The combination of small and simple things can create magic

In today’s track I decided to keep trying out some of the ideas I talked about in yesterday’s post on writing longer progressions by systematically using simple short progressions as presented in a blog post by Gary Ewer. I’ve also been reading a bit about contours and motifs in melodies which in the past always seemed to be too vague and simple to have any real application.

I decided to try out a motif where the rhythm of the phrase stays the same and where the contour of the melody falls in pitch. The notes themselves change on the context of the underlying chords but the rhythm and contour of each phrase is the same. I was surprised by how effective this ended up being and I think that the melody is one of the best I’ve come up with.

The basic concepts used in songwriting are pretty underwhelming on their own – when I first heard about chord inversions I was baffled as to why anything so simple could even be considered a worthy concept. After having experienced the difference that chord inversions can make, my opinion on their importance has changed forever. The same can be said about chord progressions, modes and motifs – they’re extremely simple and on their own don’t amount to anything. It’s the tasteful combination of all these tiny concepts that ends up creating something worthy of being called art. Anyway, that’s all for now.

Change one thing at a time

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.

Track 22/365 – Whatever It Takes

Apply pressure and see what breaks first.

When you apply enough pressure your weaknesses blow up like a Christmas tree. I’ve been writing a song a day for three weeks now and the pressure has made me painfully aware of my weaknesses, one in particular – I suck at writing melodies.

The obvious solution to dealing with weakness is study and practice, so I recorded a simple chord progression and tried to come up with eight different melodies back to back. I can’t say that any of the melodies turned out great but this forced me to spend time with my problem area. It was a real struggle for me to come up with melodies that didn’t sound the same and I definitely came up with melodies that normally wouldn’t occur to me.

Once I had eight melodies to choose from, I listened back and selected the ones I liked the most. One of the melodies sounded like a fun riff on its own, so I removed the pads around it. The riff ended up creating nice variety between the intro and chorus and it’s one of my favourite things that I’ve come up with during the last three weeks.

One of the hardest things to accept when you’re a beginner is that you suck at almost everything. You are not all powerful and you can’t fix all your problems at once, so start with the thing that you suck at the most. Once you suck a little bit less, apply pressure again and fix what breaks next. That’s all for now.