How do YOU write songs?

[smile_man]

I fuck around until I find something that sounds pretty in a mathy sort of way and then try and elaborate on that.

[Bellyheart]

Lately I've been writing with my looper in layers. I've started exploring that within a band. I find myself to write more efficient and creative parts when the tv is on. I've not constructed a full song on my own in awhile. I just make parts. When working in a band, if you bring a full song to the table, certain people feel like you're stepping on their toes by having it constructed and don't get the concept of being open to change.


Man...I sound bitter.

YAY MUSIC!

[Scruffie]

I have no full songs per se, but I come up with a riff while playing sometimes, then i'll record it on the dictaphone function of my MP3 player and scribble out a tab for it and then over time, i'll piece some together etc. as I come up with new little riffs.

But i'd be more productive in a band, but I can still use those little riffs/ licks as examples to start a song off with some outside inspiration to it and having them on the dictaphone means I can plug the aux in, into my MP3 player and get across my ideas... or just play them if I remember them, either way.

But the general process is fucking around while playing, i'll find something in a song that I like perhaps when playing then move it into my own realms and make it my own... normally just while sitting and watching TV... or something will just come to me and i'll work it out from there... Different states of mind can help too (that doesn't just mean high, I mean happiness, deppression... I know it sounds obvious but it's true)

[smile_man]

i feel a lot better playing when the tv is off. i also find it easier to read and understand things if I havent watched tv that day.

[Teej212]

i can only seem to get ideas on my acoustic guitar, but then i plug in and then i go from there

[Nychthemeron]

Well I have done a few youtube looper jams which are not really songs per-se, but it at least gets something out there. I really have been lacking since I usually just fuck around with random placement and tapping until something sounds decent. Still need to learn a lot more chords so I know what I'm actually doing.

[the raytownian]

Shitty improvisation over bare-bones rhythm tracks (either made on the computer, a 4-track, or my DD-20, usually).

I'm too retarded for anything else, unless it's just really sloppy free-form stuff... That's not to suggest quality improv. music doesn't require skill and musical talent most of the time, but (shitty) improvisation doesn't always!

Otherwise, it's usually just fucking around until I get a good single-power chord riff (usually one someone else has already recorded), and then I go with a simple verse-chorus-verse setup, and I usually manage to fuck that up, too.

Seriously... I am to music what Stephen Hawking is to marathon running.

[Ghost Hip]

If I come up with the music first: I'm usually just jamming by myself for fun and sometimes something strikes me as worth building upon. Once I have some riffs, I usually singing a melody/phrase over it and just sing whatever comes to mind. I figure the song will bring out whatever I feel at the moment. I keep doing this until something clicks really well with me and the song. I then sit down, go on facebook, and write out lyrics in a note. I then try my best to figure out a song order, which takes a few days of tweaking and rearranging. Although in some cases I've done this in one day, and even recorded it the same day.

If I write the lyrics first Some days I just feel like writing. These songs end up being more about lyrics obviously, so figuring out the music can be a pain. Usually if I'm not too passionate about the lyrics I'll let it be, and sometimes I'll have a random riff later on which I then go back to old unused lyrics and combine. Sometimes though the music coincidentally fits and it's usually a pretty simple four chord rock song.

My lyrics tend to follow a verse chorus verse chorus outro layout. I hardly ever end on the chorus, and always have some sort of an outro ending, which is my favorite part of any song I write.

....now how I decide to apply fuzz to a song....whoo boy that'd be a long post.

[bigchiefbc]

Most of my songs start in one of two ways:

1.) My bass, a shit-load of effects, and a cool riff, or me twiddling knobs on a synth, until I get a real nasty tone. Once that's down, then go into cubase and try to lay out a cool beat to it. Then the synths layered over the top.

[the raytownian]

I suck at lyrics so pick a fucked up concept and go from there?

I suck at lyrics pretty badly, too, haha... The most I'm capable of are quasi-political rants and social commentary, and there isn't a ton of room for metaphors in that... or I'm just not a good enough writer to apply them to these things.

Some of my best (I should say better) writing comes from cut-ups done in a variety of ways... Like blindly dropping a pencil on passages, or simply selecting ones I think sound interesting, and then rearranging them randomly (drawing from a hat or something), or just picking a way to arrange them that sounds good, and then filling in any blanks to make coherent sentences.

All the other lyrics I write are about how I hate myself, and those are easy as fuck to write, duhuhuhuh.

[eti]

Inspiration usually comes when I'm doing something else. Though I have written a lot of songs with a collaborator, which usually starts with them supplying a drum beat or some other musical idea, and that triggers me to come up with stuff. I can also come up with songs by just messing around or drawing on my backlog of unfinished song ideas.

So there's no one way to write songs.

[phantasmagorovich]

Usually I just play until I find something that seems to be worth repeating. Then I repeat and repeat until it basically plays on it's own and I can let my mind wander. Then I'll usually think about something important to me, something I had thought about before or something random. I will then start singing to my repeat music as soon as I came up with a metaphor that seems usable. Maybe I'll throw in some other part or let the music wander off again. I will usually not record this but stop playing at some point and do something else. After I concentrated on something else, continued with my day, slept or just let some time pass I will try to recreate the song. I will usually remember some verses and the chord progression. I will usually have forgotten the rhythm. (Man, I suck at rhythm. But this way I sometimes come up with stuff in strange time signatures that are cool and interesting.) From this starting point I create a more consciously constructed version of the song. I will keep on coming back to the song until I have a structure and a good handful of verses. These verses might include variations of other lyrics and rhyming pairs that I came up with while improvising. Then I will write the lyrics from what I improvised before and give the song it's final structure. Maybe I will play it to my buddy Matthes and we change the structure some more.

[01010111]

The songs I write by myself are usually ridiculously complicated looking on paper. I come up with something, chord progression, chord, melody, rhythm, sound, etc., then I figure out everything that sounds good with it and write/record it. I do this a few times, then I go back and see if I can weave them together in a song.

I assign each part a letter the first part is always part A, then if I change A later on it's A1, and when I'm finished it usually looks something like this:
AAAAABAA1A2BB1CCC1DC1C1C2D1EBAAAFF1F2F3

Last time I took a song like this to the band, I spent a half hour explaining what the symbols meant, then a half hour later I had to explain that these weren't chords, but were instead representations of parts of the song. It's a lot of "I have no idea what the fuck is going on" followed by, "that's fucking stupid why didn't you just say that."

[metalmariachi]

Well it depends on whether I come up with the lyrics or the music first.

Some lyrics just come with their own sound, I hear it and feel it.
Others are sitting in my note book waiting waiting.

If the music comes first, riff, bass line or melody, it may stay instrumental or get lyrics later.

It’s funny how words will pop into my head months later that just fit music that had no direction before.
So I guess I’m from the spontaneous eruption school.


MM

[oinkbanana]

i try to write in big blocks.
i'll force myself to sit down and write 15-20 songs in a 12-20hour sitting.
after the frist 10 songs I'm forced to imagine new composition ideas that might not really deliver
ie: awkward chord changes, awkward rhythm changes, changing lyrical themes....

songs can be written lyrics first
riff first
based on an effect
a bass line
or just a programmed beat.
but i only consider a song written once i've got a lead sheet written that i can go back to and replay the song completely from start to finish.
recording a quick demo always helps. but i try not to get carried away with recording a complete song as i'm writing it anymore.

and then i'll listen to them for a week and pillage the good stuff and piece a decent song or two from the session and then invest myself to recording and layering it.