The Effect Of The Essence (Songwriter Lessons pt.1)
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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