Lyrics or melody - which comes first? How I started playing and producing

How did you start writing music? What comes first - lyrics or the melody? I have been asked a couple of times...

In all honesty I never really wondered about the above questions or even gave much of a thought to the process of how a song is actually created. Of course, when studying music production, I did have a module discussing the ins and outs of how hits - classic and contemporary - were written and produced, even had top producers lecturing us, but for me writing always remained sort of an organic process.

Thinking about it, none of the above questions is very easy to answer. I started playing the guitar when I was 13 - I learned classical for two years before my teacher left the music school I went to and I rather not had the teacher taking over teaching me, so I left after year 2. It was around the time I discovered and started listening to rock heavier than Queen; the likes of Nirvana, The Offspring, Carzy Town, Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. Although it was the early 2000's, back then I used to borrow albums on CDs from friends and schoolmates (who got them from the black market) and copy them onto cassettes - I am still fond of the sound characteristics of cassettes and hopefully will find a way to have an album released on tape one day! So I already new a few chords and the fundamentals of power chords and also learned to cover my favourite tunes, but I think it was the emotional charge in some of these songs that really made me want to express my feelings by the means of writing songs.

The first ever "song" I remember writing was based on an Em G D C chord progression but I never really got beyond the first chorus. It was not long afterwards however, that I started writing another song featuring a bluesy chord progression, called "Broken American Dream", that was inspired by some of the blues and rock and roll music Peter of EP guitars introduced me to. It came to me relatively quickly despite not having written much previously, it must have took around half an hour sitting on the corridor floor outside my bedroom in the our house, playing on my mum's electro-acoustic guitar. That corridor had such a nice echo! Although by time I forgot most of the lyrics, when working on "Reach into your Soul" the chord progressions sprang to my mind and as I played it over a few times, I grew to like it so much that I decided to include it on the album - and so it became "Ain't No Queen." The song is technically exactly the same as I wrote it back in the day, it's only the lyrics that are now different, although thematically it is not that far from the original.

It was during my first couple of years in high school when Peter and I were still neighbours and would often get together for a jam, and we wanted to audition to play on an annual busking festival. This required us to produce a demo CD of 4-5 songs which we recorded in his bedroom. I think he was using Soundforge, but hearing how great (to my virgin ears) multitracks sounded and how straightforward it was to record them was really what made me want to experiment with how I could create harmonies myself and build songs using multitracks.

Some of the very first songs I wrote and recorded featured only my Squier Strat via a Digitech RP80 and occasionally my Ibanez electro-acoustic, but after I managed to get a friend of mine, Holi, who used to live in the neighbourhood, to help me out with drumming on a new song I wrote called "Something about Us", I felt that I needed to find a way to create my own drum tracks. Not having access to a drumkit myself and not wanting to pester Holi all the time, I turned to samples. Thankfully, then it was rather easy to download technically anything you wanted from various sources, and I managed to download a set of drum samples - just a couple of hits on each of the main drums and cymbals. I then started assembling drum tracks by virtually copying and pasting (and multiplying) individual hits - it certainly took a good few hours if not half a day to make one this way, but despite switching to Acid Pro not long after, I carried on with this practice until I bought my Mac, Logic Pro and a midi keyboard, which only happened in 2010! Hence my demos until then feature largely the same drum sound thoughout. Strangely enough though, despite the excessive use of compression I still like the way they sound.

So what comes first - lyrics or melody? Well, to me there's no straight answer. In most cases however, it starts with a chord progression or a melody that I record as a voice memo and if I can still hear and feel the vibe in it when I listen to it again, I go on and record the instrumentals first, then the key vocal and backing vocals humming (or nah-nahing rather) before starting to write lyrics to it. In other cases I might have the lyrics first, without any melody, almost like a poem, and then try and find the chords to suit it's mood. This was the case with "Kertem Aljaban", or "Room 605", for example. I also had instances where the melody that came to me almost dictated certain words so powerfully, that they had to become the words for that part of the song, such as "Reach into your Soul", “Tainted Goodbye” or "Overdrive". In a way, this helps preserve that fragile organic nature of the creative process I treasure so much, but in other instances it can also present challenges. Since working on "Reach into your soul", I often found myself struggling to find the right lyrics to the humming vocals I recorded to some demos, such as "All I Need", as the syllabication of the vocals was so much tied to the dynacmics of the song.

I suppose one reason for this was the fear of losing said dynamics for the sake of lyrics, but again, giving yourself a bit of freedom when constructing lyrics and trying to focus on key notes and harmonies rather than restricting yourself with matching the syllable count certainly seemed to have helped so far.

On the other hand, finding the right words for lyrics can be a massive challenge in itself sometimes, but I might leave that for another post.