Not many here have touched on my main form of writing, complmentory writing.
What I mean is that most have talked about writing from scratch or writing pieces. I’m talking about when you’re just writing a “track” for a song and just adding your flavor to it.
In any given 6 months I might play with 10 different groups (all friends I wish I could play more with, so don’t think it’s 10 different groups all the time, just seveal groups I play with when I get the time to). They all have songs they have written and when they have me play with them I’m not there just to play what their other guitarist plays… I’m there to add.
I’d say at least 60% of the time I’m just playing something off the cuff that wasn’t planned, but I’d say 70% of that time it’s something similar to what I played last time I played that song with them, it just isn’t written down and odds are I change some things here and there.
But with my main group we write a song at least every other month and this is my process:
Usually the vocalist/rhthm guitarist comes up with a song that has a good foundation to it. He’ll have lyrics, a melody, main chords, and a good idea of what to do with the drums. Drums are his native instrument, so he’s great and understanding song tempo, feel, dynamics and the like, so his foundations rarely get changed much.
So once I hear what he’s got, I first find what I don’t like about the song. There’s very little in life that I “hate” but I can find negative things to think about almost anything. So I find what I don’t like, or what I see as the song’s weakest point, and I try to cover it. I’ll let writer know about it, and what I’d do to correct it. Many times it’s as simple as a vocal melody that gets tiring, so I’ll write a supplimentory melody between vocal pauses so people’s ears gravitate somewhere else other than what’s being sung.
9 times out of 10 though to song is structurally fine, and I’m free to do what I want.
So I start listening in my head to what I’d want to hear if I was listening to this song being played by someone else. I trying to think about what “feels” right with the song. Many times I hear something much simpler than I’d want to play, and I know that’s the direction I need to go. Usually I have better results writing simpler riffs because they tend to communicate better. Other times I’ll write my whole section for a song and then realize I can spice it up in certain areas, and I’ll think about some good runs to play here and there.
And then there’s writing on my own from scratch. Like others here the process varies greatly. Manytimes just a nice little goove, other times I’ll hear this huge orchestrated piece in my head that I just NEED to get out. Most of the time when I hear something in my head what I end up writing isn’t nearly as good, and I just can’t find the missing notes. They just don’t exist. š
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