A Trip To The Woodshed

[MikeRobinson]

I'm on my fifth (or so...) read-through of Jimmy Webb's tour-de-force, TuneSmith (ISBN-10: 0-7868-8488-6 ... yeah, of course "I've got it right here."), and in the past couple of days I really had it hammered-in to me just what he meant by the phrase, "Woodshedding."

Jimmy defines it this way (in part...): "Woodshedding" is an old musical slang expression that means kind of working things out by trial and error -- fitting things together and discarding others as we go along."

I just experienced it for myself. I made myself do it, because I was stuck. I was working on what was to become Trading Places. I'd come up with a nice little motive (Ditty), and a contrasting punctuation or two to go with it, and a funky-bass part ... but I had no interlude and no ending. What I did have were several dozen "throw-away" (so to speak...) drafts that were all: aimless, inappropriate to the piece, and going nowhere. And this is when I realized I'd have to go to the woodshed.

For these parts of the song, I needed segments of music with specific lengths and characteristics. They had to "go from here" and "go to there," and accomplish certain purposes along the way. "Noodling around" was obviously not going to do that. I'd already wasted three days on the attempt ... coming up with stuff that might be the germ of a future song, but that wasn't doing anything at all for this one. So, understand that I was "going to the woodshed" more or less out of desperation . . .

Here's what I did, and I'd love to hear comments on it.

• I wrote a melody-line of quarter notes, leaving a few blank measures before it. (Remember: I'm using "MuseScore," a music-score writing program.) I focused on the intervals between the notes: interval and direction. I tried to notice how they looked on the page.
  
• Then, on the drum line, I dropped-in a sequence of hi-hat hits just to mark where I wanted the downbeats to fall. (Lots of copy-and-paste here.)
  
• Next, I started to literally transcribe those notes, with some rhythmic variations, fitting those to the rhythm sequence that I'd made.
  
• Then, I started trying to put to work Jimmy Webb's "chord substitution" technique, because all throughout all of this, I didn't feel anything at all "creative" coming.
  

There were no "springs of inspiration" here: I was digging a well. Dirty, smelly work, partly because I haven't done this enough (yet!) to really know what I'm doing.

I tried tricks, really for the first time:

• "'Upside-down' and/or 'backwards,'" or to say it high-falutin', "inversion" and "retrograde." The major note sequence from the opening line, turned end-for-end, turned upside-down, and both at once. I dropped each one of these into the quarter-note sequence.
  
• Since the song is called Trading Places, and it's built around a Vibraphone and a Marimba part where the two players are literally "trading places" sometimes within the same measure, I copied a line from one part, pasted it into the other, usually shifted slightly to the left or to the right, then shifted up by a third or a fourth. I fished-out all the "clams." An eighth-note sequence might become "sixteenth and dotted-eighth" in one, and "dotted-eighth in one and sixteenth" in the other, just so that the two players who are playing the same thing aren't playing it in precisely the same way. (Hamming it up, you know.)
  
• In one case, I turned all the quarter notes into half-notes for one of the overlapping phrases, and since one part was now twice as long, I copied it, pasted it in (shifted by one note so that this instrument would finish the repetition one beat after the first), and inverted it.
  

Rhythm and final-bass parts came last, and I admit that right now they're still sounding a lot like "loops" because of the cutting and pasting, and because I am neither a bassist nor a drummer.

Whew! And here's the goofy thing, the amazing-to-me thing, and the reason behind this post: after all of these shenanigans with "a musical word-processor," suddenly, it worked. I'm writing this while listening to a rather cool-sounding (if I say so myself...) piece of music that I don't entirely recognize. But I like it. And the "woodshed parts," being the interlude and the coda, are the ones I think I like the best. It sounds like two people are actually playing it.

Also: I think that the "musical word-processor" technique worked very much to my advantage ... I guess it's like the composers who wrote music by punching holes in blank player-piano rolls ... because, "I myself could never play this stuff." I don't have the chops. But... I don't need them.

Edited September 26, 2011 by MikeRobinson