The Let it Burn Blog

After the breakup of my band I took a break from playing the guitar and writing music for a couple of weeks to make sure I do not rush from one thing into another. I wanted to make sure that this is still what I wanted to do with my spare time. Fortunatelly my hunger for writing and playing music was bigger than ever before and so I happily (re-)stared working on songs.

Not being in a band anymore and also growing up as a musician and music fan my approach to songwriting was way more open minded than it used to be in the past. In fact I diminished most of my previous barriers and boundaries and tried to focus on the essentials that make up a great song, no matter what music-style or genre. Let me share some learnings I experienced lately:

1.) Take your time. I know this sounds odd but songwriting is something that will never work out if it happens in a rush. Make sure you have at least a time frame of 5 hours, mute your phone and close your email-client.

2.) Don’t aim too high. Face it, your song is most likely not gonna be the next “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Paranoid”. It might not even be a full song but only a couple of fragments in the end but that’s perfectly alright because you can and should always:

3.) Share your music with others. There’s only very few musicians who play and understand more than one instrument fluently. If you’re a guitar player the input from a real drummer or bassist is essential to get the most out of your song. Playing with others is also the only possibility to “feel” your song.

4.) Gear up. The fewer technical barriers you have, the more you can focus on the creative part. So if you need a certain software or hardware of if your instrument is giving you a hard time, go and buy some new stuff even. New gear is also a top motivator!

5.) Musical Jettison. I know you have heard this so many times before but LESS IS MORE! Keep in mind that there are other instruments, too (Vocals in the first place). Let your song breathe. In addition to that it is counterproductive in almost every genre to add too many parts and ideas to one song. Just pick the best and make sure they fall into place. Therefore also embrace the next hint:

6.) Unlearn your skills. Yes, you are a very talented musician, probably the best in town, but for writing great songs your musical skills might stand in your way. Most of the biggest hits ever written have the most pathetic riff(s) and harmonies (from a musical point of view). Usually the magic happens through the interplay of various instruments and not through the virtuosity of one.

7.) Write, write & write. The more songs you write the better they get. The routine won’t destroy your artistic creativity, it will more likely smooth the way to implement your ideas. If you happen to start picking over the bones by using old riffs for new songs at one point it’s perfectly alright.

Well, even if you internalize every single point there’s still one thing that’s more important than anything else when it comes down to writing amazing songs: Unconditional love for music. If your heart is not in it and if you’re not having fun writing and playing music you’ll never come up with one single great riff.

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Most of my knowledge concerning music and its adverse reactions I gained through “self-experiments”. Writing good music has always been a mysterious thing to me, so I was eager to find out more on this topic. Here’s my upshot:

Bands have countless individual strategies when it comes down to writing songs. There’s bands that only have one songwriter who delivers complete and finished songs, there’s bands who fight over each and every single riff, beat and note until they find a compromise and there’s other bands who have no fuckin’ clue what they’re doing, it just happens to them that a song is somehow finished at some point. Just to name a few methods.

As for my own band, The Blackout Argument, our strategy up to this day used to be to write riffs at home, bring them to practice and make them a song. Right, nothing too special so far. The crazy part is, that we usually managed to finish a complete song in a 2-hour bandpractice. “Finish” in this case means that we have no idea what our singer is going to do with the song (singers usually don’t show up at band practice, I am sure you have heard of this phenomenon) until we enter the studio to record it. To cut it short: with this method we wrote over 50 Songs in three years. Some of them were “ok”, some turned out to be “good”, about every tenth song became a real “hit” and a good amount failed. It’s always been a mystery to us how the songs COULD have turned out if we had spent more time on their creation, so here’s what we did last week:

We locked ourselfs up in a Studio far away from our hometown for one whole week to do nothing else but writing songs. The idea was to put 100% of our time, energy and focus in this one thing, in curiosity to find out how these songs would turn out. As you can imagine our initial output was immense, there’s been days where we wrote 3-4 songs, but we also took the time to revise them, change them, add vocals, change hooklines, fit in lyrics, work out a full album concept that merges all single components together and most of all we tried out all ideas that came to our minds.

You’re all waiting for the enthralling denouement now… YES, it worked out. Working with bands I know that every musician tends to favor his latest musical output over everything he did in the past but in this case I can clearly say that nothing I or anyone else I played in a band with has ever written so heartful and thought-out songs. Also I have never been this much convinced, that the final result (in this case our next album) is going to be great.

I learned from all this that a bandpractice after a stressful 9-hour working day is NOTHING compared to a timeand location-framework that allows you to blind out everything else and focus on nothing but writing music. A great artistic and emotional experience I will recommend everyone who regards sonwriting as a pain in the ass.

If you want to find out more about “The Blackout Argument - Songwriting Isolation” you can check out our studio diary at www.theblackoutargument.com.

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