SPONTANEOUS CREATIVITY

I’ve recently been a bit bogged down in my music making. Although I have nearly two album’s worth of new material already in the can, it’s been difficult getting things finished. 

Starting a new song is easy - but somewhere after the second part has been recorded, the wall appears, and no more progress can be made, and everything I do just feels stale and formulaic. I then invariably stop and move on to a new song. Rinse and repeat. 

And then I end up in my current situation - no less than thirty unfinished songs hanging around.

While it’s OK to work this way - do a bit on one song, shelve it, do a bit more on another, stop, add something to another one, etc, it is nice to sometimes get to make a song from start to finish without having to pause.

Earlier this week that very thing happened - and in record time, too (no pun intended).

I was noodling around on the guitar in the morning while waiting for my coffee to brew, and I came up with a nice riff. I then found a second part. I quickly recorded it on my iPhone as an audio memo, then after breakfast decided to record it properly. 

First, I fired up the software and found the correct tempo for the song, adding a basic drum beat as a guide. Then I laid down the left side rhythm guitar part on my Fender Jazzmaster, using a software amp simulator, making up the structure of the song as I went along - playing the first part, then the second part, repeat, and then spontaneously coming up with a four-chord riff to finish.

After that, I used my Fender Telecaster to play exactly the same thing, but panned to the right side. I decided to go old-school on this recording - no cutting and pasting, actually playing all the way through in one take, and no later correction of timing.

Next, I picked up my Gibson SG and played heavily distorted chords on some parts, and added two brief solos, completely made up on the spur of the moment.

Then the bass - my Rickenbacker 4003 - nothing fancy, just sticking to the root notes, but I did find a nice little run for the first part of the song.

One great thing about recording guitars into the software directly means that you can change the sound after the fact, which you wouldn’t be able to do if you had recorded using a real amp. So, I could tinker around with various software emulations until I got the sounds I’d imagined.

The next task was to replace the guide beat with some ‘real’ drums. For this I used the astonishing AI drummer built into the music production software I use. This is so sophisticated that, after choosing a musical style and a particular ‘player’, it will listen to your music and can follow it, creating a tight and natural sounding beat. It’s just like having a session player drop by - you play her the song a couple of times, tell her what kind of thing you want, and she just gets on with it. Of course, it isn’t perfect, and quite a lot of tweaking has to be done manually, but I think the end results are pretty amazing - almost nobody would be able to guess it’s not a real drummer just from the sound.

Finally, I adjusted the mix, getting the levels of all the instruments balanced, and used dedicated software to master the final product.

The whole thing - from first inspiration through arranging, recording and mixing - was all done in one day - very satisfying!

It’s a deliberately simple song - short, jerky punk rock in the style of early Wire, with no vocals. Sometimes it’s nice to produce such a palate-cleanser to counter-balance the more abstract and cerebral electronic pieces I usually come up with. Anyway, give it a listen and judge for yourself…