Songwriting

What's our songwriting process like, Sup Forums? Do you use other songs or lines as a jumping off point? Do you try to have zero outside influence?

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your*

I JUST MAKE MUSIC, IDIOT!

Vengeance will be had
Blood will be shed
My retribution cries to the ghosts laying in stead
...
Of heaven
And the rope cuts itself
The skies enveloped by the gate of time
I see my fate crawl to the light
But the platforms rise to unleash the night

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sometimes i'll be watching a movie strumming a guitar and stumble upon something which i build upon

Sometimes i'll start with a rhythm, a bass line, a drum part.Maybe i'll reverse a part in my DAW and build around that.

Sometimes i'll hit up Oblique strategies. It's always different, but never forced, which keeps me from getting writers block/frustrated

yo calm down my nigga what the fuck

This is helpful, but I mean more like lyrically.

Are you the same person who did this? Huh?

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what is any of this

rbt.asia/mu/thread/76659674/#76662083

freestyle. Nobody is listening to lyrics that deeply. Just make sure you don't mention brands and current events cause they will age your music like milk.

thing is there's no one formula you can stick to, only prompts that you learn to build upon through practice.
properly learning theory is super fucking helpful. if you don't even know what key you're in, what kinds of chords are likely to evoke the kinds of feelings you want to evoke, and where you might be able to take a progression, you're definitely going to get stuck. i'm beyond that point now i think and it feels really good, but now it's just exhausting because so much time goes into actually finishing a piece.

if you're starting with a blank canvas, i think the first thing you want to establish is major/minor/modal and picking a chord.

do what works for you man
i took this fragment of a thing i had saved as a voice memo and rerecorded and expanded it today for like 6 hours so it's structured like a complete song now
i still got a bunch of production stuff i gotta work on but like the groundwork is laid and i'm pretty happy with it

I can't properly write a song without recording the rough draft, listening to it, changing what i didn't like, re-recording, until I get the skeletal structure of the song.
But the spark always comes from something I just stumble upon, and there's a million different ways to stumble upon an idea worth expanding.

Oh, you want help with lyrics?
Keep a notebook, write a ton of poems. Fill em up. Eventually you'll have a ton of fruit to pick off the tree (as well as rotten ones) that you can cram into a song eventually.

lately i been prioritizing sound of a word over meaning. i been using a lot of internal rhyme schemes and stuff to make the vocal parts sound nice, it's just real difficult to find words that are compelling that fit the pattern. i'd recommend trying to force yourself into new lyrical structures that you wouldn't typically use so you can get a feel for how you can use different meters to bring out the best in the melody

>poems

I usually start w chords till a combination paints in my mind. I feel a vibe in chords and almost immediately I have melodies in my head. After I play with melody speed dynamic etc, I'll jam on the arrangement.
After I have a somewhat clear idea of the song I record a demo on my laptop. From there I proved to dissect add arrange and work out the nuts and bolts
Most important thing for me is the melody is this feel good vibe I feel when I listen to music. I don't know wat its called other than feeling the music.
So after this Il have some different versions of one song. I always like being able to have total control of the music, I always want to know what it makes me or others feel different ways. I have the acoustic version, a instrumental version and then a produced one maybe even remixed into a new song completely.

Lyrics is a different beast. I see good lyrics as word art, not storytelling songs, I love words that arranged in a way make us feel a way despite lyrics not making sense. I love words in a song, that if I could rearrange lyrics it has little effect on the song. Examples are prince, Radiohead, Portugal the man, Beatles, john Lennon, tool, perfect circle, mars Volta, Mac demarco, animal collective, slipknot, basically all good music IMO. Their lyrics are either under the surface and surreal or they are ironically on the face. The Beatles infamously wrote in nonsense surrealistic ways to prove a point, its all just word art. Using pronouns like you me I we she he, they make anything any word combination catch the ear.
She wears a empty Cadillac
But you, you always call me back
That's just an example of something that could or could not mean something of value, its authentically unauthentic.

Nah I have a Masters Degree in Music Composition and have to disagree. Theory and academia are useful to unispired people. I can tell myself to arrange a piece with counterpoint for a baroque feel or develop a melody by seting up a criteria like generating a tone row based off a word or something. These are great bells and whistles to have if you make vapid music for a living for TV and Commercials, but a nice melody is where it all starts or some chords or a beat that INSPIRES you to build something meaningful. You can not create meaning out of theory. You need to drop the theory academia meme. Never had someone share an moving piece of music turn to me afterards and explain it to me or tell me about thier degree. Like most shit does who cant teach or in this case wave the flag that they know something you dont do to le Theory which really I mean cmon something either sounds good or it doesnt. If my 5 year old kid likes it, its catchy. If neckbeard likes it I am weary. Music is a universal language not some inside club that you need to pass tests to hear and enjoy music. Thats all bullshit, and I have a vested interest in this bullshit but the truth is the truth.

yes. little bits and pieces of words arranged together how ever which way they end up. they don't even have to mean anything, just words, in a row.
Imagine doing that a thousand times.

imo i think music theory is important, but isn't required to write a good song. knowing which chords work well with eachother and knowing what notes belong to a key can really help someone flesh out their ideas, but at the same time if there is something that you like that is "against the rules" fuck it, go ahead and do it. but what do i know im just starting out with this shit

Knowing. I see this argument on here a lot. Your ear knows if something is dissonent or not. Theory is a language to explain why a punch in the face hurts. Theory has no place in creativity. We already know what we like and what feels good. No one says oh wait what if I put a substitue chords instead oh wow neat! They already know how that chord will sound if they are at the point the know that infortmation. Theory is really for the unkonwong to sound knowing as evertyhing I learned in music theory was obvious. Again its a lunguage sstem to allow musiciians to communicate It is not a tool to create art. We are not engineers and I see this STEMS appoach here in Mu a lot like there is a clinical way to grow in music. There isnt. A lot of people just dont have the gift.

no shit. you've got to feel what you're playing. however, you can't do much without theory either. you need it to fill the gaps and there will always be gaps.

>evertyhing I learned in music theory was obvious
not him but I strongly disagree. Secondary dominants are not obvious, orchestration is not obvious, form is not obvious, analysis of popular songs is not obvious, study of composition is not obvious, learning about the renaissance or 20th century bimodal style is not obvious.
All these things can help your songwriting greatly, even if you simply internalize them rather than sticking to them strictly. You can still write intuitively, but having this knowledge behind your intuition will give you more options.
Sounds like you learnt basic counterpoint and then decided you didn't need to rules to continue writing mediocrity.

I say this a lot to people who say theory is useless: Knowledge and creativity are separate. Knowledge gives your creativity more options.

>quirky shit isn't obvious
maybe i'm just dense but almost none of the traditional/popular stuff was obvious to me either.
i agree with your philosophy though. theory is there to give you options with which to apply your ear and your feels. people who haven't learned theory (or who've gone to school for it) seem to think it enforces rigidity but it really doesn't at all. it's just a very useful tool.

Ideally lyrics first. A good song should have the music underpin the meaning of the lyrics at all times. Trying to write lyrics to music that already exists is harder than writing music to lyrics that already exist. The lyrics give you a rhythm and a meaning to inform the songwriting.

I write songs in a variety of ways, so here's a few of my processes:

>Write lyrics
>improvise singing lyrics while playing guitar or piano - record these improvisations.
>Write down chords from improvisation, expand and/or refine the chords and word setting.
>record refined version with just voice and guitar, or create backing track in DAW
>Record parts better, polish up, add layers, etc.

>Write chord progression or backing track in DAW
>write some lyrics to fit
>improvise wordsetting while recorded chords or DAW track is playing - record the improvised singing
>repeat the recording of improvised wordsetting, refining each line until its good.
>Record the lyrics properly once the wordsetting is set in stone, polish the track