The Birth of a Song: Conception

So in a previous post I - sort of - answered the question on whether it is the lyrics or the chords that comes first to me, but I thought I share my songwriting experiences in a bit more detail, as I haven't previously given much of a thought to what is undeniably a complex process.

So there I am, walking in a park, taking a shower, or typing away on my laptop at work after lunch...and the magic happens. It mostly comes in the form of a melody of only a few notes. From where, that is a true mystery. As much as I would love to call it talent or something inside me that I could take credit for, it certainly feels more like as if someone just dropped these in my lap. One minute you are watching a dog catch a ball in the park, reaching for your shower gel or autofilling a column in Excel, and boom. Out of the blue, there is the seed. And it sounds so catchy in your head, resonates with your soul and makes you reach for your phone instantly (or, in the case of me in the shower, keep humming unitl I finish and dry up). What is even more interesting is that I recently went through some old voice memos I had on my Mac from around 5-10 years ago and discovered some that were almost identical to recent recordings, or even songs I wrote and produced years later without realising. Seems as though I often end up reinventing melodies that I had recorded years ago and completely forgotten about. Intriguing isn't it? Almost as if they were so determined to come to life, they struck me again and again.

Other times, I would just sit down with a guitar and start strumming away until I find something catchy - a chord progression, a riff or a harmony, anything, that makes me think it further effortlessly and hear what the next chord, riff or melody should be. When I do this, I often try and pick a guitar that I don't usually use (one of the many positives of owning more guitars than I need lol), something that sounds fresh to my ears. I seem to find it easier to improvise and just jam on something that I am not used to; may that be the feel or the sound of the guitar. This is one of the reasons why I am so fond of the Ibanez jazz guitar I bought from Peter, as although I have been using it to record, unplugged it has a very different tone to what my ears are used to. For the same reason, I find my little Orange amp also extremely useful, as I don't really use it to perform or record, and it has its very own characteristics that cannot be 100% reproduced using a software amp modeler. I also like plugging in some basic delay and/or reverb to create a bit of atmosphere and help ideas flow easier.

When I come round to picking a voice memo up again, I try and put some melody or chords to it (whichever was missing) before re-recording a few bars one after another. What inevitably happens then is, that no two bars are the same, some mistakes creep in, but strangely enough, sometimes that's exctly what you want! A slightly different harmony here, maybe a skipped beat there can make a song so much more exciting - the latter is exactly how the beat for Reach into Your Soul came about.

For most songs however, it is only some parts I will have laid down before sitting in front of my Mac and starting to record individual tracks. 9 of 10 times I start with the drums; mostly a fairly basic one, of course, but defined enough to dictate the dynamics and the beat of the song. Then I go on and record the rhythm guitars for the parts I already figured out, before trying to come up with ideas for any parts missing, like a prechorus, for example. For any additional bits, such as solos or riffs in the verses for instance, I normally just play the existing parts on a loop and just improvise over them, trying different rhythms and harmonies until I settle with something that sits well with the existing tracks. Then onto the bass, which follows very much the same principle; loop, listen, improvise. This few hours of the whole process is probably what I love the most; hearing as the song builds up from one track to the next, however I soon realised that this has its drawbacks too. As I virtually spend just enough time practicing the individual parts so that I can get them right for the recording before jumping to the next, I often forget them in a matter of days, if not hours. In the case of a relatively simple song, or one that doesn't have half a dozen guitars strumming left to right, this is not normally an issue, however I have made demos in the past on my old laptop, that quite simply to this day I cannot figure out entirely, and without being able to access the multitracks, I have technically lost every hope of ever finding out what those great guitar harmonies or chords were. How ironic.

When the instrumentals are done, I would normally record humming vocals without any lyrics, just so that I can take a demo with me to listen to, to help think of lyrics. Sometimes just the lead vocal, but often some backing harmonies as well, which, quite often end up remaining in the final mix, so if you ever hear a line going "na-na-nah" in any of my songs, that's normally due to either me finding it just rigth to stay there or running out of words :D - just listen to the end of Reach into Your Soul or the chorus of Eyes Like the Deepest Sea. If The Offspring could get away with a chorus with the lyrics "Oh yeah" in Self Esteem, I feel no remorse.

So there I am, listening to the new demo; time to think of lyrics. That calls for another post.