Drafting Songs

[john]

hey

I don't know about you but I generally approach writing songs in a variety of ways. I usually start in a structured way and use some very loose approaches as distinct stages or tasks. other times an idea and basic draft just pour out. So I thought I'd jot down what i do now...

As a structured example:

I sit down and think about what I want to write about. The intention with this is to find first and foremost the title, although in that exploration full songs sometimes appear.

Depending on the inspiration (could be a melodic snippet, a phrase, a news article etc) I use a number of techniques at this stage trying really to work out what I want to write about what message I want to communicate etc. This is a draft idea and so likely to change. I try to get into the emotional space before I write a fuller draft melody. This phase can also include listening to songs of that ilk, trying a drum loop and singing, playing guitar or another instrument, whistling, singing, staring into space. Getting in this zone helps me establish the mood of the piece. During the process I usually find riffs, rhythms, word snippets etc but they key goal is finding the melody.

Armed with the draft melody I then approach the lyrics. this does constrain the lyrics writing process, but for melody is the overwhelming winner in first engaging the listener and also the key hook in getting them to want to listen again. So I have mood and melody. I may or may not have had a fairly fixed subject matter but now I want to hone it into title, message, vehicle, hooks, structure etc.

Getting a title is for me hugely important. The process usually spawns a clearer idea of the message I want to convey. In exploring for a title I first and foremost write. Ideas, snippets inspired from melody, phrases, keywords, exploring standard themes and I may read a fair bit on related subjects.

Once I have the title the message quickly evolves. For less obvious titles I find that the title and message evolve very much at the same time.

During the search for title and message I have honed the subject matter and arrived at some possible vehicles (lyrical themes, stories etc.) an approaches (literal, metaphorical) and possibly tense or if it is to be written in the first person etc. Now comes the chorus or refrain..

Aided by any snippets of words and phrases my previous explorations have taken plus of course the melody, mood, title and message writing a working draft chorus or refrain is all the more likely.

Next come verses and a basic structure evolves. At this stage i decide if I would like a lyrical bridge, instrumental section etc. so that the whole song begins to evolve. This whole writing process, if possible is done in conjunction with preparing a draft recording. Over the years I have more and more brought the writing process into the recording studio. Unfortunately I cannot spend the time in the studio i would like so the song and it's component lyrics, melodies, rhythms etc may only exist on a dictaphone.

For all I use a structured framework, it serves to focus my attention, really allows me to concentrate on creating each part to my best abilities... but at the same time there is plenty of room for creativity, exploration and freedom as a writer. If anything I find this approach encourages creativity, breadth and emotional connection with my work and at the same time I am far more in control of the direction of my song and more likely to produce a coherent, consistent piece.

example 2:

An idea pops into my head, out comes an entire draft song. Go figure. Writing takes inspiration, but you have to be writing at the time to use that inspiration. I find if i don't use a structured approach regularly that I get less ideas of this kind that effortlessly produce a song. I also find that those songs that do come about in this way are less coherent if I am not regularly writing with a structured approach. I guess the effort and process rub off.

One thing I would say is, when drafting, when creating ideas etc... don't edit what you do. Leave that for later. In both cases i want to constrain creativity as little as i can, let ideas flow. At the end of each stage although in the structured approach I do expect something tangible to pop out so the song follows a more definite evolution. I would say that the structured approach produces songs that need less editing and overall adding drafting and editing together the structured approach i find produces a better song in a shorter time.

Although I say structured I find many of the processes become inbuilt. For example in arriving at a title the exploration process is very creative in generating possible titles, however I then apply all the typical critique type questions to decide it's suitability and ultimately to select the title. I guess other times you instantly know that a title is a good one.

Hopefully this doesn't all sound like rambling!

I'd be interested to hear how you approach writing a song draft, deal with writing block etc.

Cheers

John

[McnaughtonPark]

My process is very different indeed. I think, given the fact that I don't write music, the similarities would be small. I do, however, many times if not always, start with an idea. Inspiration is never is short supply unless I have found a nice comfortable cave to in which to dwell. That, so far, has not been the case.

For me, the lyric writing process really begins before I have picked up the pen or pencil. It begins when a thought comes out of my mouth in the form of a melody. Sometimes i get more of an idea than others. For instance, one day driving along I suddenly sang "My Angel Has Devil Envy." That's it. Nothing else came with it. There was I time when that would be enough for me to sit with and begin writing. But, I have found that by being patient, the rest will come and a lyric will eventually come about, as long as I am writing that is.

Writing when Most of the idea comes is different in that I have to stop what I'm doing and write in that moment. Too much comes to believe that I will remember all of it by the time I'm back home. I do this, I'm the guy you see pulling over suddenly, grabbing a piece of paper and pen and talking to himself. "Hey, you got a pen?" I ask strangers. I run into the drug store for a notebook. Whatever I need to do to get the words down in rough form when the inspiration hits. Over the course of forty years, I have only written a small percentage of inspired lines, not because I chose not to, but because I let the moment pass without writing.

Once this rough draft is scribbled out, I can sit down with some writing tools and get more serious. My tools are clean sheets of paper, a pencil with eraser, my mission style recliner and floor lamp (with energy saving light bulb...I like the light), rhyming dictionary is a must. I can't emphasis this enough. Take it for granted that without any help your rhymes are going to suck. No use sugar-coating it, the sooner you admit it, the sooner you will find the advantage of using a rhyming dictionary. I usually write down the key words from the rough draft on the paper and start to look them up. Next to the words I'll write some rhymes I've found. I find by the time I've done this, I've gotten excited about the ideas they bring to light.

Using a list of adjectives and adverbs is also a great way to make a lyric interesting. You can find these lists on the internet. Print them off and staple them together. There, you've just created your own reference material that will flavor your lyric with brilliant new spices. Let your eyes salivate in these words to transform common nouns and verbs into explosions of self expression. Write down exhilarating combinations. Be excited.

I find by doing this, what began as inspiration transforms into coherent, well designed and interesting expressions. I have yet to be completely satisfied with anything I've written. I do try my best with every lyric, but just haven't felt there is anything now that can't be improved upon. I move on because I believe I can't stop writing. When the inspiration hits, I want to be open to it's possibilities.

Peace

Tom

[McnaughtonPark]

I swear to Blackbeard's ghost this said Drafting Lyrics when I responded. Sorry if i misdirected the thread.

[john]

Hey MP

My fault. I set that as the title posted the thread and almost immediately changed it as the whole post was about songs.. You must have gone in to view it then! Oops.

Not to worry I think what you said is still perfectly relevant and interesting to read.

Cheers

John

[john]

Just a thought.. it must be quite interesting for you.... you write a song with a melody in mind that you have worked up on your own.... you then turn the song over to a collaborator who comes up with a completely new melody.

[McnaughtonPark]

That is something about the process that I find rewarding actually. In a weird way, I feel it validates the effort. I have an adjustment period, at first it sounds out of sorts. That part is understandable, but what happens after I hear the songs melody a few times, is that it becomes the melody I remember or relate the song to, not my original melody. I don't feel ripped off, quite the opposite.

I consider my melodies to be dummy melodies. I was once asked to sing my lyric to the melody it was written to. I did. It changed. Musicians have so many wonderful tools at their disposal, and I'd much rather write to an existing melody, or defer to the musicians melody, than use my own.

[ShawnDavid]

I focus a lot on lyrics, I was a quiet kid and when I discovered The Beatles and Dylan, it was like a door opened, and I found my voice “You mean I could spill my guts like that too?” kind of thing. So I often start with something I want to say.

I tend to let it all pour out of me at first, then go back and take the time to think about what I’m trying to say, clean up the clichés that inevitably come to the fore on the first draft and make it more structurally sound, add color/poetry to the lyrics or whatnot.

When I was in Nashville I really hated what I perceived as this ‘machine’ mentality. But it did help me to improve, to be more disciplined and gave me the tools I needed to be a better storyteller (when I’m in storyteller mode. Sometimes it’s just about illustrating emotion).

Still, I’m pretty free and loose, I’ll hum melodies while I’m driving and if something strikes me, I’ll grab the guitar when I get home and see where I can take it. I rarely sit down and say, okay here’s the model I’m going to use. It either hits or it doesn’t.

I also like to do these mad experiments just to shake things up. Lay down the drum track first, or write a song around a sign I see while I’m driving (last song I wrote started after driving by “Bates Pharmacy”). Or I’ll go find a chord I’ve never used or used rarely, see what I can do with that.

Things like that get me out of a routine. It challenges and forces me to work outside of my normal way of doing things and helps with blocks.

[sub7th]

I'd say my process is similar to yours John, with a few rearranges in the steps

Melody comes first.

For me that's one of my most important rules.

Without a melody lyrics are just a poem. They don't necessarily fit with the rest of the song and I think that comes through in the final.

You can hear when the lyrics and the melody weren't necessarily made for each other.

So I like to get a rough idea of both the verse and chorus melodies before I start coming up with lyrics.

But my melodies come to me randomly, I never try to force it.

Generally they surface in the shower but once in a while I'll hear one while I'm out walking by myself or trying to fall asleep at night.

As soon as I hear one I like I start working with it, I'll mumble words that make no sense to get a sort of rhyme scheme going in my head.

It probably sounds like someone trying to sing along with a song when they don't know the lyrics, "shiminda boodle kwammana doodle." That kinda thing.

Once I have a melody I try to identify the mood of that melody, which emotion inspired it and focus on writing real lyrics that fit into that thought process.

The subject can be as random as I like as long as it embraces the feel of the melody.

I like to think outside myself a lot and write lyrics from the perspective of someone else, be it someone I know or an imaginary figure.

Though generally it's an emotion or situation I have at least experienced myself.

After that it's a matter of tightening things up, I'm pretty random in that area which is why I think it takes me so long to get a song finished.

I'll go back over my lyrics several times to make sure they aren't cheesy or, in most cases, to abstract.

I'll also play with change-ups and structure until I feel like I've got something that has a nice flow.

I'd say the biggest difference for me is that I don't usually come up with a title until I'm almost completely finished.

I try to make titles that summarize the song in some way and I don't feel I can do that until my song is almost complete.

The last step in my process is to set the song aside for a bit and come back to it later to listen to it with a bit less bias.

I find that I can hear more mistakes that way and I'm not so caught up in the mood that I let cheesy lyrics or melodies slip by.

Nothing kills a song for me like a cliche, hell that goes for movies, art... anything.

I'll turn a movie off right away if I hear "My god, what have I done?"

It's the same for music, seems like everybody and their mom want's you to "fly to the stars" with them, thanks but I'd rather shoot myself.

[MikeRobinson]

I'm hardly an authority on doing this, but the way that I do it is with musical scores. (I use MuseScore, which is an open-source scoring package that is very good and that runs on everything.)

I work-up the song one motive at a time; one phrase. There might not be a lyric at all.

I often write in silence. When you start listening to things, the ear tends to take-over for the eye. But not when you're hand-clapping "da dum de dah di-di dum." A wrong note you can fix it later; you'll hear it soon enough.

Being, for a very long time, a computer programmer by trade and training (no formal music degree... yet), it is a very deliberative process. (But the music isn't. I'm no Philip Glass, nor do I wish to be.)

(I live in Music City, after all, which BTW is not "just country." Of course I am hoping that someday composing and arranging will segue to become "my trade...")

The process starts, literally, with looking for intervals ... things that might take a couple of measures or three ... that feel like they might go somewhere. And I write them down (on the computer), add a few blank measures and then a line-break. Then, next idea. If nothing's coming (yet), I try inverting a phrase, running it end-for-end, or both. (Result = 3 or 4 versions, all kept.)

You wind up with several pages of stuff, tagged with comments like "Yuck!" or "This has possibilities." Then you print all those pages, sit back with a highlighter pen, hit Play and just listen to everything straight through. The blank measures give you several seconds of silence in-between. And you X-out all the typos that you hear, check-mark what sounds good, indicate what doesn't.

Keep it all. Don't touch that keyboard. I don't "delete" things. Not in the (draft) score pages, and not the files themselves. The "Delete" button is verboten; the trash-can welded shut. I figure that if I spent time doing it once, I don't want to throw away my own effort. And who knows, sometimes that phrase later turns out to be "the cat's meow" ... it just came too soon. Or maybe it can still be worked-in somehow. (I do use the Mac OS/X "label" feature to help sort the dregs, and shove the trash into folders.)

I get something down, hitting Save often, then mash the (Mac OS/X) Time Machine "backup now" button.

A song builds up by sort-of stringing those building blocks together. Or at least, the bare beginnings of a song, enough to actually be "stumbling around on its own feet." It, too, has numerous drafts. (All kept.) Some of the drafts have more than one copy of a particular phrase. Alternates. There are blank measures in there, not only for expansion but also to separate each phrase from the next. To "clear your ears." The blanks will be taken out.

When you put those "blanks" in, it helps you to hear each phrase as a separate thing. This one sounds good ... that one sucks ... and the question is, "why, and what to do about it?" (Yeah, I said I was a computer programmer... I guess that I try to debug songs. )

And you get to: "I think I've got it!"

But you don't really know if you've "got it" until tomorrow. You've got to clear your ears, so to speak, so that you are listening to it fresh. Quite often you wonder what all the fuss was about just a few hours before.

It always involves a "run-through" of yesterday's file, good or bad: "listening to the 'dailies.'" (Sometimes, when your ears are clean again, something that sounded bad or just indifferent sounds better.) Depending on whether I "slept in," the run-through might be all I have time for in the morning. But some part of you mulls it over all day.

And then, with today's next-draft-copy file, I always try to do something. Maybe the stars will fall from the sky; maybe not. But I do remember that "Sparky" Schulz (Peanuts) stressed that he always spent time doodling on a note-pad, probably just the same notepad and just the same pencil, every day. And the "Tin Pan Alley" people... they did it for a living, too.

My goodness, what a ramble . . .

Edited February 7, 2010 by MikeRobinson

[john]

Hey

Yeah but a good ramble none the less. I'm not used to music score... I take it that it is similar to Sibelius? You get to hear what you write, played with different instruments?

Cheers

John

[MikeRobinson]

Yeah but a good ramble none the less. I'm not used to music score... I take it that it is similar to Sibelius? You get to hear what you write, played with different instruments?

Yeah, the website is http://www.musescore.org. I think it speaks (very well) for itself. It isn't Sibelius, nor is it Finale, but perhaps you have no need for the particular things that those programs do. To its credit, "it is what it is." And, it's solid.

(MuseScore was apparently split-off from a "formerly all-in-one" (Linux only) tool called simply, "Muse." Fortunately, this scoring component runs on Linux, Windows and Mac.)

Score-wise, it is quite full-featured. Yes, it has the ability to do sounds. It allows you to select a SoundFont file (only one per-program, not per-score) and to associate the voices in that (e.g. General MIDI) file with each of the instruments in your score. It also knows about performance features like "pizzicato strings" and dynamics, and when you call for these things, the result is quite believable. The result is a very satisfactory rendition of what the song will sound like when performed. It's got a rudimentary mixer so you can put the Violin-1's to the left and the Cellos to the right, and so on, add a little reverb and so on. Which is what you need for this. For the purposes of scoring, it is a thorough and well thought out tool.

And yet, this is strictly and unabashedly a scoring-oriented tool: it doesn't try to be anything else. You might be preparing something for a symphony or a marching band. Or, you might be preparing an XML file to be exported to some other program. Maybe you're doing a file that's going to go into Lilypond to become a thing of printed beauty.

If your objective is "a finished, computer-generated performance," then this is not a complete tool for your purposes. You'd take it as far as you want in this program, then export it out in some format, and pick it up from there. (Or, perhaps more likely, you might buy one of the "soup to nuts" programs like Logic Pro, or of course Sibelius and/or Finale. Whatever works best for your workflow.)

But it does what I want it to do, and I don't at all feel like I'm playing with "some cheap toy." Getting it for "zero dollars" is, well, a nice bonus. But I would have paid for it.

Edited February 7, 2010 by MikeRobinson