So here we are. It’s time to start on album number 2.
I am currently in writing mode. It’s an exciting time, there are so many possible ways the project could go from here. For me ‘writing mode’ is something that doesn’t often involve any actual writing with a pen per-se. I should probably call it ‘noodling with riffs, sounds and patterns waiting for something cool to happen’ mode. Generally, I have a couple of techniques that seem to bear fruit and I thought it might be interesting to talk about them.
One is to switch on the Fusion and load up a grand piano, and just improvise. (When my good friend Paul Travers lived locally, I used to love sitting at his fabulous Bechstein grand and noodling, because that was even more immediate and raw) Anyway, hopefully something cool will catch my ear, a chord sequence or a melody, or something, and then I’ll work around that and build on it until something vaguely song like emerges. The trick then is to capture it, because so often I’ve done this, come up with something really nice, left it alone and then completely forgotten how it went. The audio recorder in the iPhone has turned out to be a great way of doing that – and it imports right into iTunes ready to be reviewed at a later date!
Another technique I’ve been successful with is to choose a synth or keyboard and spin through stock sounds until I find something that I think is interesting, then load up Logic and use that as a basis to play around with the sounds manipulate them into something new add some other textures or very occasionally loops, and pulling inspiration from the sounds themselves to start developing some coherent themes.
Very rarely I’ll actually come up with a lyric that I think is cool and come at the song writing the melody for that lyric.
Unlike Fantasy Bridge, where all but one track was music that I had already well developed as demos, this new album is only going to feature about 50% existing material. In fact it might be quite a bit less than that. Take ‘The Big Song’ for example. This was going to be one I had written years ago, but when I started working on it I threw away all of it except one opening stanza and one big instrumental break. So, as I start to re-develop the other tunes there is the distinct possibility of more older stuff being consigned to the archive to be replaced by re-written material. It’s all a bit of an adventure into the unknown.
I will also probably end up in a bit of a grasshopper work mode. Working on a bit of this, and a bit of that as the mood takes me, with the basic aim being to end up with a bunch of workable demos in Logic, complete with guide vocals that I can start so use to actually record the final versions of the songs. How much of that demo ends up in the final recording will very much depend. With Fantasy Bridge that varied from absolutely nothing to almost everything. At this stage in the game there are no rules.
