Starting Songs from Riffs

Season 2 Episode 9 Each song wants to be written in a slightly different way. Songs have personalities of their own, and that personality shows up right from the beginning of the writing process. Every time you write you'll have new puzzles to solve. For every song you finish (good, bad, or ugly) you come out of the process a different writer. In the last podcast episode we started a conversation about finding the starting point for songwriting. This is probably the thing I get asked about the most. “Where should I start??” is a question that all writers deal with whether their new to writing or have been doing this a long time. It's a scary question. And honestly, there's no real direct answer. That's what makes it so tricky. Because each song wants to be written in its own way, there's no silver bullet answer that will make that question go away. You need to approach every piece on its own terms and meet it where it is. That's all fine and dandy for a kind of meta-discussion of creativity, but how does that actually help write songs? Personally, when I'm stuck, I just want practical direction to get unstuck. Thankfully, although I really do think each song has it's own unique journey to follow, patterns emerge through the creative process. There are some places where songs like to start from, and we can keep going back to those places for more songs. In today's episode we're talking about starting songs from riffs. Using musical ideas as the fertile ground for beginning a new tune. It might be starting with a single musical phrase. Maybe a chord progression or a melody. Maybe you've got a big sexy hook cooking. You might even start with just a couple of notes strung together. In this episode: Using the structure we set out in S2E8 of “Encounters” and “Generative Structure”  we specifically dig into what those look like when applied to the musical aspects of song. We give some real-life examples of musical encounters (like stumbling across a cool chord progression when you're noodling around on guitar). We also go over some handy tools for creating musical generative structures (like retrogrades, inversions, borrowing chord progressions, etc.). After we go through the examples of what these look like in practical songwriting, we discuss some next steps to continue following the threads started by these initial riff ideas. Hope this episode helps give some direction on starting songs with musical ideas (even if it's something small). We'll be continuing this conversation about finding the starting points to songs over the next couple of episodes. Diving further into starting songs from words and starting songs from pictures. We'll wrap it all up by talking about actually getting around to finishing songs. So be sure to check back in 3 weeks to keep the conversation going!

Om Podcasten

15-20 minutes of regular, open conversation about songwriting, what it's like to be a songwriter, and how to keep improving at the craft of songwriting. New episodes every three weeks!