“Process” doesn’t sound like it’s something associated with the arts. Based on Hollywood biographies, we often see artists as tortured, erratic souls, and lightning rods for bolts of divine inspiration. I’ve been in many artist’s studios (the painterly and the musical sort), and they’ve all been workplaces in the truest sense of the word – places where creative people go to create, tuned to the particular artist’s creative process.
I’m sure there are disorganised, dissolute creators out there, but the artists I’ve met, spoken to, and, on occasion worked with are Grammy award winners, Royal Academicians, and recipients of gold and platinum disks. They go seeking inspiration. They work hard, and often everyday, to unlock their creativity.
I’ve no Grammy awards, or platinum disks, and I’m not a member of the RA, but before we talk about individual songs, I’ll explain how I work.
Space
I’m lucky enough to have a dedicated space for my writing and recording, and for me, that’s important. Everything I play or use is within arm’s length of my desk chair, and the most effort I need to expend to get started, is to switch on an amplifier. I find that the worst disincentives to my working are the trivial ones, such as getting myself situated. Once I’m writing or recording, I’m happy and engrossed.
Some people find a separation between their living space and their working space is a good thing. I can see this for artists with families, or for people who need to physically distance themselves from the work to decompress. Personally, I don’t want to have to get in the car, or use public transport to get to my workspace, and it’s great to just go up or down some stairs at home.
Getting started
My approach to song writing is largely based on sound. I rarely hear tunes in my head: for me it’s usually a case of trying to find a sound or a melody that I want to develop. I very consciously go and seek those, and have a few different approaches:
Playing the guitar – the guitar is the only instrument I can actually play, everything else is a hack. I write less on a guitar these days, but when I do, I generally just sit down, pick up a guitar – doesn’t matter if it’s electric or acoustic, or if it’s plugged in – and just start to make noise. I often trance out doing this, just strumming or picking for as long as I’m enjoying it, until something stands out. This can be a cluster of notes, which could be a riff or an arpeggio, or an interesting chord voicing. From there it’s a matter of finding where the song goes, what comes next. This isn’t an easy process, but once I find something interesting I feel that I need to follow the breadcrumbs.
Different guitars obviously have different sounds, so I purposely don’t always pick up the same guitar. Equally, electric guitars played through different effects point me in different directions, so I might play with distortion, echo or reverb to get things moving.
If I’m writing on guitar, and I have something that’s working, I record it. As my recording set up in my studio is always ready to go, I can record something that’s near a “keeper”, and often that original idea stays in the song until the end, and I have some of the original freshness in the final track.
Hammering away on keyboards – All of my keyboards are electronic, and I can only use them with Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) such as Reason, Ableton Live, Maschine, or Pro Tools. For me, that has a lot of advantages: I have access to a massive range of synthesizers, samplers and sampled instruments, and aids such as chord generators. I really can’t play keyboards, so anything that helps me cut to the chase and write is a massive plus.
Reason has some fantastic sampled pianos, Native Instruments have some amazing synthesizers, and I find the range of sounds usually triggers something. Of some recent tracks I’ve written…
Person Woman Man Camera TV, came about because I was playing with the Metaphysical Function sound generator and Rounds in Native Instruments’ Reaktor. The song pretty much jumped out at me from those instruments.
Alpha Sierra was me looking for a rich piano sound, settling on a wonderful sampled piano in Reason, and using a chord generator. I’ve no idea where the jazz feel came from, probably from the drum loop in Addictive Drums that seemed to work well with the song I found.
Finding a good drum loop – This is a hybrid of the above, in that I look for a drum loop that has some kind of energy that attracts me – it could be upbeat and dance oriented, or slow and trippy – and from there I’ll find something that works well on top, such as guitar chords or riffs, or piano or synths.
Inspiration from another song – I don’t look to rip off other songs, but sometimes I hear some motif, or “feel” in a song or piece of music, and decide I want to explore that approach. This doesn’t happen too often, but some examples I can think of are:
LPG – I’m quite a fan of The Verve, and was interested when they released their comeback single “Love is Noise”. I actually didn’t like the song very much, but I liked the sampled vocal motif (the kind of “ohoh ohoh ohoh” riff), and wanted to try something in that vein. It’d be hard to point at LPG and say “that’s a steal from ‘Love is Noise'”, but once I had the four note synth riff, the rest of the song followed.
Papa Bravo – This track had two distinct inspirations. I’d really liked the Radiohead single “Burn the Witch”, particularly the pizzicato strings that drove the song, but never really got around to writing anything along those lines. The kicker was watching the TV series “The Bureau”, where the incidental music often had pizzicato in it. I started playing with string samples, and this song came out.
The song goes where it wants…
As I’m following the paths I’ve talked about, I’ll often start off in one direction, and get quite a distance, then find out that the inspiration for the song might not fit anymore. This sounds counter intuitive, but sometimes something that starts out key to the track, just doesn’t fit anymore. It took me ages to get over being too attached to parts of songs, but after a few mixes that didn’t work because of my obstinacy, I learned to be much more ruthless with my writing – if the song works better without something, regardless of what it is, can it!
The right tools
By this, I clearly mean ‘the right tools for you’, but here’s what I use…
Writing
I use all DAWs mentioned above for writing, though usually not Pro Tools for the initial creation. As ‘writing’ in my world often equates with ‘sequencing’, if I’m not starting out on guitar, I’ll use one or more MIDI sequencers to get things going, they all have their individual strengths. Based on my experience:
Reason is great for its synths and samplers, and block/song mode is brilliant for structure. There are also lots of plugins and ReFills such as “Soul School” and “Disco School”
Maschine is wonderful for raw inspiration – there are tons of great drum loops, and very rich sound sources such as Reaktor and Massive
Ableton Live is really strong for less structured working, especially if you have a control surface to trigger patterns. With Live it’s really easy to try out different layers in real time until something really jumps out
Pro Tools is more my ‘tape’, or my ‘multitrack’, where I bounce the stuff I’ve been working on elsewhere to audio tracks for editing, mix and mastering. I often use several DAWs inside Pro Tools, loading them into instrument tracks
(While it’s not strictly related to songwriting, I’ll talk about my signal chain in another post)
That came out way longer than I expected, but hopefully you’ll find it useful, or even just bizarre and entertaining. The next song I start, I’ll catalog my trials and tribulations right here!
I cried when I wrote this song 