What is your writing process, and how do you capture ideas?

Cirrus

I use the record function on my phone when I come up with an idea. From there to the complete song could be through a number of routes - jamming the idea with my band, sitting at home with an acoustic guitar and notepad, or recording a full arrangement at my band's practice studio either through a PC or more recently the multitrack recorder on my ipad (along with an Alesis io dock!).

It just depends. I play drums and bass as well as guitar and I can sing even if my voice isn't brilliant so a lot of the time as soon as I have an idea, I already have an instinctual idea for a drum beat and bass part. But I keep it as just little clips and notes/ written lyrics until the song is more sure of itself before I try to actually record it. If you record a "demo" too soon it's like throwing too much wood onto a fire - the spark gets put out. I actually find the initial demo recording process to be an incredibly fertile time of discovery but its a process you can only do once, so the basic song has to be robust by that point.

PolarityMan

monquixote said:

Though I don't write much anymore I spent about 10 years playing in original material bands. 

I think the absolute key is speed of getting ideas down while keeping the "creative brain" without engaging the "engineer brain". 

Computers and multi FX are idea poison. I'd always have a brilliant idea and then start trying to fire the PC up and set the interface up etc by which time it had gone.

I couldn't disagree with this more. I basically started using MS-DOS dirven trackers to make songs within a few months of learning to play so perhaps it's just what you're used to.

Personally I tend to write at least the drum part and the guitar part together. I find writing with the whole band...at least in this current band...quite inefficient. Mostly as soon as I write a riff I'll have certain elements on the drums that are integral to the riff and communicating what I want to our drummer and persuading him to try it etc is a bit of a ballache.

Our jams all ten to start out ok for 8-16 bars but then everyone just gets busier and busier until the sound as a while is pretty impenetrable. The problem is when you're repeating the same thing over and over again it's easy for people to convince themselves that it sounds alright when it really doesn't. When we do write as a whole band I spend most of the time with a Quality Control type hat on working on the drums and bass to really enjoy the process. And getting macro arrangements in is far harder than it should be...its much easier if i just demo it and then take it from there.

By contrast working with the other guitarist / singer only is really smooth so this may well depend alot on how good writers the rest of your band are.

monquixote

PolarityMan said:

Personally I tend to write at least the drum part and the guitar part together. I find writing with the whole band...at least in this current band...quite inefficient. Mostly as soon as I write a riff I'll have certain elements on the drums that are integral to the riff and communicating what I want to our drummer and persuading him to try it etc is a bit of a ballache.

Our jams all ten to start out ok for 8-16 bars but then everyone just gets busier and busier until the sound as a while is pretty impenetrable. The problem is when you're repeating the same thing over and over again it's easy for people to convince themselves that it sounds alright when it really doesn't. When we do write as a whole band I spend most of the time with a Quality Control type hat on working on the drums and bass to really enjoy the process. And getting macro arrangements in is far harder than it should be...its much easier if i just demo it and then take it from there.

By contrast working with the other guitarist / singer only is really smooth so this may well depend alot on how good writers the rest of your band are.

Yeah, this probably says more about your drummer than the process. 

I've played in bands where you could play a riff twice say "I want emphasis on this note/beat" and the perfect drum beat would ensue. 

You can't write effectively with people who don't have really good ears.

PolarityMan

Anyway sidetracked a bit there. I basically have 2 main writing processes.

I'd normally produce something like this. This would take about 4-5 hours starting from nothing if I'm feeling inspired. If I'm not getting anywhere after an hour or so I'll usually either file the idea or give up.

In this case I started from the intro writing the drums and stabs for that before moving on to the other riffs. I pay particular attention to the drums and often refine the guitar riff to fit the drum parts and vice versa. In this example I liked the fill at the end of the thrashier chorus riff so changed the guitar to fit in for example (0:31)

 For this one I put the bass in at the end because it didn't feel like the bass was a principle compositional element for this style. On other songs I would usually write the part first that has the greatest compositional focus.

I also pay attention to where I think vocals will go in the final song when making arrangements. Occasionally what I think of as a verse will become a chorus etc after the vocals are written but I'm thinking about final structure by this point.

For this one the end chorus is actually the original idea I had for the main choruses but I decided it was a bit too cheesy to use so often in the song so instead I used to to make it feel like there is an energy / tempo change at the end of the song.

At this point I'll send it round the other guys to see if they like it. We might also start jamming it out in rehearsal.If we decide it's a keeper then typically the singer will produce a demo:

Singing kicks in at 0:54.

By this time we'll start playing it in rehearsal in earnest and stick it in our sets. For example:

You'll notice at this point that the fill in the verse has acquire some pinch harmonics as sort of an effect and the bass drum rhythm in the second half of the chorus has been changed to what I should have written int eh first place but was too lazy to and jsut cut and pasted  but the song is pretty much as demo'd including things like the drum fills from the demo.

At some point the song will then make it onto a recording. In the studio we often notice small details like when 2 guitars are playing slightly different rhythms. We'll also often work on ideas for new vocal harmonies at this point or refine existing harmonies and after it's mixed it sounds like this (sneak peak of new album):

Any changes we made in the recording process will also filter back to our live versions of course. Biggest change here other than better quality recording and performances was the chorus vocals (1:55ish)

Oh yeah, forgot the little wah'd texture parts in the last 2 choruses were added during live playing / rehearsing.

PolarityMan

monquixote;383369" said:

PolarityMan said:Personally I tend to write at least the drum part and the guitar part together. I find writing with the whole band...at least in this current band...quite inefficient. Mostly as soon as I write a riff I'll have certain elements on the drums that are integral to the riff and communicating what I want to our drummer and persuading him to try it etc is a bit of a ballache.

Our jams all ten to start out ok for 8-16 bars but then everyone just gets busier and busier until the sound as a while is pretty impenetrable. The problem is when you're repeating the same thing over and over again it's easy for people to convince themselves that it sounds alright when it really doesn't. When we do write as a whole band I spend most of the time with a Quality Control type hat on working on the drums and bass to really enjoy the process. And getting macro arrangements in is far harder than it should be...its much easier if i just demo it and then take it from there.

By contrast working with the other guitarist / singer only is really smooth so this may well depend alot on how good writers the rest of your band are.





Yeah, this probably says more about your drummer than the process. 

I've played in bands where you could play a riff twice say "I want emphasis on this note/beat" and the perfect drum beat would ensue. 

You can't write effectively with people who don't have really good ears.

Just by way of contrast, this song was a full band effort:

I'm immensely proud of this song but getting it from a handful of guitar riffs and that intro drum pattern into a song was a massive pain in the ass. Took about 3 practices. In the case the main issue was the bass line as the bassist was really committed to playing something high up and kinda lead guitar sounding rather than something with groove.

The break down part took orders of magnitude longer to get the drum part sorted for than it should have actually (6:45)

ThePrettyDamned

I have two ways of writing really - one for funk, one for rock.

Funk: I riff on *one* note.  Or none, sometimes.  It's more important to get a great rhythm.  I'll have a metronome on.  

Once I've locked into something, I'll work out whether it should be single notes, one note altogether, smaller chords (typically 2 or 3 string), then work from there. 

For rock, I don't bother with a metronome.  I just jam - I find writing heavy rock pretty easy to be honest, as it's quite a straightforward thing to do. 

I don't *choose* to use interesting time sigs, but if I have an idea that happens to be, I often need to slow right down, then use a metronome until I've locked into it.  

I don't often record as my laptop has died, so I might need to look into one of those Zoom recorder idea thingies - seems to give an acceptable in the room sound.

thecolourbox

For the "i need to record this idea right now" moments, ive had good results with one of those Line 6 backtrack thingies. As they record a "dry" signal they also allow you to put the raw track through any combination of amps you like on amplitube et al when you go through them on your computer, which satisfies that tweaking urge as well!