I learnt a lot about streamlining the creative process between creating my first album, which took 18 months, and making the first Vorstand Circus album, which took 6 months.  For “Sworn In…..”, I decided what the album was about thematically, decided on the instrumentation, decided roughly how long it would be and how many tracks it would have.  I then sat down and wrote the whole thing before I went anywhere near a computer to record, arrange and produce it.  I had learnt that getting absorbed in the endless possibilities presented to me by creating on a computer was what wasted most of my time on the first album.

I honed the writing process that works for me while creating “Sworn In…..”.  It has three parts.  The first part is generating material.  I do this in three different ways:

• Writing words on paper with pen which I then sit down and improvise music to.  These words are usually pretty stream-of-conscious.  I’ve started doing this on the train on the way to work to wring every available minute of creative time out of the day.
• Singing random words and melodies into my mp3 player’s voice recorder which I then transfer in to the computer and add music to.  I often do this while I’m on a long walk, reacting to the environment around me.   I used to do this with a micro cassette recorder.  The mp3 player is much faster.
•  Sitting down with keys or guitar, a microphone and my laptop and improvising.  This is how I’ve been generating most of the material for Melbourne Beauty so far.  Most of the time, I’m singing complete gibberish out of tune over a chord progression or riff I’ve just made up.

These become individual tracks with their own shorthand names in their own folders.  I’ve got 40 little folders of this stuff sitting on my hard drive as of now.  I’ll keep going until I feel like I’ve got enough, and then I’ll move onto part two of the writing process, which I refer to as the “sketch” phase.  There’ll be a post devoted to that when I get there.

 So here’s what these bits of material sound like.  I feel pretty naked and embarrassed letting these out into the public domain, but I said I was going to share everything.  Some of these snatches of improvised material will be worked on further and may eventually end up in a song; maybe the melody, maybe a lyric, maybe a chord progression, maybe a sound.  Maybe.

a_delicate_place.mp3 (808 KB)

i_can_be_your_razor.mp3 (698 KB)

laughing_in_matchbox.mp3 (1.01 MB)

six_eight.mp3 (819 KB)