I decided after grief jars enigma to take a different approach to songwriting. I was getting bored of the same process that I have been using since my piranha. I would noodle on a guitar, record a chord progression to either a cassette/minidisc or Quicktime video, then flesh it out with some other parts while recording. I’d add lyrics at some point in the process. Over the years I became faster and faster at it. Perhaps too fast; I published some work that I am not so happy with in hindsight. Ho hum. This is the downside of emphasising quantity over quality. In my defence, I was keen to keep momentum and not be so judgemental of the work. Nearly everything was abandoned at some state of incompleteness rather than being perfected. I viewed the last five or six projects to be more about capturing moments in time as opposed to being polished artefacts.
I’ve taken a different approach with things lately. I am primarily using apps upon my iPhone to produce some ditties. I record them without any rehearsal or plan into GarageBand. They are each around three minutes long and are usually an unprepared jam of whatever I think sounds good on the day. As of today, I have 31 projects or ideas. My goal is to reach 70. This is a bastardisation of David Lynch’s approach to filmmaking. I am trying not to be judgemental of the ideas as I do them. My hope is to revisit the different ideas and then sculpture bigger tunes from these different tracks. My inspiration is William Orbit’s rumoured approach to making 13 with Blur, where he apparently let them experiment and then stuck loads of bits together and produced the album from the different experiments. It means that the compositions are unlikely to be verse/chorus twee fest ditties like my previous work. I would like it to be closer to Mansun’s Six or John Frusciante’s Letr Lefr E.P in terms of structure.
In terms of apps, I am using a mixture of Animoog, GarageBand (on iPhone), SoundPrism, Musyc, Synth One. I sometimes use others and I may introduce some Arduino/Stylophone or bass to things as time moves on, but I am not sure yet. I spend most of the time being unsure about this project. I always have pangs of doubt on everything I make but it is more pronounced on this. I doubt that it is any good but take solace in Bowie’s point about being out of your depth. I am just trusting that the process may lead somewhere eventually.
I am enjoying the challenge of making things differently. I can already say that I find playing with my phone nowhere near as fulfilling as my guitar. I doubt I will want to make anything like this again. However, it will hopefully be different from my other work just as a result of changing the process and the tools. Hopefully that will lead me onto other avenues that I would like to explore.
