In my head I can craft a really awesome guitar riff....fillls, melody...it's awesome....but I can't transfer it well! What do I have to do to get my ideas to come through my fingers! Ray Charles was great at it!
spend some time practising intevals and things... im still at school at the moment, and as part of my A level exams i have to listen to a two part melody and write down either the top part, the bottom part, or both parts, and the only thing were told is the first note and perhaps, if the melodys four bars long, the first note of the second bar... oh yeah, and the key.
its the type of thing you can practise with a friend, and every time you do it you'll get better... and its amazing how easy it becomes to work out the notes of a riff or melody or whatever.
it also might be helpful to know that when we think musically we often automatically jump to notes like the fourth and fifth and relative minors of the key (the minor 6th of the key.) and a lot of songs and riffs are built up around these chords.
And until you have the ability a good idea is to get a recorder, and hum out the ideas with your mouth, i have done this beofre on an 8track i would make all the insruments with my mouth, like bass and guitar, and drums, then sing, sounds insane in a mix.
either way it keeps your ideas down, because its hard to write down the sound of somthing.
And until you have the ability a good idea is to get a recorder, and hum out the ideas with your mouth, i have done this beofre on an 8track i would make all the insruments with my mouth, like bass and guitar, and drums, then sing, sounds insane in a mix.
either way it keeps your ideas down, because its hard to write down the sound of somthing.
And thus, "Don't Worry, Be Happy" was born, and drove us nuts after that.
It's a good suggestion though, because you can sit down with your instrument after the fact and work on the chords and what-not to fill it in later....