WRITE FOR YOURSELF






Now this is a novel concept for some people. If you didn’t have to please anyone, and didn’t have to follow a bunch of rules, what would you write? Which genre? Which instruments? Put your wish list together and just get going. Here are a few ideas you might try if you find yourself stuck.

GO FOR IT!

Get on your favorite instrument, push the recording button, and just start to rip. Start with some scales in any spot that feels comfortable, if you can’t think what to do. Bang around and don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense or not. Push some random setting on a sequencer to get a drum track and/or bass track going to jam to first if you need one. The main thing is to just thrash out the first things that come into your head. Sure, the tape you make may be just junk, but there may be at least a good riff or two that could get used later. Hey, there’s always editing, too.

WRITE THE GREAT AMERICAN SONG

I, for one, have a great love of symphonic music. With the music notation software that’s available anymore, you can always write that great opus, one note at a time. Or, you can just take a sequencer and jam out the notes using all the fun instruments that it has available, and program them in one note at a time. Have fun adding a horn here, or a screaming guitar solo there until you have it the way you always have wanted to hear it. Make that great noise piece, that heart wrenching melody or exquisite flute solo—if you love it that much, chances are someone else will, too, but don’t even think about that. Just write the piece the way you always wanted, and make it a masterpiece, beginning to end. Tweak and tweak and tweak some more until YOU are happy.

LEARN TO PLAY THAT STYLE

If you really don’t have a clue how to write in the style you love most, get thee to thy local library, the Internet and/or the local music store. Take a class, talk to folks who do play that way online or at your local songwriter’s group, get every book you can find on the subject, and listen to lots of music in that genre. Eventually, it will begin to make sense—you will see the patterns in rhythm, keys, instrumentation and arranging. A typical exercise is to take a classic piece, and change the melody, then begin to change the arrangements until it becomes your own piece but in the same key, then even change the key. This is a bit formulaic, but it can teach you the basics of how a song like that is put together, and then you can jump from there to writing one of your own from scratch. Be brave—no one is looking—and just enjoy yourself.

The main thing you should glean from this little exercise is that sometimes all the training, all the rules just get in the way of what makes you happy as a writer. Sometimes all the theory and proper writing can make your work sound stilted and forced. Sometimes the only way to get around that is to just write what comes into your head and what your hand or voice wants to go to next, and forget what the “right” thing to do next should be. It’s small wonder that most of the biggest hits are written by “untrained” or “self-taught” musicians under the age of 30. The rest of the industry is just trying to copy that spark—why not learn to cast the light within you? It’s already there—just let it out.



Deb's Top 5 Songs Of The Day:

Brother, The Crow
Louis XIV, All The Little Pieces
Bread, Guitar Man
Seether, Truth
Foghat, Fool For The City

Local Artist Of The Day:

Waylon Crase