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Get a cheap little 2 or 4 track recorder, and plug the line out of whatever you are playing through into it. Now instead of concentrating on trying to write this or write that... just play. Practice your chops, play cover songs, try weird stuff. Get lost in it. Something almost always happens for me then, and when it does, I hit pause and I have it forever. Stop it after its recorded 30 seconds worth and go back and try to write a background or melody part to whatever it was.. or perhaps just stop and come back to it later... next thing you know, you fall into a chorus part, and you can now hit pause again, and have it on tape so that you never forget. You'll end up with tapes that are full of short parts that were cool that you couldnt think of anything else good to go with it. (be selective, if you write a good part, dont ruin it trying to force a crappy part in, just forget about it and mess with it again next week) Another cool thing about this is you can toss the tape to the side when its full, and listen to it in a few weeks, and things you had already forgotten about will fit perfectly into that new one you were working on earlier. Every idea is a good idea, regardless of how it sounds at the time. The weakest sounding thing might sound great with "that" melody over it, but you would never have remembered anything of it if you didnt happen to go through your tapes one night, stoned. Archive everything you write. You'll find that when you have writers block, you can go back to the parts and pieces that you saved on tape when you WEREN'T blocked, and sometimes it kickstarts the whole process again. New ideas, new arrangements, etc. That one I have in the MP3 forum (the only one I have to reference happens to be a good reference!) was written entirely like that. The chorus part I think was written 1st, and on another tape there ended up the very beginning part. I thought the beggining part sounded neat, which is why I recorded it in the 1st place, and started messing with it, and it also turned into the verse part, same notes, etc, just picked differently. I thought "man, I;d like to have a chorus that was slamming to go with that" Couldnt write a damn thing to it, tried and tried and tried. No luck. Then I was going through some old tapes again and found that chorus part. Thought "Hey, that would fit well" Tried it. It worked. I wanted it to built more prgressively, so I sat and wrote the part between the main verse and the chorus. The last 20 seconds or so is the same bassline he plays during the verses, only I do it with him, heavy. This process works.. Record everything on a cheap easy medium without quality worries, and just toss it to the side. COme back later. Much later. See what happens. Sometimes its just what the Dr ordered.
Paul