If I only had a(nother) brain…

I am sometimes asked how I do it; sometimes by people that also do it all the time, sometimes by people that do it… sometimes, or indeed sometimes by people that have never done it at all. Sometimes… I ask myself.

The ‘it’ in question is the creation of new music and I guess more specifically the complete process of creating a finished recording of said new music. My answer is of course rather dependant on who’s asking; no point getting too technically detailed with someone that is primarily a listener and, seeing as there are very many ways to make and record music, even a fellow creator may work in a way so different to my own that a general ‘broad brush’ explanation is also applicable to them. So with the above in mind I am going to try and describe my processes in a way that might enlighten… will do my best… maybe add a little glossary at the end explaining a few terms.

My first spark can come from doodling on guitar, some ‘random’ humming, or just a rhythm tapped out whilst thinking about nothing much. I would say the second two examples are probably more common now and I have learned, the hard way, to capture those ideas quickly as they are ephemeral and can be totally forgotten in an instant. As I can’t write them down as musical notation I find the only way to guarantee that all the notes, phrasings and nuances are captured properly is to get them recorded, on whatever device I can find the quickest. At that earliest stage sound quality is unimportant. Whilst there is a greater chance of me recalling something I’ve actually come up with on the guitar, it’s still best to get a rough recording of it as soon as possible!

So, with a spark of an idea safely captured the next stage is to build on it and hope that, in the doing of that building, more ideas are sparked. Invariably this does happen but it’s also at this stage the first dawnings of self doubt appear… supposing the magic doesn’t happen? The thing is I can’t force it, I have to trust that the ideas and creative thoughts will flow. However, luckily, they usually do and it’s here that I ‘start building’. The building process for me can go in various directions, depending somewhat on the original idea.

If it’s a bass line then I will want to write a drum part next most likely and then a chord progression on either keyboards or guitar.
If it’s a chord progression and rhythms from the guitar I might well (these days especially) convert that to a piano part because, although I am as a player primarily a guitarist, I like writing for other instruments a lot and am also ever more keen for my music to not be overly a guitar thing.
If it’s a melodic phrase then I will be turning to my guitar for a chord progression and probably a groove too, before moving on to bass drums and keyboards. Although my chord progressions often end up being keyboard parts, my knowledge of chords is based on my guitar experience, so generally that’s my route.

I try and imagine my band as a bunch of experienced and ‘good’ musicians but not as absolute virtuoso players, so I aim to write a backing track that fits that scenario. I keep at it till I have the whole thing up to the level that you get in a ‘real’ band once the basics are learnt and it’s been played through as an ensemble successfully, without too many clangers! The elements of the arrangement are all part of the ‘more ideas are sparked’ that I mentioned earlier, and hence that feeling of, “Will I think of anything?” persists (with me at least) throughout the process and can actually lead me into avoidance behaviour if I am not careful. All of which which leads me on to the subject of those sometimes elusive things called melodies, which can be the very worst cause of Will-I-Think-Of-Anything syndrome. To date all my stuff has been quite ‘old school’ in the sense of there being written melodies for different sections (the verses and choruses etc. if they were songs) and sometimes I do start off with a melody or two in the first place. More often though I don’t, and therefore just wait for ‘bits of tune’ to pop into my head… and ooomph, we’re back into, “Will I think of anything?” territory. However these days I must say I am much more relaxed about that and the more relaxed I am the more likely are the tunes to pop in and visit the little grey cells of Poirot legend.

So, with my band’s parts worked out, the basis of an arrangement sorted and some main melodies dreamt up, what next? Lots of listening through and lots of pondering! That’s my way. I do like to get the melodies played and recorded very early on as they are the ‘washing lines’ on which the rest of it will hang. I just bang them down, always with the idea that they are merely guides to be played properly much later on but, dear reader, I have found that they nearly always end up as the finished item. So now I have to actually believe my own “It’s just a guide part” mantra when recording them… weirdly I seem to be able to do that?
So this is the middle game (to use a chess analogy) – deciding how long the piece should be – will there be improvised solos, and on which instruments? This can be quite a Rubik’s Cube to solve.

With my current setup I play the guitars and bass guitars, plus the odd very simple piano or synthesiser part. If I have guest musicians like I did on my last album, on saxophone and trumpet, they record their performances and send them to me. Literally everything else is written by me, every note and beat, but then ‘played’ (as if from a musical score) by my studio DAW – Digital Audio Workstation – in my case an app called Cubase. I go to great (some might say crazy) lengths to impart as much of my own feel into those parts as possible and it does take a lot of care and time, plus some considerable thought and invention! One of my favourite things is to record myself playing a rhythm guitar part completely on my own, with all my little ‘human errors’ (not actually errors to my mind, it’s MUSIC!) and use that to create a ‘musical timing map’ for the app to follow, rather than it’s perfect-but-inhuman metronome clock. That guitar part quite likely won’t feature in the final mix at all.

Eventually all the writing and the recording is as done as it’s ever going to be and, in this modern age of being able to undo/redo as much as one likes, actually deciding to stop and put yet another hat on can be hard. In fact the next hat is really several hats; mix engineer, producer and mastering engineer. The first two have in fact been on and off throughout the process, tinkering away and providing a general view on the overall sound as well as the arrangement itself. Now we are into the end game and trying to make the whole tune gel together as well as possible – making it sound as if it’s somewhere and placing the instruments (players) in the stereo image – using reverberation and delay (echo) to place the sounds nearer or further away, creating an illusion of a three dimensional space.

Finally the whole tune is finished! Done! But… not dusted, no, there’s one last stage, the mastering process. This where I plant my mastering engineer hat firmly on my head and proceed to make the final mix acceptable to the modern world. We are talking about the overall perceived loudness, the dynamics (quiet to loud ratios) and the overall tonal quality (treble, middle and bass frequencies). These things are actually a lot more complex than my simple descriptions but they are very important if you want your great masterpiece 😉 to sit nicely in a playlist with who knows what before and after it, on the radio or wherever. Some people even go to the lengths of producing several mix/masters for use in different scenarios, but I haven’t done that yet. I go for a ‘middle for diddle’ approach because… hmmmm… honest answer? Well, I just can’t be arsed!

Now… thinking about non musicians that might have made it through my waffle I mean blog, there are a few musical terms that might need clarifying.
What’s a chord? Well imagine a piano keyboard; if you play more than one note at the same time, that’s a chord, usually we use three notes as a basic chord and may add a few more. Most songs you hear are built on repeated sequences of chords and these are called chord progressions. This concept can lead us onto the arrangement.
When you have a series of chord progressions (think verses and choruses and maybe ‘that middle bit’) then at its simplest that’s an arrangement. In a more advanced understanding the term arrangement can cover rather more that the ‘order of the blocks’ but that will suffice for this ‘ere waffle, no! I mean blog 🙂

Nuff said!