Writing Archive - Nadine de Macedo

How to get stuff done and get rid of creative debt

Nadine — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

People often ask me, how I manage multiple collaborations and projects at the same time and finish so many musical projects. There’s no easy answer, but I try to give some tips and tricks how I handle reoccurring issues and get stuff done. Creative debt Technical debt happens when you implement your solution as quickly or easy as possible without thinking about long-term consequences. It’s a term from software development that describes the huge amount of work to fix a problem that is rooted in a decision you took many months and years ago. This concept can be applied to many fields of work, including creativity. Creative debt most often occurs, when you start a new project without finishing your previous ones. To get rid of creative debt, it’s best to accumulate as less as possible, which means (a) have a great concept and (b) evaluate it and (c) maintain and check your running projects and (d) document everything well. Creativity may be untamable, but if you’re interested in getting stuff done, there are a few rules to stick. Biggest impediments and distractions Look, there’s a squirrel! It can be so tempting to turn that spontaneous guitar riff into a new song. If you don’t jot down the idea from beginning to end, you may forget about it next week. So you record a guitar riff or loop. After a few months, you have a dozen great guitar riffs and 8-bar loops, but no song. Listening to your old drafts some months later, you may not be able to reconstruct the emotion or reason you recorded it. You jam along for half an hour, but you cannot find a verse to an existing chorus. Later, you may come up with the idea of merging multiple loops into a song, but they won’t sound consistent. You’re stuck. Worst of all, you cannot delete your 8-bar loops and guitar riffs, because each of them sounds like a potential hit. Take a look into your archives. How many of these 8-bar songs did you turn into a full song? I bet you’re better off recording a dirty one-take draft of the whole song instead of a perfect recording of the riff. Don’t forget to write down the chord progressions, tabs or lyrics. In case you want to rerecord this draft neatly, it will be much easier to remember the emotion and learn the song. Neglecting your needs Most creatives get super inspired and hyper when they’re asked to collab, so they say yes to everybody. They may be hyper focussed and get the first two songs recorded. Suddenly the big pile of promises feels like a heavy weight. You may get some stuff done if you turn your nights into days or force yourself to draft. You may feel guilty of promising things you cannot keep. It’s impolite to cancel three months after your commitment, so you try to postpone in hope that you find more time or inspiration someday soon. After a few weeks or months, your collab partners may get nervous or angry because they wait for your part. Be honest. You have burnt the candle on both ends. Decide if you (a) step out and burn bridges or (b) keep your promise with a massive delay while avoid writing new songs. In the long run, keep track of your capacity and needs. Learn to say “no” when you’re full. In the worst case, cancelling projects before somebody wrote, recorded or adapted anything for you is even better than letting your band wait for months and years. The band might still have a chance to find a new person and tailor it to their needs. Piling up too many projects Not everybody is made for multitasking. I am multitasking for years, because I cannot work on a sad ballad when I’m angry. I usually have two, but sometimes also five completely different projects in parallel. Being highly dependent on other people’s recordings, I can use my waiting time for working on other projects or preparing social media posts. Multitasking is fine, if documentation is your secret superpower. You need a lot of self-discipline to focus and finish things even if you’re not fully in the mood to master a ballad. However, most people work on many different songs as an excuse to look busy. They’re procrastinating because they’re scared of finishing or scared of admitting that they’re stuck and need help. Having too many projects at once can lead to decision paralysis and information loss due to context switching. Which song do I do next? What was missing in this song, again? If you find yourself switching between many things without finishing anything, you may have hit your capacity limit or a creative block. More below. I have a big spreadsheet with ALL running projects with status and to do’s. I know who is working on which song and what I have to do. This won’t help you, if you’re a rather chaotic and spontaneous person. You should try to set a maximum amount of parallel projects, get them done as soon as possible and learn to say “no”. Trap of perfectionism Talking to fellow songwriters, I often hear something like “I cannot finish this song. We need a great solo, but it’s not good enough”. It’s OK to be stuck here and there. But sometimes, we have to take a decision if we want to get the best possible solo (and put this song on hiatus for years) or perform an average solo to get the song done. Even if you decide to get the best possible solo, it doesn’t mean that YOU have to record or write it. If you’re stuck for too long – ask your best friend for a collab. They might come with an idea you never thought of. Perfectionism is a trap. Most people won’t bother if that solo has been played by an organ or guitar, if it suits the song. Nobody is able to read your mind and listen to your original idea. Circumventing the critical path When I write songs, I think about them as projects. My role as songwriter, arranger and producer is related to project management. I have a clear goal (release a full recorded song), a deadline (release date), a product vision (for example a hard rock song about driving down the Route 66) and a team (band members). I can break it down into milestones (draft, recording, mixing) and subtasks (record guitars), that can be assigned to different people. If you’re deep into project management, you may be heard of a critical path. It’s the longest chain of tasks that cannot be completed without the previous. This may result in massive delays or cancellation. The critical path points out, that you cannot parallelize everything. Same in songwriting – It’s pointless to record the vocals in parallel to the backing track. The vocalist won’t be able to jump into the groove of the rhythm section or circumvent the lead guitar. Most likely, one of them has to rerecord. This will end up in fights. Try to find your critical path and force people to stick to it. If they don’t, your bandmates may not be the right people to work on a multi-collab or musical chain letter with many dependencies. You can still have fun with them in a jam session or in a two-way collab. Otherwise, you may have to take hard decisions like: cancel, restaff or postpone. Nobody will be happy about them! Out of fuel Are you completely out of ideas? Or busy working on twenty projects in parallel? Sometimes it’s better to stop and get things done. There’s nothing wrong about a creative hiatus if you communicate it to your collab partners and bands. You don’t have to be there 24/7 and write 365 songs a year. Writing too much can lead to creative debt, too. Take a break and decide which songs are worth finishing. Are there some you can achieve on your own? Some that may need a little help from your friends? Is it better to cancel or archive some? Don’t start new projects while you’re sitting on a pile of unfinished songs. Otherwise, your creative debt will grow bigger and bigger. It won’t help you to refuel. How can I get rid of creative debt?

This post How to get stuff done and get rid of creative debt was published at Nadine de Macedo.

Songwriting techniques worth trying

Nadine — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 14:15:00 +0000

Do you have favourite techniques for songwriting? Some artists may develop a certain process to write songs more quickly. In this post, I’ll discuss different processes and methods of songwriting that may help you on how to write a song from scratch. Talking to plenty of musicians and lyricists, I figured out that everybody developed a process to start a song from scratch. I noticed, that people who call themselves lyricist, start with the lyrics or vocals first, whereas drummers are more likely to create a groove and add a bass. In my honest opinion, there is no right or wrong. These are different attempts, and most of them are worth a try. Theme oriented songwriting The main idea about theme oriented songwriting is to write down a topic or a musical theme and construct the song around. Here are some ideas on how to write a song. Start with lyrics Are you a wordsmith? Some songwriters already have a topic in their minds and write down the lyrics first. Most of them already have a metric and rhyme scheme. Even without knowing the melody, words of a skilled lyricist flow naturally in rhythm. You may only vary the pitch to create a melody. About a year ago, I tried another method which has been completely unknown to me: Word clouds and mind maps. You start with a keyword and generate words that are linguistically or contextually related. For example, building is connected to house or construction, construction may be connected to noise and dirt… Once you found a couple of words, you build phrases. This has been an interesting and challenging experience. Another quite related method to start a song with lyrics is creating 2-4 phrases and search for end rhymes with a rhyming dictionary. This will set your focus on metrics and rhyming. Be careful not to use super obvious rhymes like “you” and “blue”. You can also write down your spontaneous feelings and thoughts about your perception. Just a snapshot of your life or the situation you’re observing right now. It’s a more natural way to use a word cloud. This technique seems to be used quite often in singer-songwriter and country lyrics. Sound design first I must admit, I’d never have heard about this method, if I never talked to producers, keyboarders and guitarist who left their heart on sound design. You can spend hours and hours on your amps or synthesizers to recreate the sound you have in your mind. Sometimes, a certain sound inspires you to write a melody. Once you’re done, you create the next sound and the next element. Working this way is very, creative and intense experience, leading to a song with a strong atmosphere. Genres like ambient, lo-fi, shoegazing or djent cannot live without sound designers. Even if you don’t know the meaning of all the knobs of your gear, you can follow the sound design first approach by using presets. Take a sound, play some notes, jump to the next. Put some weird effects on it and listen. It’s interesting to turn some arbitrary knobs and hear the outcome. “Neotokyo” happened this way. I used odd compression settings on the piano and wrote the chords later. Getting the rhythm straight In my early beginnings, I wrote plenty of songs, starting with the rhythm section. I picked a tempo, choose some nice samples or drum sets and created a typical 16-beat intro for club music. By adding more and more percussion elements, tonal FX and loops you start a good build. The next natural step would be adding the bass, and then you start with fragments of melodies turning into full themes. I always thought it’s an approach for writing club music, but I talked to rock and fusion drummers and bassists who also work this way. It’s been interesting to hear, that a drum riff could be as catchy as a guitar riff. I never thought this could happen to me with non-electronic music, until I wrote “Wrench in the works” based on a 6/8 drum groove using plenty of toms. In my honest opinion, the interplay between drums and bass is very important, no matter if acoustic or electronic music. A good song needs a strong groove. Starting with the rhythm section first urges you to structure a song, cause the drum groove should not become boring after a couple of repetitions. Building a song around a melodic theme In classical music, soundtrack and jazz, the idea of writing a song to an existing melodic theme is quite common. Of course, it’s boring to loop the same melody over and over again, so musicians modify the theme by using different instruments, accentuations, keys or inversions. If you want to dive deeper into the topic, I recommend listening to classical variations or visit jam sessions. There are different ways to write strong themes. If you wrote the chords first, you can figure out the scale, interpret it as a limited set of notes and improvise. Some people write melodies based on arpeggios from the chords they used. Pragmatic songwriters do not even know the scale they’re in, they just write! As soloist or arranger, you may also have tried a technique, I’d call harmonizing with melodies. Once you found your main melody, you try a new melody with a different instrument instead of using a chord. This may limit the amount of chords you can use for harmonizing. Arrangement oriented songwriting The above-mentioned techniques are great to write a song with a consistent feeling, melody or groove. But if you’re deep into arrangement, you can try to write the structure first and add interesting details. Composing with the main instrument In series and movies, songwriters are usually portrayed as guitarists or pianists playing their instruments and singing along. There may be some truth in it, but it is not the only way to approach a song with an instrument. If you’re deep into arrangement, you may write the chords first or in parallel to the melody. Use your main instrument to play the whole song, add more layers later. “Going My Way” has been written on the piano, before I created a drum groove, a bass and a guitar. Talking to fellow musicians, I feel like there are music theorists and pragmatists. People, who are really deep into music theory, deal with chord progressions, key changes and improvisations in a completely different way. I learned, that harmonic function theory and cadence theory are two approaches to (a) find the next chord according to a certain mood and (b) find chords to an existing melody. Jazz theory may even go deeper. Arranging final or draft takes Composers, instrumentalists and arrangers have different views on the moment you hit the record button. I know people, who prefer to learn to play a part properly, record it and jump to the next. Digital tools make it possible to change the order of the recorded parts or to re-use them. So they work part-wise, write and arrange their songs during their composition. I also know people who need the full arrangement before hitting ANY record button. And people, who love to write a first lousy prompt on their acoustic guitar, do plenty of re-recordings and go real big on their DAW. The idea is quite the same as composing a song with a main instrument, but every instrument of your first arrangement is a draft. When you’re done with the arrangement, you (re-)record everything neatly. Start with the full instrumentation Another huge point of discussion seems to be the question of where you start with your composition. Should you start in the beginning and create an intro, a verse and work your way up to the full instrumentation (tutti)? Or should you create the chorus or tutti first? Both methods have interesting con’s and pro’s. I noticed that sound designers love to create intro and outros. The full focus on the first part of the song ensures that the listener is carried away by a mind-blowing atmosphere. However, the length of commercial music decreases, and it is very challenging to write an intro for a song below 3 minutes. If you decided to work on the full instrumentation first, you have to make choices about when and where elements should be dropped. Writing an intro and verse is challenging, because looping the chorus chord structure can take away some drive. What is my approach? Thanks for reading my lengthy thoughts on songwriting. You may have noticed that I tried a lot of these techniques. I had serious issues writing a song based on sound design, rhythm or a word cloud. This is where I figured out that I’m definitely more arranger. I prefer to start my songs in the chorus or tutti. My reason for this is quite plain: I love catchy hook lines and starting with the tutti I know the maximum amount of instruments for that song. I’m flexible enough to add another element as soloist later on, but knowing the instrumentation makes it quite easy for me to decide who starts when. My biggest difficulty is writing verses. They need less instrumentation and have to fit in harmonically without being too close to the chorus. I also figured out that I love songwriting from rough drafts to final recordings. Trying different techniques on songwriting has been a pleasure. I learned so much about music or the way I work. How do you write a song from scratch?

This post Songwriting techniques worth trying was published at Nadine de Macedo.