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”.
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.