Category Archives: Making Music

Song-A-Day is always a big challenge. Producing a brand new piece of music every day and posting it for everyone to hear is a pretty good recipe for crazy-making. There are moments of doubt compounded by exahaustion that make you wonder why you ever signed up in the first place. That’s par for the course, and you find a way through and are usually happy that you did.

But the other night, I ran into something I’ve never experienced before, and hope not to again anytime soon.

The family had gone to bed and, as usual, I sat down at the keyboard to
start noodling around and generate some material to work with.

I stared at the keys, with my hands were resting on my lap, not moving. They didn’t know what to do.

I forced myself to pick them up and put them on the keyboard. But I didn’t start playing. Why? What was going on? And then it suddenly hit me: there was no music in my head.

There were no rhythms to plunk out, no textures to emulate, no shape of a melody, no feel of any kind. Just dead silence.

Sometimes I’ve gotten stuck because I didn’t feel like I had any good ideas. This wasn’t that. I had no ideas, not even bad ones.

I can’t remember this ever happening to me before. My head’s been filled with bad ideas, other people’s ideas, ideas I’ve had before, but never absolute silence. There’s always some kind of music happening inside me, but in that moment, there was nothing.

I got myself to start moving my hands on the keys, and of course some sounds came out; if you press a key on a keyboard, you’ll make a sound – even my cat can do that. But what I was playing didn’t sound like music – it was just disembodied sound. There was no there there.

I got up and walked around a bit, but still nothing. Music, it seems, had just taken the night off.

I probably could have just let it go and gone to bed, but I have OCD tendencies when it comes to this stuff and didn’t like the idea of having a blank day in the middle of Song-A-Day. So i did the musical equivalent of throwing a Hail Mary pass. I loaded up a drum loop at random, added an absurdly simple bassline, hit record and just started playing. I gave it a quick mix, saved it, posted it to the Song-A-Day site and went to bed.

The next morning I no recollection of what I had done the night before. I had to go to the site and play the track to jog my memory.

To me, this felt like a near-death experience, because I had never experienced complete silence in my head. But I talked to a few other Song-A-Day’ers who said it happens to them all the time. I decided not to worry about it too much and just be grateful it doesn’t happen more often.

Fortunately, the condition turned out not to be permanent. The next day I had sounds floating around in my head again, and my work session felt much more like normal. Music had come back from vacation.

I’m not so crazy about the song I wrote that night. It actually makes me blush a little when i hear it, but I’m glad I did it. I feel some degree of pride that I worked through it, rather than walking away from it. I did my job: I showed up and gave the muse everything I had. It wasn’t much, but I did what I could.

Still, I hope I don’t find myself in that position again anytime soon.

I have a hard time naming things.

Since I mainly compose instrumental music, coming up with titles for the pieces I write is especially hard. During Song-A-Day month, I have to deal with problem every day for the full 28 days. And it’s frustrating every time.

This year, however, I’ve noticed a pattern emerging; it doesn’t really make the process any easier, but it adds an unexpected side benefit that helps the whole compositional process.

When I sit down to work, I usually don’t know what I’m writing. Sometimes I begin with an idea in my head, but for the most part, I’m starting from scratch. I turn on my keyword, start up my music software, find a sound I like and start playing. As soon as I find some riff or phrase that grabs my imagination, I start working with it.

At a certain point, I have some work that I don’t want to lose, so I hit “Save”. The computer dutifully pops up a dialog box asking where on my hard disk I want to save, and, annoyingly, what I want to call the piece I’m working on. This is the moment of truth: I can’t continue until I come up with some kind of name for what I’m working on.

A sensible person would probably say that I’m putting too much pressure on myself at is point. It’s too early in the process to come up with the real name, so why not just save it as “sketch” or something like that and give it a real name when the piece is done and its intent is more clear?

That’s a perfectly valid question and I don’t have a good answer other than to say that I’m profoundly lazy. When I’ve tried that approach, I seem never to go back and rename the file, so my hard drive ends up being full of files with helpful names like “Sketch1″ or “Groovy Thing” or even “2011-02-03″. This is real a drag when I’m trying to find something I wrote some time ago.

As a result, coming up with a name right on the spot is my current discipline; but it turned out to be useful in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

When searching for a name, I have to take a long moment and think about what it is that I’m writing. I try out different words and phrases until something just feels right. Once I’ve found it, something interesting happens: the music suddenly has a point of focus. The name starts to guide what I do next, and my compositional choices from that point on are guided by it.

For instance, one night I began my work session with a slow funky groove using a Rhodes sound. I added bass and drums and liked it enough to keep working with it. I hit “Save” and stared at the computer while I tried to come up with a name. This is what I had:

What is this? I thought. What is this about? I looked out my window, which faces out over East Oakland. This tune definitely had an Oakland vibe to it: funky, unassuming, and with a little bit of grit. So what then? Oakland Nights? Lights Of East Oakland?

Then an image came into my mind: an American-made early 70s sedan driven by Samuel L. Jackson’s character from Pulp Fiction. That’s when it all came together. What I had was the beginning of a theme song for a 1970s cop show set in East Oakland. That was it. From there, the title came easily: “Oaktown Vice”.

Now that I knew what I was writing, and had a workable name, I quickly knew what was going to come next. There would be a strong melody, played by a vintage-sounding lead synth. I’d need lush strings, some horns, and a clavinet. Oh yes: there would be clavinet.

It took a little time to work out the details of those broad strokes, but eventually it all came together, and I ended up really liking the result.

If I hadn’t taken the time to come up with a title, I’m not sure what direction the composition would have taken. I’m certain it would have been quite different. I’m equally certain that those extra moments I took to reflect on what I had done and give the piece a name saved me a lot of time in the long run. I ended up with focus and a clear direction that might have taken awhile for me to find otherwise. I can see this being very useful in the future.

Here’s the final version of the track. But if you’ve got suggestions for alternate names, I’m all ears.

It was another night in February, and the usual ritual began.

The family had gone to bed. I did a few chores, then, as I do each night during Song-A-Day, I sat down at the piano and fired up my music software.

It was late – later than I like it to be when I’ve got a tune to write.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just do something simple: maybe a short piano improvisation or a sparse looped ambient piece that I can put together quickly, so I can get it posted and get to bed at a semi-decent hour.

I pulled up my favorite Rhodes patch and immediately launched into fast, rhythmic funk groove. I kept playing, and started to hear other parts that could be added: a fast bossa-like drum groove, a nice fat bass, some sort quirky synth lead melody, maybe some other backing parts, and…

Crap. This is not the tune I wanted to write.

This tune was going to take time: time to work out the parts, time to learn to play them (the tempo was dauntingly fast), time to mix all the different pieces. It was too late to start something like this.

But Song-A-Day is a stern mistress.

When you’re trying to post a new tune each day, you don’t really have time to obsess and you certainly don’t have time to go against the flow. This was the song that showed up that day, so that was the song I needed to write.

Nonsense, you might be saying. Why not just save what you did for another day and go back to one of your original ideas, one that would be simpler, and let you get some sleep? That’s a perfectly reasonable question, but I can only say that I’ve tried that in the past, and it doesn’t seem to work very well.

That damned tune, inconvenient as it was, was in my head and wasn’t going to go away easily. I could have forced myself to do something simpler, but I don’t know how satisfying the results would have been. This was the tune that was here, now. And sometimes it’s best just to go with it. So I did. And a couple of hours later, I had something I rather liked.

I certainly paid a price for it when I awoke early the next morning with a toddler sitting on my chest asking me if I was asleep, but listening to the tune now, I’m happy that I stayed out of the way and allowed it to come through.

Here’s the tune (“Your Fault”) in its final form:

And, just to run with this idea a little further, here’s a remarkable talk given by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, who makes a pretty convincing argument for bringing back the ancient idea that creative inspiration is not something that comes from us, but rather to us from a source outside of ourselves. When I first watched this several months ago, I thought it was a useful metaphor, but now it seems very real to me: not just an interesting way to think about creativity, but something that actually reflects the truth of how it works. It’s certainly something I’ll keep in mind as I continue on through the end of the month.

We’re about a week into Song-A-Day 2011, and there’s already something a little different happening this time around.

In previous years, the project felt like an endurance challenge. It was always fun, but it was also something of an uphill battle for everyone. Just get something posted each day, no matter how rough and ragged, and move on. We did the best we could, and some good work got done, but there was also a lot of stumbling around.

Not this year.

I don’t know what’s going with everyone, but the quality of the music that’s being produced has jumped up to another level. As I go through my daily ritual of listening to all the new music that’s been posted, I want to call everyone up and say “Guys: when you’re posting new songs each day, they’re not supposed to be this good!”

I sort of doubt they’d listen.

What the hell happened? Maybe it’s just that this has been going on for a few years now and folks are starting to find a rhythm to it. Or maybe it’s all the fresh faces we’ve got this year. Or maybe it’s something else altogether, who knows? All I do know is that I’m hearing music created in a day that outclasses stuff I have on “pro” albums that I know took months to produce. And that’s just nuts.

If you haven’t been there yet, I strongly encourage you to head over to the main Song-A-Day site and have a listen or two (or three or several). There’s also an RSS feed, and you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes if you’re so inclined. Each day, you’ll get a new batch of freshly-pressed tunes in a wildly varying range of styles, produced some very talented and passionate (and probably insane) musicians, all for free. Where else are you going to find a deal like that?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got another track to write…

It’s that time of year again. And so soon.

I am once again taking part in the February madness known as Song-A-Day, in which participants write, record and upload a new song each day throughout the month. How hard could that be?? Ha.

When I wrote about this last year, I had some clear goals that I wanted to accomplish with the exercise. This year my aspirations are not quite so lofty. I’m keeping more of an open attitude and seeing it more as creative boot camp: just something that forces me to show up to work each day and see what happens.

I’m also aiming to keep it things little simpler this year. It’s easy to get caught up in the arrangement and recording production, but I’d really like to try to make those secondary concerns this year, and instead focus on the composition itself. That might mean much simpler arrangements, but that seems like a reasonable trade-off.

But who can tell? If there’s one thing I learned from last year it’s that anything can happen, and when you’re up against such a strict deadline, you don’t have too much time to second-guess yourself. You’ve really just got to go with the flow.

Above all, I’m looking forward to what the other folks create. I was knocked out by some of the tunes people posted last year, and it really helped to keep me inspired. The experience is challenging enough that it fosters a strong community among the musicians. We’re all doing a tough thing together, and rely on each other for support and inspiration. It’s a pretty nice place to be, actually.

Wanna follow the fun? The main site is here and there are handy links to RSS feeds and the iTunes podcast. Enjoy!

But…uh…keep on open mind…