Hey, listen, I love the randomization ambient stuff. I could listen to youtubers play with the random and Euclidian functions on the Digitone II for hours. But also, I like wind chimes. The real ones. Now 10.99 at Walmart.
Question: Do you know how to architect and orchestrate song? Before you touch a piece of gear, can you come in with an idea, and plan it out on paper. A theme, both lyrical and musical.
Do you know how to arrange each part in the spectrum? Can you program drums the way a real drummer would play? Can you write a bass line that jives with both the drummer and supports the transitions between chord progressions? Can you choose instruments in the midrange that complement each other?
Can you write good chord progressions? Do write musical themes that have tension and release? Can you write a good intro that fits the theme of the song? Can you do intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. Lyrics that fit the music? A lyrical theme thatās based on a book you read? Can you tell a story?
Or are you just pushing buttons to see what happens?
For March, my goal is to write a pop song. To start with a plan. To begin with the end in mind.
I am admittedly just a good button pusher. Sometimes I donāt even stick around to see what happens. Iāll eagerly await your pop song and dream of the possibilities. Keep us posted @BeatChef !
Same here: those questions are those I have in mind when I ādesignā a song.
They actually make me speak about alternatives or other aspects of a song
Iāve spent years and years in rock bands, more often than not without participating to the lyrics writing.
During the first lockdown, I started writing my own songs (or should I say: I started finishing them, as before that, I had only written/produced proposals for my bands).
Songwriting is definitely what interests me the most these days.
Please keep us psoted with your progress and feel free to post/ask advice and share your difficulties/victories.
Iāve written a lot of pop songs, and continue to do so. I have many thoughts about pop songwriting. Iām interested to see how this thread develops!
Hah love the wind chime point. Wind chimes work well in gardens and generative ambient music is, as Eno would say, like a garden. You walk around and explore.
These are two different paradigms of music and both can happily coexist and make a different kind of impact on different audiences.
Love well executed pop though. I find William orbitsā work especially inspiring.
Yes to all, although not only for pop, but for everything I do; andā¦
nope, 90% of the times. I find pushing buttons or being a train conductor for a bunch machines that do shit on their own pretty boring and my brain would hate me for letting it rot this way.
Obviously you has to be careful not to praise yourself too much with questions like theseā¦ but āpopā is the type of writing Iām most comfortable with. Coming from a band background Iāve brought some elements of pop writing through into making electronic music, especially because pop is such a big influence across guitar bands of all stripes.
I donāt start a session with an idea or a song pre-written. And I donāt know many musicians who do - for the most part the one thing that links the two different types of writing is the search for āsomethingā just sitting there trying things until something pops up that works and then latching on to it. I like the general idea that songs are discovered rather than written.
Chord progressions and putting a song together with a verse and chorus - yeah that comes from playing an acoustic and not having anything else to work with. I definitley feel comfortable with that way of working, though I like the sonic freedom in the way a lot of electronic music is made. The fact sometimes itās more of an A/B section feels quite liberating. The computer helps me get away from always doing the same thing, where we all know the story of familiar chords just happening to make their way into all your stuff. The acoustic test is a good one though. The best pop tunes tend to stand up to being played on a guitar/piano, so if it works there then itāll work anywhere. Funnily enough for melody development, I do this by loading a piano sound to start any song on the computer. They rarely end up sounding like that, but starting there is a good link to the songwriting I started out with.
That said, pushing buttons to see what happens is one of the cooler aspects of electronic music, and so I like to combine the techniques.
So do I. It happened to me to be working a particular block of one of my bandsā song and all of a sudden a riff emerged. Or some mistake took a special meaning, a special sound. It kind of became something new and relevant, independant from the other thing. I started a couple of songs like that.
I often do something similar. Iām primarily a keyboard player and I tend to write songs I can sing along (which is kind of new to meā¦). I often end with some a simple piano part. However, as Iāve been proposing those songs to my main band for years, Iāve always developed the first idea into an arranged version for the specific line-up. So sometimes, the piano initial part would be sort of āsharedā between the guitar, bass and piano parts.
I like the fact a song can have two personalities: one with just a piano or guitar -as you said- and another one with the full band.
One of the things I love about pop songs is that they havenāt changed fundamentally for 100 years. Of course the sounds change, different instruments and different rhythms and different production styles come in and out through the decades, as do preferences for more or less complex harmonies, but the building blocks remain the same. You can take a simple 50s pop song, or something more spicy like a Radiohead song, or anything in-between, and decompose them into their fundamentals - theyāre pop songs at heart, with a chord progression and a vocal melody - and they are all part of the same family once you strip away the production. I enjoy figuring out really old songs sometimes, 20s/30s stuff ā thereās nothing in the musical (rather than production/instrumentation) side of it that wouldnāt fit in modern pop.
The most fruitful songwriting method for me: at the keyboard, left hand playing simple bass, right hand fooling around in the āvocalā range in the middle of the keyboard, searching for those movements that combine familiarity and surprise in just the right amount.
