Finished vs Unfinished Songs

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Whatmysay

Whatmysay

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What is your unfinished-song to finished-song ratio? Do you see them as failures, trash, part of the journey, slowly distilling to be finished or future ‘stems’ for completely new work?

I am interested to hear about other’s work flow.

It varies and to be honest I seem to write complete songs in threes – one good/great, one OK and one maybe with a Vs, Ch, riff or melody worth saving. On average over a year I think I am about 4/5 unfinished to every finished song. I usually average 7 to 10 OK to great songs a year. I write every 2 to 4 days if I am not recording.

I believe they are stems for future use – I do not think a song itself can distil for much more than a month – this may sound semantic, but I think it changes into another song – there is a focused energy for me that unite the work.

I do not believe anything is wasted and as I have got older I have become more confident that I will write a good (one I like and others might) song eventually and just keep writing, finished, unfinished, just stay in ‘flow’ – it is all part of the journey.

How do you work and what are your 'scores on the door or floor'?
 
18 to 1 ----Sadly......

That seems to be an approximate ratio for me. Perhaps it is because I write every day whether I am inspired or not. It's just my method. If I wait for inspiration then it never seems to come looking for me. When I write daily I find that once in a while inspiration will bubble up out of the mire and fall headlong into what I am doing. I relish those moments and that is what keeps me writing until the next one.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I once read in the McCartney autobiography that he and Lennon sat down to write together just over 200 times and never once came up short. That's not 'magic' or 'special'; simply amazing talent.
 
I actually love this type of discussion!!!!!

At any given time I may have 2-3 songs going through my head. Normally I have the basic chord progression, the basic melody and a few words here and there (often the words/phrase that I think will be the hook/song title).

I play around with these "unfinished songs" sometimes for a few days and sometimes for a few weeks - during which additional lyrics will come to me (hopefully) - and often the melody will develop further and perhaps I will strengthen the chord progression along the way. During this process I often sing what can only be described as non lyrics, but rather sounds and vowels, which eventually become words.

For every 2-3 songs that I start, 1-2 may never really develop. At some point I determine which song I will choose to actually develop (or rather the song chooses to coorperate with me) and I will then actually sit down in 1 or 2 actual writing sessions (with pencil and paper) and try to actually finish writing the song. I then add it to the list of songs to be recorded.

Sometimes, I will have a chord progression that I really like, but can't find words that work - so I will record the progression (I often use Band-In-A-Box with real guitar - simply to capture the muse) - and then if I have a period where I don't have any songs floating in my head I go back to that chord progression and try to revelop a song. If I do actually develop the song, I go back in and replace all the BIAB parts with real perforances.

So - I think my ratio of finished to unfinished songs is about 5 unfinished for every one finished. However, I never consider the un-finished songs a failure - simply part of the process to get to a finished song. My ratio use to be much higher (maybe 20 to 1) - but I'm now more selective on what I choose to work on.

The more I write, the better I've gotten at knowing when to keep working on a song and when to give up. As a by-produt of that - I find that my ratiio of "good" songs vs. crap has improved significantly. I use to write 20 crap songs before I wrote one good song - now I think I write about 5 crap songs to get one good song (and even my crap songs aren't all the crappy).

I've now written about 200 plus songs (written over a period of about 30 years) which maybe 10-15 of those being what I consider really "good" - I probably complete on average about 5-7 songs per year) and probably over 1,000 long forgotten snipets that were songs never to be.
 
everyone of my songs is great . . .

. . . or so I would like to think. Each time I create something I think it is wonderful. Then after a few days I listen to it and wonder what possessed me to come out with such rubbish!

I'm not sure what my ratio is. Pretty poor, I reckon. My songs tend to come out in spurts. I will have a period of intense activity where songs and ideas just bubble out, almost beyond my control. A few of these are okay. Most are junk. When I am not having a burst, the songs emerge really slowly, and I feel as if I don't have an original thought in my head.

I have heaps of half-started songs, where I have either a few lines, or half a song structure, just lying around gathering cobwebs.
 
gecko zzed said:
. . . or so I would like to think.
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Nice aside gecko

I realised as I wrote the subjectivity of great, good, ok – we could start (or return to) a whole thread about the benefit of collaboration in assessing our own work even at the embryonic stages of riffs, progressions or lyrical hooks.

I think my question is definitely framed in our own 'objective' (contridiction I know) opinions of our work.

Dave’s Beatles story is interesting – is there anyone out there who writes regularly in a team? Is the ratio of productivity better/worse then solo writers?

I would suggest solo writers have an innate mistrust of their quality because they work in isolation (at least during the process) where as a group could easily reinforce the concept that what they were writing was great – even if it was rubbish.

All that said forums like HR afford us the in between of independence as writers yet the collaborative input of ‘fellow band members’. Maybe another question to ask is has your writing improved since putting stuff up on this forum – particularly with Daves monthly challenge and feedback?

Got to think James Surowiecki Wisdom of Crowds is going on here
 
I probably complete 75+% of the songs that I start and take the effort to record in some manner. As soon as I put pencil to paper or turn on my mp3 player (with recording capabilities, ooh!) the song moves from "will be forgotten by the end of the day" to "will probably be completed...eventually."

Granted, I'm still sitting on half a dozen or so semi-complete songs at any given time, some of which I may still throw out. And for every song I take the time to write down, there's another half a dozen snippets that I discarded in my mind already.

I do view songs that I never complete as failures. However, by the time I reach the point where I know I won't complete a song, it's usually been a few years, and I'm disgusted by the thing, so I don't view it as a big loss.
 
i'm bad at finishing songs. it's why i play bass! :p

a lot of songs i'd start, i'd end up writing them into MIDIs, originally just so i wouldn't forget them. then i like to put together all the parts, and in MIDI form, my songs take on a different life. i get to like them as they are, all cheezy and videogame-sounding, and then i don't really mess with them anymore. i think out of all the MIDIs i've started, i've finished maybe 1/4 of them. i think i have around 80 tunes, though a lot of them are just the beginnings of ideas, and i've been doing it for maybe 3 or 4 years now.

in real life, i've only ever finished one song, and that was three years ago. i always get hung up on lyrics and the vocal melodies. i've been practicing at it, and i think i'm getting better, but i still don't feel too confident with my melodies. i'm never happy with words (with the exception of the one song), but i do try to write some every day.
 
spy said one said:
i'm bad at finishing songs. . . but i still don't feel too confident with my melodies. i'm never happy with words (with the exception of the one song), but i do try to write some every day.
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I think that goes back to what I said earlier about solo writers being too self critical and for better or worse missing out on the instant feedback of fellow players - as the process evolves from initial ideas.

The Dave's Monthly challenge has been the best thing on the forum since I got here - but even though many of us do big rewrites - we are presenting whole songs - it is incredible enriching but it is a consultation not a collaboration (hell we got to take it where we can get it) and I think most participants know I’m not splitting semantic hairs here.

I’ve done some stuff recently on CCMixter – a remix site and it has been my first experience of ‘stems’. The genre over there is generally rhythm oriented, though some experimentation is going on too.

I guess what I’m saying is could we create ‘stems’ (ideas, lyrical hooks, riffs, progs, ch, vs, melodies, etc) – go through our discarded idea and throw them up see if they vibe anyone else – maybe they take them away completely or maybe they just do a bit and bounce them back at you. Put bits up for feedback or inspiration from others?

I don’t know much about the value of intellectual property but if I can’t make something of it then I think it should be yours to do with as you please.

Next time the perennial thread of ‘Where do you find your ideas/inspirations?’ comes around I’d like to say ‘in the stuff other songwriters threw away?. We are all approaching the same problem – so even the trash we make is moving in a direction we all understand?

Perhaps we could start a ‘Trash and Treasure’ thread, where we just dump ‘stem’ that we have exhausted? I don’t want to stop this thread either as part of the success of sharing understands how people work and what values they hold about that work.

Thoughts?
 
trash and treasure. it's gold. let's do it. i'd love to see what some back-and-forths could do to build some songs!
 
As much as I find the concept of other writer's "stems" an interesting proposal, I suspect in real world application it would not result in a significant stockpile of material.

Almost every serious writer I know (be they a lyricist, a composer or an author) have some semi-organized method to save those little snipets of phrases or chord progressions or riffs - for potential future use.

I can not speak for all writers, but I suspect many (myself included) choose to save the best thoughts, phrases and riffs to be personally mined a different day....not to be offered to a communal tribe.
 
mikeh said:
I can not speak for all writers, but I suspect many (myself included) choose to save the best thoughts, phrases and riffs to be personally mined a different day....not to be offered to a communal tribe.
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Come on Mike let your altruism run free. I wasn't talking about stuff you think you might use or want to save for a rainy day.

I guess with the 'stems' concept you need not 'let it go' - just offer up something more embryonic for further collaboration - as opposed to offering (near) complete songs to 'critical friends'. I'm was just trying to capture another process of creativity that we might engage in.

I do not think that songwriting will ever become my main job and maybe you are already making a healthy income from writing that you do not wish to compromise and I definitely get that. Or perhaps songwriting is a very private process to you?

For me it is like golf - I could play alone against the par of the course or I could play with other players. Just trying to propose a new game?

There is a strong likelihood that if the ideas are dead for one writer they might just be dead and we'd end up offering a lot of crap to each other - still it is no different to watching TV, going to art galleries, reading or one of the many other ways people have offered up as ways to release the muse.

Perhaps the process of deciding what you share and what you keep could also be very positive?

It doesn't have a business model yet - but more and more often I am hearing on the Web (2.0) 'You are what you share!'

So I'll go through my note book tonight and post 'stems' in Trash and Treasure later. Some I'll just give up and some I'll note if I want to collaborate on further
.
 
I've had the same unfinished songs in my scone (& on tape) for 25 years. One came to fruition last month (Sewersong/Night Out) when I finally found the missing piece - a verse that didn't make me want to give up. From that moment it became a song.
I still consciously have three things carried over from the 80's waiting to see the light of day as a finished something or other.
So I'm slowly construction from brain fired bricks. It seems a little archealogical sometimes but works in an organic way - I have thought that carbon dating might be approapriate to my processing style.
Back to the original premise - 100% finished if I can just organise some chronotravel. Sorry - well, I agree with everyone - grist for the mill, whatever doesn't kill you, life long learning, pan galactic jigsaw or put another log on the fire.
 
Whatmysay,

Perhaps my post came across too negatively. What I was trying to suggest is that most writers may want to keep the best story ideas or phrases for future use - thus anything offered up may be either overly general or of limited value to other writers (although I should not be so presumptuous to think I can guess what may on not be of value).

As a tongue-in-cheek example, I'm thinking a good song storyline could be about a one legged hooker - with the lyrical hook (title) being, "Hop Along Hooker" - I have the start of a chorus - but I can't figure out where to go with it - so here is a stem for all to use.

She's a hop along hooker, a real good looker
And she only charges half
An awkward street walker, a real smooth talker
But she's missing her left calf

Damn, now that I think of it - that may be a good story line.
 
mikeh said:
She's a hop along hooker, a real good looker
And she only charges half
An awkward street walker, a real smooth talker
But she's missing her left calf
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When she gets her leg over, she just falls over
As she does 'the lady bump'
Once her legs in the door, you'll be want her more
They say 'she gives good stump'

or I see a Tarantino film where she owes money to a mob boss with one eye and get helped by a client with one arm.
 
noirengineer said:
when is a song really finished?
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Usually when its recorded or has been in my performance repertoire for a while and I've played it out. But there are no rules - it could just keep on going. Think of the way classic folk tunes are recycled and words are changed.
 
Whatmysay

Let's be co-writer's - we can send this song in to be analyzed to determine if it can be a hit! I'm gonna call BMI today and tell them to start collecting our money - then we can watch the checks flow in:D

I stand corrected - this whole stem thing may work much better than I would have anticipated:eek:

I think we should change the title from Hop Along Hooker to She Gives Good Stump - it has a much better ring to it.
 
I have a Word file for every one of my projects, one song per page. I'm currently on page 10 and 3 of the songs are complete. I'm with up-fiddler here. I haven't found inspiration in quite a while, but if I keep at it, I can some times muster up a full song that I really enjoy. Some of my songs have been sitting there for months with one or 2 verses, I'm just afraid to rush into it and ruin them. Eventually. Eventually.
 
Henry Rollins once said something about being bored with playing music because he was turning into his own cover band.

When you think about it that way, as an artist, you may never want to truly "finish" a song. Once you've finished a song, there's nowhere for it to go. But if it's forever just short of complete, you can keep working on it, adding to it, and improving it.

Following that train of thought and considering the way I record (make it up as I go along), I've probably only "finished" a dozen or so songs. The ones I have recorded will be finished when my hard drive craters and I lose the raw tracks they're built from!
 
mikeh said:
I think we should change the title from Hop Along Hooker to She Gives Good Stump - it has a much better ring to it.
Click to expand...

It could be apocryphal, but I did here of a porn mag for amputees called 'Stumpy' - if we start now perhaps we could submit it to next years 'Idol' song competition. I know Simon would love it
 
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