun putting the non drum drum track together. One of the things I really like about digital recording is being able to record sections of a song and then later putting everything together in it's correct sequence. Listening to this song, you'd never believe the laid back section was actually recorded first as it comes second in the song. Interestingly, I decided to keep the scratch guitars of both parts even though I'd meant to ditch both. They're both raw and sloppy but in a good way. A few months later, I put bass on both parts. The laid back part wasn't hard as ideas had come to me over the months but for the "reggae-fied" section, I had to make it up on the fly. I was deliriously tired when I did the bass. I did the second part {which was the first recorded part !} first so when it came to the reggae-esque bit, I was sooooo tired. Sometimes when my critical faculties are turned off, what I come up with is surprizing.
In wondering how to fill out the vocals I decided to combine two bits of poetry that my young friend had written. It's funny because the "Blazing sun" poem is really upbeat and positive and that goes to the laid back music. The poem that goes with the upbeat ska/reggae flavoured bit is a desparing cry for help or at least questions looking for answers. Because of where they flow in the song, it looks like a song of resolution and makes it seem ever so deep but it wasn't that way at all ! When I did the vocal, verses 5 and 7 {there's 8} had a melody that I had hummed into the dictaphone the day the initial recording took place. The other 6 verses I made up as I went, in some cases line by line. I sometimes struggle with melodies. They work in conjunction with the music but don't often stand up well on their own. At least I don't think so.
Just a bit of violin and lead guitar to put in there now.
So there you go.
That was process !
 
Grim,
Are you going to provide a link to the song. I feel the need to listen having read the story of conception, gestation & birth!
Good story by the way. You certainly aren't nailed to a desk writing on demand - I like that!
 
Grim,
Are you going to provide a link to the song. I feel the need to listen having read the story of conception, gestation & birth!
Good story by the way. You certainly aren't nailed to a desk writing on demand - I like that!
 
rayc said:
Grim,
Are you going to provide a link to the song. I feel the need to listen having read the story of conception, gestation & birth!
Good story by the way. You certainly aren't nailed to a desk writing on demand - I like that!
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Yes! I also want to listen to the song! I'm intrigued! :D
 
rayc said:
Grim,
Are you going to provide a link to the song. I feel the need to listen having read the story of conception, gestation & birth!
Good story by the way. You certainly aren't nailed to a desk writing on demand - I like that!
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rayc - too funny. I was going to post 'song please'. I don't think I've ever heard one of Grims tales...
 
chuckduffy said:
rayc - too funny. I was going to post 'song please'. I don't think I've ever heard one of Grims tales...
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I don't think GT has ever posted a song. I've prompted him once or twice myself. ;)

I usually start out with a chord progression... or a hook in the chorus... or a riff... or a title, then I work backwards from there and figure out what got the song to that point. Then I build around that, recording scratch tracks, most likely guitar and vox. Then I listen to it, puke and trash the whole idea of writing songs. Occassionally a song will get completed before I puke and I'll post it here.

That's it. Easy, huh?
 
Yeah, I will get around to posting it at some point. I'm not sure why but in my teens when I started reading interviews, I was really intrigued by people talking about their songs, what they meant, how the words and tunes came into being. The more detail, the better. I'm a real sucker for that. The other thing is that I need to learn the process of uploading songs. It's one of the projects I've set myself over the coming months.
Actually, thinking about it, I quite enjoy tales of things from genesis to birth. Probably why my bookshelves are full of biographies/autobiographies and histories.
 
I like to be able to write the lyrics and melody and play the whole song with an acoustic guitar. Then I record and produce it.
 
grimtraveller said:
Yeah, I will get around to posting it at some point. I'm not sure why but in my teens when I started reading interviews, I was really intrigued by people talking about their songs, what they meant, how the words and tunes came into being. The more detail, the better. I'm a real sucker for that. The other thing is that I need to learn the process of uploading songs. It's one of the projects I've set myself over the coming months.
Actually, thinking about it, I quite enjoy tales of things from genesis to birth. Probably why my bookshelves are full of biographies/autobiographies and histories.
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For my part - my comment meant nothing more than I had never heard one of your songs :-)
 
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