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The music mines
May. 14th, 2009 10:13 amWriting music is frustrating business. It's a bit like mining for precious stones or metals in that you can spend ages on it and you're just producing a lot of dirt with little value. It can be demoralising to go session after session without coming up with anything useful. It's this that led me to ending up with 40 minutes of recorded ideas for a song that should be 8 minutes long, but being still unable to finish the song.
Then eventually, you get lucky or find a source of inspiration whereupon you hit upon a rich vein, ending up with a couple of diamonds, a few amethysts, and several amusingly-shaped rocks. Last night was like that and I came up with more usable sections of music in an hour than in the previous 5 or 6 hours combined. Experience means you find good things more often and can work more effectively with them once they're found, but you're still working blind for the most part.
I remember reading an interview with Metallica around the time that their Load album was due for release, and when asked if they had written any songs that didn't make it onto the album, they answered that they never had spare material, instead just working with songs until they were good enough. Admittedly they were talking about full songs rather than riffs or chord sequences, but you can't help but feel that they ran out of good ideas and then spent 3 albums trying to polish the really bad ones instead of writing more until something good came out.
After I finished recording yesterday, I ended up browsing some web sites where electronic musicians can download sample packs and loop packs from a variety of genres. To me, these pre-recorded loops of audio seem like cheating, because someone else put in the creativity and went through that tedious mining process for you. The loops are carefully made so that you can stretch them to the tempo and key you want and seamlessly repeat them as often as required. They also tend to come in packs that are designed to all work together with next to no adjustment required. You can throw 3 or 4 such loops on top of each other for each section of a song and come out with a unique combination that nobody has heard before, but it's surely less of an accomplishment when you know that someone has meticulously shaped these components in such a way that it's hard to go wrong, and that there is very little scope for 'error' in your 'trial and error'.
But perhaps I am being idealistic and thinking of it too much in the terms of art and not enough in the terms of craft. Only rarely does the end listener care about how you wrote or recorded the music, only how good the end result sounds. Saying that it has to be hard work to be good seems to be placing effort over quality and I can't say I'm comfortable with that either.
Then eventually, you get lucky or find a source of inspiration whereupon you hit upon a rich vein, ending up with a couple of diamonds, a few amethysts, and several amusingly-shaped rocks. Last night was like that and I came up with more usable sections of music in an hour than in the previous 5 or 6 hours combined. Experience means you find good things more often and can work more effectively with them once they're found, but you're still working blind for the most part.
I remember reading an interview with Metallica around the time that their Load album was due for release, and when asked if they had written any songs that didn't make it onto the album, they answered that they never had spare material, instead just working with songs until they were good enough. Admittedly they were talking about full songs rather than riffs or chord sequences, but you can't help but feel that they ran out of good ideas and then spent 3 albums trying to polish the really bad ones instead of writing more until something good came out.
After I finished recording yesterday, I ended up browsing some web sites where electronic musicians can download sample packs and loop packs from a variety of genres. To me, these pre-recorded loops of audio seem like cheating, because someone else put in the creativity and went through that tedious mining process for you. The loops are carefully made so that you can stretch them to the tempo and key you want and seamlessly repeat them as often as required. They also tend to come in packs that are designed to all work together with next to no adjustment required. You can throw 3 or 4 such loops on top of each other for each section of a song and come out with a unique combination that nobody has heard before, but it's surely less of an accomplishment when you know that someone has meticulously shaped these components in such a way that it's hard to go wrong, and that there is very little scope for 'error' in your 'trial and error'.
But perhaps I am being idealistic and thinking of it too much in the terms of art and not enough in the terms of craft. Only rarely does the end listener care about how you wrote or recorded the music, only how good the end result sounds. Saying that it has to be hard work to be good seems to be placing effort over quality and I can't say I'm comfortable with that either.
