Standing in front of a keyboard for an hour a day and wailing like a loon over stuff I’m making up on the spot is exactly as hard as it sounds.  The hard bit comes now.  I’ve now got about 80 bits of random riffage and singing recorded, ranging in duration from about 30 seconds to two minutes each.  And these were the doodlings I kept.  The hard bit is wading through them all and beginning to turn them into songs.  Frankly, I’ve been procrastinating.

So I call this second stage of my process the “sketch” stage.  A sketch to me is when I take one or more of the bits of material I’ve made and start stretching them out, sticking them together, adding extra bits and pummeling them into the shape of a song.  This is when most of the actual writing happens.  It is during this process, when I’m working with some riff I knocked out in the “material” stage, that it will suggest more riffs, chord progressions, moods, lyrics and all the other stuff that ends up making the song.  It’s during this part of the process when you’ll see the biggest changes from what I started with to what comes out the other end.

So here’s the first example of what happens when I take a bit of material and start working on it.  Here’s the material:

another_(material).mp3 (1.1 MB)

And here’s the first draft of a sketch.   The bit in the middle that vamps on one note is my improvised shorthand for “I’m going to write something to put here”.

another_(sketch).mp3 (4.3 MB)

As I said, this is just the first draft.  It’s my first improvised run through mapping out a structural idea for the song.  The riffs will probably stay, but many things will be added and some taken away.  Or the whole thing could end up sounding like UB40 for all I know at this stage.

So that’s how things usually go, but not always.  Here’s an example of some improvised material that came out pretty well.  So well that I added an extremely primitive drum machine part to it, which is something I’d usually only be doing after I set the whole structure of the song.  This sort of jumped from being material to sketch in one fell swoop, but it’s still only one minute long and obviously needs a lot more work.  But it very, very strongly points at where it’s going.

learnt_from_magazines.mp3 (1.1 MB)

Vocoders, for those of you not familiar, were first invented as an encryption device.  Basically, they take two audio sources and use the amplitude of one to control signal to control the amplitude of the other.  What that means in practical terms is the robot vocal sound you hear on Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger and most of their other songs.  Yes, it’s the singing synthesizer thing.

In this WTF stage of creating material, I will give anything a go.  I decided to muck around with vocoders one afternoon as I had been compulsively listening to Black Moth Super Rainbow’s lovely album Dandelion Gum.  It’s a wonderful psychedelic affair.  Every song on the album has the word “sun” or “sunshine” in it.  And every vocal part is pure vocoder, Daft Punk-stylee.

I’m not using the vocoder like that.  One thing you can do with them is mix them in with the dry vocal, so the “singing synth” effect is an addition to the vocal, not the whole vocal sound.  This has provided me with a great tool for adding harmonies to my vocals live, and giving my other hand something to do on the keyboard (see previous post).

These examples have got me playing a synth sound using an arpeggiator in my left hand, controlling the synth that feeds the vocoder with the right, all the while wailing nonsense like a drunken sailor that will one day be replaced by actual singing with lyrics.

feel_like_a_renegade.mp3 (1.6 MB)

i_am_not_a_ragdoll.mp3 (1.4 MB)

peace_in_our_time.mp3 (1.3 MB)

take_me_as_you_are.mp3 (1.2 MB)

I started playing around with arpeggiators while I was generating material for this album.  An arpeggiator is a handy function on a synthesizer, or in my case, a plug-in on a MIDI track in my computer software, that takes the output from the key or keys you’re holding down on the keyboard and either generates extra notes from them or plays the notes form the chord you’re holding in sequence.  The latter function was what the arpeggiators was designed to do.  I generally use them to create riffs from sequences of notes that I’m playing.

I started mucking about with these because of The Knife’s album Silent Shout and some of the solo work of Spencer Krug.  Both utilize the arpeggiators heavily.  Most synth-based music does. 

I’m finding them really exciting because I’m creating sounds and textures that I’d have to be a virtuoso octopus to actually play.  Plus they free up my other hand to do something else at the other end of the keyboard.

So here’s 4 examples of me in “generating material” mode, i.e. yelping incoherently out-of-tune over out-of-time keyboard playing.  I solemnly promise this all gets turned into something resembling music in the end.

another_place_for_your_eyes.mp3 (653 KB)

blackfish.mp3 (933 KB)

i_smell_cordite.mp3 (606 KB)

its_an_illusion.mp3 (943 KB)

OK, so it’s been three months since my last post.  But I have a very good excuse.  Just 6 days after that post, my wife and I bought our first home, an apartment, at an auction.  We then had a 30 day settlement, and then moved.  Then it was Christmas.  Now it’s New Year.  Throughout all of it, I kept writing, but I couldn’t find time to update this blog. 

But the important thing was I kept working.  I’ve still been using most of my lunch hours at work to generate material and work out sketches for songs.

 John Cage once said that life was a series of interruptions that are meant to be enjoyed.  But he also thought it was unethical not to answer the phone when you’re busy.  If he’d lived to the present day I’d be interested to see how he would have dealt with mobiles and 300 unread emails in his inbox, the smug, serene bastard.