One of the hardest things during this challenge has been coming up with a new idea for a song every day. I’ve noticed that things like the song structure and chord progressions are near limitless in terms of how they can be turned into music. That’s why I’ve decided that from now on I’ll take the track that I wrote the previous day, change only one thing about it and use that as the starting point for the track I’ll write that day. This way I’ll get to fully explore the possibilities provided by the architectural components of the song, while making the process of songwriting a lot easier.
Today’s track was all-in-all my most successful songwriting attempt during the challenge. I was able to stick to a time limit while also adhering to proper song structure. I think that the reason for this success was that I had the song structure in place so that writing the parts had context. The drum patterns I started with were perhaps a bit too intricate and I feel that next time it would be beneficial to start with patterns that are more simple.
The first thing I did was to limit myself to an hour for writing the track. I decided to run with yesterdays walking skeleton concept so I started by coming up with three different drum patterns that could be used for the verse, chorus and bridge. Once the drum patterns were in place I tried jamming out different chord and melody combinations on the keyboard until I found something that I liked. Once the drums, chords and main melodies were in place I just filled in the bass and other instrumentation and voilá, I was done.
Check in tomorrow to find out how the experiment goes, that’s all for now.
qsma music 