How do you build a song?

[wayfinder]

When I'm making music, there are two kinds of mood the I can be in, and they influence the way I build songs.

The one mood is when I feel like making music, but can't really feel the creative flow. In that mood, I usually start with the drums and a relatively monotonous bass. First, I try to get a groove going , and then I expand and enrich it as I see fit. That helps me to get into the mood to write harmonies and melodies. When I feel that I have a working groove going, I usually start on the climax part of the song. For my music, I want this to be a special, overwhelmingly cool couple of seconds (never happens ), which I'll loop and try to perfect. When I'm satisfied with it, I start attacking the song structure. In most cases, I'll make a wireframe sort of structure first, really rough, and almost in realtime, and later flesh it out. I go over the structure in layers, adding more and more detail. My biggest mistake, and one I've been trying to correct for the longest time, is that I stop after the first occurrence of the main loop, or rather when I'm out of base material. This is why I have like 15 half done songs sitting around. When I do finish the structure though, I go through the sounds and fix glaring EQing and compressor errors, separate instruments etc. (I usually do a lot of this work during the initial loop building already, but once you get different sets of instruments playing in different contexts, it all goes out the window at some point and you have to re-do some of it). When I'm really content with the mixing (read: when I can't fucking wait to get the song done), I export a version into a wave file. I don't use a big mastering suite or anything, I'll just do a final compressor/limiter stage and call it a deal!

The second kind of mood I am sometimes in when I make music is when I'm playing random patches on various synths via my midi keyboard until I strike gold with something that touches me in some way. I try not to forget this and translate it into a pattern. Then I build a loop from that, and from this loop, try to go in a chorus or phrase direction, depending on how good I think the initial stuff is. I make loops of the different song parts at their peaks, and from there on, I'm on the same track as previously described.

What are the differences between the number one kind of tracks and the other ones? Well I guess the first kind strikes me as more impulsive, less planned, and to me as the composer, they have more unexpected moments than those from the second category. Those have better thought-out harmonies and melodies though, for the most part, and they are much more emotional. I couldn't say which ones I like better, and I don't want to have to decide really

So, how do you do your magic thing?

[Fred Bevins]

Well, I hope we continuously analyze how we write songs in an effort to inspire ourselves But I write dance music, so my new method is easy to explain.

and it goes a little something like this:

1. Drums - Create the main beat first, the hardest thumping bd first, then the snare/clap/smack instrument. Then fill in with breaks and cyms - adjust levels/eq etc

2. Bass/Rhythm - This is a weird part, because this is where I lay out the key and progression of my song, so often, after the leads/vocals/focalpints are laid out, this actually gets deleted. I do this because it sounds better if the progression isn't completely obvious to the listener. btw, this part can also be a chord progression which I'll often lay out with a pad or piano

3. Focalpoint - This is the main melody of the song, it interacts with the progression by kind of dancing around it. This is where it's most important to be original and creative, and a good majority of the time is spent coming up with something timbrally interesting.

4. Vocals/Effects/Builds - This is the stuff that makes the song flow well, so obviously the interactions between these things and the drums, melody and bass are really important.

Anyway, my setup is alot more complicated and weird than that (as anyone who's opened one of my bmxes can attest to) - but this is how I have gotten my starting point for the last few months.

a poetic summary:

writing music is like a game of chess. you have a few tried and true opening moves, but after a while, things evolve into a completely unique situation.
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[relativeq]

i usually start out with chord structure first, assembling a 4-8 bar section, then adding bass, drums, etc. to create a full section. then i start breaking things down and structuring it. wash, rinse, repeat for each section of the tune.

of course, this doesn't always happen, because my brain works in very strange ways most of the time, but that seems to be the general angle of attack.

[bignic]

More often than not (lately), I do the drums right away, and I try to just keep layering drums until I've got about 6 or 7 seperate tracks for my drums and its looping what I'd call the climax of the tune. Then I go back and spread them out and EQ a bit.

I like to have my drums well mixed before even writing anything, otherwise they seem to get in my way if they sound 'unfinished'

This results in having many tunes that have just drums and some shitty bassline or epiano chords because nothing goes with the drum sequence.

But the odd time I start with a bassline or pad, I have all of these ready made drum sequences that i can throw in and try right away. A handful of times, this has worked very well, and I found myself getting quite into the tune because a large portion of it was already worked out and I didnt have to spend any time eq'ing and processing the drums.

If you used someone elses loop to achieve this effect, you'd still be left with a feeling of "well i didnt really do anything" even if it soudns good. If it sounds good AND its your own work (just done ahead of tiem) you'll feel a lot smarter and much mroe fullfilled because it was all your own work.

[o9]

one matilde tracker, 4 tracks, 16 patterns of 128 rows, one sample of a doorbell, one jeskola reverb.
thats what i start with for great tracks. point is... dont let machines clutter up the sound and cause confusion and then you wont have half finished tracks. also... only finish up the half finished tracks that you keep hearing in your head after a couple of years. otherwise... dont bother.

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[razornaut]

I tend to start with ambient 'noise'. If I start with a clearly defined style or mood a part of me wants to break free of the boundaries set by this and eventually destroys the track. Starting with a soundscape allows for progression of mood and style without diluting what I had in mind at the start. It makes composing quick and straight from the soul, so to speak; there's nothing to get in the way. Drums etc come later, made to match. However, it does make life a little difficult when adding more to it; it can make compositions sound unfinished (though not stale).

[Disasteradio]

[shango]

It is interesting to read about all your methods and views

For me it happens (mostly) like this:

1. Inspirations: sometimes I have tunes or beats in my head, or i hear a sound in my surrounding. If I don´t get inspired this way I start technology experiments, downloading the latest machines and play around until buzz crashes:( . During playing, I sometimes hit something which might be a song, since I have no prefered style and like strange things this is allmost everytime for my ears only (genre: psss cchhhhr bliep tsrieep ts ts sszzzshhshshshsh dudel dedudel)

2. Concepts: Another method is to make "grooveboxes". I mean a setup of machines made for starting imediately with composing and aranging. Make sure that you are familiar with these machines, so you don´t need to think about technology and you can concentrate at making music!
I also use selfmade templates to have this effect.
My basic "groovebox" is like this:
- 2 x FSM Infector
- BTD Sys samplegrid
- FSM Kick XP
- Climox 303
- Fuzzpilz unwieldy tacker
- 2x jeskola ASIO In (for guitar, Mic or analog synth)
I add the fx during creation process.

3. Dogma: Sometimes I try to make a song with a set of machines, and only with them! No machine adding is alowed, only the arangement of the given elements become the song. I don´t know if someone remembers the "metronome sound source only" competition, this was much fun: the only sound source was a metronome, so I used delays to disorder the rythm.

4. Disciplin: It don´t happens often that I finish a song. Since buzz gives you the possibility to make any sound you can imagine it is hard to not overload a song. Once overloaded with elements it sounds like crap and i don´t touch it anymore.

5. Motivation: I love listening to music and I am a technology nerd. But the biggest motivation is the thirst of my Ego for feedback. This leads to the next point:

6. live: For the moment I work on my live act. I use buzz as transportabel gear rack on my laptop.

I hope this might help someone in a creativity crisis. Btw: The most stupid tracks i created where allways after getting home from long weekends
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[o9]

well, we all go through the same things in the writing process, first some inspiration, then a good idea, then the reality sets in that you have to wake up for work in 3.5 hours and you have get some sleep.

composed tracks are fine... i have little problems working on them after about 10+x years of practice. new to me are these "live" layout type things. best thing htat i have found is to take one or 3 of my most popular mods and then make a "set" of something that can be mixed easily. what i mean is like... 7 or 5 tunes that just use the matilde and some effects and then use the DEX crossfader or something... im sure there is some better way of doing it. basically for live sets... all you need is about 5$ worth of good beats. if you have that you can throw in some chill ambient pop tune bullshit then... just like... make noise for the first half of the set. composing stuff for the liveset is really the hardest but.. trick is to make it homogenious. remember... nobody is going to remember the details. nobody is going to know what machines and what you are doing on the screen, so go for the throat. if you have too... just use the matilde and make 7 tracks for the same machine in the f4 pattern. this stuff might seem obvious to oldschool pros but, honesty... it took me a while to figure it out. also... you know the best wayto mix your tracks for transitions in livesets? KEEP THEM ALL THE SAME BPM ANS KEY. no joke... whats the worst that can happen... it all sounds like the same song? well... thats what people whant to here anyways... some bad ass techno that lasts forever. if you have a tansition between to trax that just dont sound the same... make some random noise in buzz... diskwrite it nad save it as mp3, then use winamp as your second turntable. shit... you can make things in abox or reactor... well... point is that live stuff is a little more difficult as far as "composition" goes because... you have to throw alot of rules in the garbage. just remember one thing... people in clubs want to hear lowd noise. thats why they came. the faster the better. melodys dont count, becuase they are too drunk to hear them. stick 10 beats on a floppy mix them with a noise sample

outta

[relativeq]

my live sets are all improvised, using midijump and a guitar-playing friend. we usually sit down and write the stuff about an hour and a half before the show.

the way it works is i write "chunks" of stuff, using the same methods i normally do, but then add the midijump and use it to set up loop points around the chunks. live, we just kinda jam it out, moving through sections with the midijump whenever we feel like it.

we usually play one or two pieces on a show, and it's always gone over well here. to me, a live show is all about establishing communication with your audience. in my case, it's also often about making them want to take naps. either way, i came to my live setup after thinking a lot about what i think is wrong with the "live electronic" concept, and how it's often carried out. i really hate the whole "press play and check your email" school of laptop music, and i think that the audience deserves better than that. at the risk of everything self-destructing, i like to keep my live setups as interactive as possible, and i like to play everything live.

that's just my two cents, though.

[mute]

my 2 cents are almost identical to relative q's
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[intoxicat]

I wish i had a more 'live' based appraoch to making tracks like relative q and mute but having never needed to do a live set it just hasnt developed.
I usually set myself ridiculus restrictions on what i can and cant do and then work from there. (like no drums unless they are absolutely justified) tracks are usually finished through alot fo anguish and reluctance to even sit down in front of the pc and when finally sitting down to finish things off I fail more than half the time arranging the tracks in an interesting way. The few tracks that do go through i think are pretty good tho..
so no advice really from this camp.. if i think of any 'one click' modus operandi ill let you know...

[white butttaaahh]

creative:

I used to be concerned with trying to make music that people like but ive matured from that. Listening to music is as much an artform as creating it. Anytime anyone listens to or makes a track, they bring to the table their own desires of what they want and expect to hear, awaringly or not. The beauty of music is where the music and the listener's world collide. Like I said I've grown, and I don't try to make music that fits into my world or anyone else's anymore. The two are dynamic for me. Making a banger used to be the problem and writing the music and figuring out how to make that hot track used to be the solution. Now when I write music its nothing but questions. And statements. About nothing or anything, because anything I create is relevant. Because of this, my music reflects my life and experiences now, I think. And my life is influenced by my music.

technical:

I buy shitloads of cheap records, listen to them, and sample any parts that stand out to me, and store them on my harddrive. I don't usually sample and write music on the same days. When I work on a new track I start from fresh and rarely have any idea of what I want to do. I just fuck with samples, play guitar or keys, or program drums until I get inspired. I used to write verses hooks and bridges. I don't give a fuck about structure anymore. I let shit loop forever without a beginning or end. And I make shit thats progressive too. Another big part of writing for me is listening to other music, because I'm a subconscious copycat. Lately all I've been listening to is the producer Madlib, and Aphex Twin's album DRUKQS. Once I have most of the track done I'll do scratches on the turntables. The loudness at which I monitor affects my creative process. Lately I've been writing at really loud volumes. There's so much I could say, tricks and techniques I have in buzz for working with samples or whatever......and then the formulas I use for recording & mixing but all that shit would take forever to type and I already said the stuff that matters to me the most.

bottom line:
Don't take what I say too seriously and don't take me for being to serious about what I say, because I'm basically full of shit.

[Lee_dC]

JUST MAKE SURE YOU SAVE REGULARLY!

[nool]

[Mirfus]

Various ways of doing songs:

1) Get stoned at a friends house, then we sit and make cool snippets which I will take home and expand on. Also make snippets when I'm bored during my lunchbreak - expansion of songs requires more time. Usually it's experiments with rhythms and machines that turn out sounding nice.

2) I get a brainstorm for a full song and plan it out in my head. Then using the knowledge I've got from experimenting I make that tune, giving flesh to that virtual skeleton. Note: This method has not been accomplished yet...

But I am working on it.

[nool]

Some quick Inspiration can be derived by

chordwizard/buzzhelper - two great apps by namdans available on buzzmachines utilities

http://web.hibo.no/~mva/utils/BuzzHelper.zip
http://web.hibo.no/~mva/utils/cw07.zip

Also of course
Templates/Presets help

having an organized wav library (esp for drums) also helps

and pvst preset factory if u get bored

also there are tons of freeware vsts (and of course so so so many buzzmachines) out there, sometimes just the right or 'new' 'one' can give that extra inspiration
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ReWorked the Entire Site - Spin Laden !

[Hamst3r]

I build music with hate and feces.
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[usr]

i build music with luck - or lack thereof
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[Farq]

I rarely plan my tracks, but sometimes I will come up with a melody in my head, or more often, with my keyboard. I used to forget them when this would happen, but I spent two weeks training myself for pitch and have since been able to retain melodies in my head. My pitch still sucks unless I really focus.

When doing an unplanned track, things often start with the lead. Sometimes I'll lay out some percussion first - but I really get things going when the first lead pattern is laid down. Up 'til then, the song is crap. CRAP I SAY.

Other times, and this happens about 30% of the time (but leads to a lot of amazing yet completely unfinished tracks), I play with sound until I get something awesome. In fact, there comes a time in every track that I start playing with the sound. I love sound... and that's why Buzz is my weapon of choice. Unfortunately, some sounds are unwieldly... which is why I have like .5 GB of unfinished IT modules that mostly sound good, but have no composition.

I love melody, but I suck at it. It's like a patience thing... or maybe I just can't speak the language well (I can understand it when spoken well enough... I started playing FF because I heard the music, which had already told me the story, for example.) If I could do it, I'd write a 60 minute meldoy, execute it with Buzz and burn + distribute that. I've managed to get to 30 minutes before, but that took insane patience... .and lots of transitions... and to boot, there's a few stupid mistakes I made (I was terrible with music theory at the time) so the thing is practically a write-off.
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roksteady

[paniq]

yay yay. another thread to show off & read nothing of anything others have written >

i start at 120-140 bpm most of the time, with an tpb of 8. none of the tpb 16 tracks have ever been finished, because the patterns were just too large to fit into my current mind, and 4 is just not enough.

most of the time i add a groove pattern to the master machine altering the tpb in a way that adds shuffle to all machines but doesnt fuck up matildes loop matching (08, 06, 08, 0C, ... doesnt seem to modify the current BPM much and shuffles nicely).

i start with the bassline and the drums first, working on a single loop for a very long time (like a marching band playing up on the spot before finally starting to walk), until the loop is full enough to roll out the dough. most of the time, and this is in 80% of all tracks i do the case, the loop gets so fucking good that i render down a preview of 1 minute with slight changes and listen to this loop for 12 hours, until i'm so pissed off by it, that i cant continue - so, sadly , the best tracks are those that i never finish because i just get too excited over them. some of those get done anyway, but it needs a lot of discipline to tell yourself to fucking finish it.

all primary eq and effect work goes into the loop. its like a little laboratory. i add several fx and find good filter progressions, ideas for breaks, and so on, until i finally arrive at the stage where i want to create all the joy that is caused by change of progression.

its basically a lot like wayfinder does it. i turn the loop into a wireframe of the first half of the track, "flesh it out", add breaks and crashes, until i think that its basically done so far.

then i'm at the stage where i have to make up something new to make the track last longer than 1:30, and at least stretch it to 3:30 or 4:00, which should be sufficiently entertaining without becoming boring or too short. adding new parts is a bit tough, and i sometimes change the mood of the track, transpose things, add some percussion drumwork, expand the main melody or add additional chords to keep the tension.

basically i'm just selling the groove i created most of the time, and all elements of the track are there to support it.

rarely, there's other tracks emerging, that get very "epic", because i feel that the loop i created doesnt even last long enough for 30 seconds..

for the second half of tracks, i also like to apply the same "recipe" for the first half to the second half, but with another manifestation - its a bit like those second tracks by some one-shot instant-charthit dance acts that sound exactly like the first track they published, but slightly different. i pack it in one song, and its perfect.

i think, that making music is a trade off between expression and entertainment. on the one side, you're expressing a certain mood, on the other side, you're selling it to the listener. it has to be in a nice wrap, should not be too challenging, and somehow reflect the listeners identity as well - make his/her soul vibrate.

the best songs (the ones that get the best response from people) are usually those i do for women, because they have of course the highest sell:express ratio.

[e-client]

hmmm...

i think i should start doing it the bignic way... because of the drums parts... i spend normally ages doing the drums... yet i end up with a shitty shit sounding drumstuff...

the ways i do a track differ way too much but i think i will give my 2 cents here too...

when i start up a track, normally i setup a general setup, consisting of the mixer, slight compression after the mixer, put in some more compressors, connect them to different channels to the mixer, preset some of them for the instrument type i want to use that channel (synth, stabs, pads, drums, percussion, ambience).

generally thats the way most of my later tracks have been started. then i start putting in some gens, most likely the first gen in my tracks is an infector or a voidsynth 2

i set it up for the sound i got in mind (if mind=empty, a pad), make some basic melodies or some harmonic stuff, add some effects between it and the compressor (you might not really notice it, but almost every sound you hear in my tracks went through an individual compressor )

drums i normally start a dull 4/4 thing, or try a breakbeat. but well... as things go on, i tweak stuff like everybody.

normally it starts as a 64 tick loop, for the setup of the sounds, i enable and disable some chains on the mixer, to see how it sounds solo, or without effects or stuff. when i have the sounds about right, i normally hook up the controller and start messing around with some basic settings, like cutoff, resonance, or stuff like that. i get some inspiration and go deeper into a mood like that, and basically create the climax part of the track like that. then when i think i got into the right mood, i expand the loop and start fine tuning and fine tweaking, start to give the thing a structure. on and on, my tracks end up unfinished like always, but to hell with it. ouf of 1000 there might be something i even really finish and is worth listening or even dancing to!!!
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[sir.henry]

In my case there are usually three ways to start a song.
1. Nice chord progression -> melody.
2. Nice melody/riff -> chords
3. Tweaking synths/effects until I got inpsired and end up to 1 & 2

I've been quite minimalistic lately. Only ab. 5-6 machines/song. Jeskola Bass3,Voidbass, Arpman, Infector, 909