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Songwriting - How Do You Challenge Yourself?

Monday, January 15, 2007

Posted by: Source Audio | Posted in: Tips and Tricks,

The other day I had listened to a recording that I had just made of an instrumental tune that I was quite happy about initially - and I could not get over the feeling of "sameness" it gave me upon completion of the listening. "How could that be?” I asked myself - I was very happy with the parts I came up with, and even though I know I played the parts well, something just wasn't connecting. So, I had to give not only this new tune, but my "musical blueprinting process" a thorough diagnosis.

It soon became apparent to me that I was subconsciously using the same arrangement formula from piece to piece - and I was therefore limiting the parts that I was creating. Without even realizing it, I had sculpted my guitar, bass and drum parts into a song-form template that I had long exhausted. Why did I automatically choose a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-out structure without thinking of an alternative?

Of course, parts need to flow into one another, but we need to challenge ourselves.

So to remedy this issue, I immediately started to form my guitar parts into an A-B-C-D form, as well as an A-B-C-B form - to which I was quite happy. The "unexpected" and "new" elements were back in my music. Similarly, do we do this with out guitar sounds?

I also made a point to use a new modeled guitar sound, which "woke up" a part that seemed dead to me. Just goes to show - that as creative people, we need to force change upon ourselves on a regular basis, especially when things get too comfortable.

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