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Old 05-18-2010, 02:35 PM   #60
Garrick
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Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Wellington
Posts: 4,622
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jens View Post
You need to let lose - let yourself go, let your mind wander...

It's hard to explain, but I think good lyrics are not thought up consciously, they kind of write themselves. Afterwards you need to edit them of course for musicality and quality control.
Nice

Quote:
Originally Posted by agilblom View Post
Professionally I'm an engineer and so I approach my creative interests with a similar analytical approach: understand the problems, the solutions, and the equipment. One important thing to remember about how our writing equipment (brain) works: The brain is a giant parallel computer. It does many things at the same time. While you consciously think of ideas, other combinations are iterated in the back of your mind.

In the long run, the better songs come together faster, but the process has been similar: I have lots of little bits laying around in my head and nothing is better than the brain and the subconscious at trying every single combination while you're paying attention to other things. When it finds a winner, you'll get that Eureka! moment. The analog to a desktop computer is that when you use the "find" function, the software has to start at the beginning and check every single piece of data for a match. Our brains can do a "find" or "match" everywhere all at once. This is why you can recognize a song you haven't heard in ten years almost instantly. This gives us an incredible creative advantage and learning to let the subconscious go do the work for you has been a huge boon for my writing.

The key for me is to write all the bad stuff too. You have to write through the crap to get to the gold. You have to be honest with yourself when you sit back and go, "Would I listen to this if it wasn't me performing it?"

I have a friend who fancies himself a short story writer but he never has the discipline to finish anything. Even though I'm quite prodigious with my creative output, he has too much pride (or not enough sense) to really talk to me about what he should do, but I tell him anyway, "Write the shitty stories about boy meets girl and you'll discover your own style in all the little side bits and details." I write songs that no one ever sees or hears just to get that one good line out which can then turn into another song that's actually decent.

As for my current process, writing lyrics and writing music have absolutely nothing to do with each other. I fiddle around with the guitar while I do other things and that's where riffs and progressions come from, and a line I'll randomly think of will suddenly strike me as fitting a particular progression, so I'll figure out how to put them together. The only part of my creative output that is 100% conscious is the engineering and production.

-Alex
cool posts, im gonna refer to this thread from time to time.
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