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Overworked.........have a few of those myself.
StoreTags: music, theory, composition, song writing
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I really agree about the notion that a song can become stale if worked too much in too short a time frame. Overworked.........have a few of those myself. Really this idea controls my writing too much I think.
I am the crumple it up and move along kind of person with respect to writing. I will abandon, for the time being, a track like it was last weeks style, in an instant. Start all over, again and again and again.
I use to be the other way around, and I would work a song until it was decomposing upon itself. Perhaps this was a learning phase, but you know the frustation when you realize days later perhaps that your song use to be good, and now it sucks. AWWWWW!!!!!! Hate that I do.
SO I have revolutionized to be the other way. A person who has a lot of tracks, but most of them suck. Rather than work and work a song into its own oblivion, I just start another one, and then come back maybe some day, to all the scraps that I have. The result, is a lot of scraps of this and that, some need eq, some need overhauled, remixed, instrument changes, rewritten, velocity adjustments.....etc..........
Now don't get me wrong here and think that I am one to listen to, since really all my songs do suck for the most part......but I do thank you for listening to me. | |
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09/17/06
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filarion
yeah I know the feeling. it's wierd when you jam out the rough structure for a track in an hour but keep on working on it for two weeks afterwards. i try to find the middle way though - saving daily versions of your tracks helps!
09/17/06
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daswesen
My approach at the moment is to just make a lot of songs, even if they're not quite finished, they can always be used as starter material or material for a liveset (where they'll eventually get bent into shape by playing them and playing them). Or coming back to them after maybe a few weeks and months, and with the approach "i'll just solidify the structure, and work out breaks, maybe a new counterpoint line for the melody", which is really a kind of "straightforward" approach, where I can't get burned out creatively, because it's more about the craft than the inspiration. And then after this second structure is there maybe come back later again and perfect only the sound (EQ, and effect automation curves, etc...) and then just declare it's finished. You don't have too much to think about once (the first time you just play around, plug things together, have a ball, and the second and third time you are just making adjustments really).
09/17/06
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Artsigreg
That’s how I do it too daswesen. Some people spend so much time realizing a particular piece of music, when they could be realizing many more new ideas in its place. The only problem for me becomes always having to justify when something off or not mixed %100, "oh yeah btw, that was a one or two nighter", justifying its roughness.
Perhaps, I always naturally was like that because of my A.D.D. too, I work on anything too long and I get bored, and get new ideas, ill catch myself tapping something new or whistling -hehe
I literally have thousands of songs/ideas but only 25% are completed.
09/17/06
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daswesen
25% is awesome man 
edited: Sep 17 2006
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midimacman
Sometimes the music is about performance and about the moment. In that context, much as a member of a rhythm section in a jazz band would appreciate, the real treasure to be had with music is not for the future, but for the now. Forget the aspect of recording, and appreciate music as a live art, one that happens and then ends. Playing to play, and not striving to get that perfectly polished sounds mastered to tape.
And yet recording makes it possible to recreate that magic, over and over again, and these days we may even benefit from the best of both aproaches toward music performance and audition. With the cost of recording onto cd being drastically lower than the cost that was involved in the use of analog tape, one could essentially record every note that they play, even as they play through their routine warmup scales, and tuning excercises, a musician can just let that cd-r roll and capture a very acurate digital representation of their sound.
So what I am getting at is reliant upon the principle of musical moments that happen by accident, that you don't even know are magic moments, until after they have been played, and are in the past. For example, imagine some of the great jazz musicians that have laid out one of a million routine improv solos, nothing different at the time, and gone as soon as the sound waves have ceased in their oscillation, but perhaps one here or there would have surprised the musician had they been able to listen to it again maybe even months or so down the road.
Accident, and Chance, and the moment all compose the idea that I am getting at: and while recording technology offers so much to the musical arts, it sometimes makes us forget about the time where live performance was not only the only form of musical expression, but it was the essence of the art itself. It was the magic, and the moment, and the sound that was heard only once, and perhaps that was what made it magical, or mundane, yet I am sure that the musician got goosebumps at least.
edited: Sep 17 2006
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midimacman
SO as I truly hold a passion for improvisation, and the ideas that were developed in the movement of music that is one of the United State's original styles of music, I would have to say that I have drifted more toward an approach to composition that is derivative of "make it up as you go along"........And I have spent hours and hours going through stacks of half scratched up cd's, in search of nothing specific and for most of the time realizing that most of these sonic sketches aren't worth another listen, or equalization, or remix, or perhaps a harmonic transcription, and really cringing as I listen, I do discover passages, motifs, melodies, and sometimes complete pieces of work, and every once in a while there is a diamond in the rough, and as rare as a needle in the haystack.
So you all may be aware that I have removed my music from this site, as a moment to reflect and percieve from the outside looking in ......... and because I didn't feel a positive energy streaming from the overall experience, which is really just my own personal experience, I decided to not take part in giving my attention to the overall sourness I felt.
While my music is not available for critique here on em4111, I continue to enjoy and respect em411 as a gathering of individual and unique artistic expressions of the art of music.
Music is such a small word, that really can't say enough about itself. The artistic and abstract implications that are involved
edited: Sep 17 2006
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midimacman
are beyond explanation with a word; in general art is characteristically so as it encompasses human emotion which most certainly is so varied and individualized from being to being and moment to moment, that now single word could ever cover all the meanings and explanations.
We must accept that art is abstract, and ever changing, and without a scientific set of rules and laws that are predict, govern, and classify, the creation of music, in the context here. There is not right answer, and really there isn't a true definitive nature of the study of "Music Theory" as it is called, since the ear is ever evolving in respect to its anatomical design as well as the way that humans percieve sound waves and appreciate, or "UN" appreciate music.
I challenge everyone to get away from theirselves, or at least open their minds up to other artists in a way that is focused on their first and intial opinions about other artist's songs. The reason I challenge musicians to think this way, is because they aren't hearing music purely for what it sounds like, but a true songwriter is hearing music on a higher and more appreciative level. What musician is not able to name other musicians and songwriters whom they are positively influenced by and look up to, yet the respect and appreciation is masked over by our own very opinionated personal human qualities, and we love to hear it black and white, good and bad, dissonant and consonant, even though the ear is clearly evolving away from the very music theories, and ideas that we have treasured.........
Really just treasure it all when it comes to sound, and music, if you are a true writer you will know what I am saying, and you won't just hear it.........you will taste it and smell the way that music sounds!
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