Capturing the music.
Posted by scottfrein on October 1, 2008
Does it seem like there are musicians that just ooze music. Every time you see them they have a new song, a new riff,they are just full of musical ideas. We all have our shining musical moments. It just seems like some are more prone to these moments. Prince once said, the more music you give away the more music that comes to you. So how do you give away what you don’t have.
Maybe you do have it, you just don’t know it. We all come up with cool riffs or chord progressions that we think are stellar and we will never forget them. Unfortunately we do forget them. I think the trick is to capture it all. Capture every riff, chord, progression, and melody. If it never turns into anything then it wasn’t meant to be but if it does, then it is well worth the effort. You’ll also end up with a nice catalog of parts, melodies, etc.. so if you are stuck on a song, maybe you can dig into the stockpile and pick something out.
I’m not talking about getting everything mic’ed up and recording the perfect track. Just get it on tape, Mp3, whatever. I used to have a mini cassette recorder that I used to get song ideas down. I have fallen out of that practice a little but I am trying to get back on the horse. My new thing is getting it on to my Mp3 player. It has a built in mic and a one button record function so I can quickly grab it and get the idea down. I am also thinking that now it’s digital I can create some folders for different types of ideas. Maybe sort them by key or genre of music. Hopefully this will result in a few more songs.
Scott
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dblacker1 said
Well said. I think people can get pretty distracted at times obsessing about tone. Emulating other artists is good to a certain point but the emphasis should be on finding one’s own sound and that entails working with all the limitations of one’s current situation, i.e. portability, cost, practicality, etc..
Dave
http://www.thegearmall.com
poligraf said
Interesting, that’s exactly what I have done since the 90s, using MIDI files to store my ideas…
A week before the time you posted this note, I went over the idea bank and started completing the various drafts I had begun over the years. The process yielded about 180 minutes of music in 2 months and a half…
You can check out how it all unfolded on my blog : http://poligraf.wordpress.com/
The albums and titles are listed in the Plan…
Blessings,
Chris