Next year, I think I would do a few things differently to make sure I finished in time.

Not starting a week late.  I started a week late this time, because I heard of the RPM for the first time a week into February.

Not spend so long on songwriting.  I spent so long writing, demoing, then rejecting songs, that I planned to do most of my proper recording and mixing in the last few days.  This backfired terribly when I got the stupid flu and spent the last few days lying on the couch feeling like death microwaved on high for 30 seconds.

Take it more seriously.  Probably the biggest reason I didn’t finish, is simply the fact that I didn’t make it my number 1 priority.  If I had taken it more seriously, I would have been forcibly removing visitors from my home – family or not, recording on those last few days no matter how sick I felt, and recording in the evenings without worrying about annoying the neighbors.

I had actually been planning on having a proper album finished by June, so this was good motivation to get some more material together, and I now have a few new songs that I’m quite keen on (and quite a few I’m not!).

[Actually, if I had really low standards I could just send in ten demo's I've done, but nah.  Not gonna happen   ]

1. Repeatedly playing Stairway to Heaven or Nothing Else Matters on the guitar for no apparent reason.
2. Listening over and over to previous work just so you can pick out every single little mistake.
3. Listening to your favourite songs over and over, picking out all the clever bits that are so much better than your own work
4. Drinking Coffee and eating Toast.
5. Doing housework, running errands, catching up on paperwork, blogging…

The worst thing is when you can think of a hundred things to write a song about – but none of it just seems any good. My current ideas involve sick frogs, the IRD, and mismatched socks.

The other worst thing is when you give up on what you’re writing a song about and just try to come up with some good music and/or riffs. When you have writers block, everything always sounds too much like something else. Sometimes, it all just sounds crap. Sometime it doesn’t sound like anything because you can’t even come up with anything.

Cures for writers/composers block:

1. Actually having feelings or opinions to write about. (Rumour has it you can get these by giving a damn – harder than it looks sometimes)
2. Being almost at the deadline… and dropping your standards to write about things you originally thought were crap when you had a lot of time to think about it.
3. Finding God (Christian bands NEVER run out of things to write about )
4. Harnessing random fluctuations in the Time Space Continuum. (eg, open any random book at a random page and randomly point at something on the page and write about whatever that’s about. Also works quite well with like dream cards, the random button on wikipedia, or even your media player set to random. [I secretly suspect all those Christian bands just write songs by doing this with the bible!])
5. Doing housework, running errands, catching up on paperwork, blogging… Sometimes stopping trying to compose and doing something else for a little while can give your brain a little time to stew things over and come up with some proper ideas.

I think I’m ready to get back to work now

So – my list of work to do on it…

1. Re-record the vocals! In rough versions I tend just to take the first crap take. The vocals need to be a lot lot better. Also if you have good enough ears, you can hear the metronome leaking through the headphones into the mic during the quiet parts of the singing. I have new and much better headphones now, so that shouldn’t be a problem in the future.

2. Record the bass with a real bass. As my bass was downstairs, I couldn’t be arsed to go fetch it for a rough. So all the bass is VSTi and hence it is rather crappy.

3. Re-record the guitars. There are mistakes all through, and you can hear quite a bit of computer noise through the guitars. And there’s this one strum I do where I whack the body of the guitar every so often and it makes a stupid popping sound.

4. Drop the vocals down a bit in the last half of the last chorus and put in a mean guitar solo of doom. My excuse for not having one in the rough? I have a Peavey Triple X head and a 5150 cabinet downstairs – and I’m recording upstairs. Its not that I’m lazy… it’s more that… I couldn’t be arsed at the time. Yeah.

5. Mix it with some descent studio monitors, rather than with stereo speakers from the early 90′s. I think that’ll make a huge difference I really do. My speakers are waaay to flattering, and tend to be a bit lacking in the bass end, so I end up with a mix that’s harsh in the highs, and too bassy, and sometimes just full of other muck I can’t hear through my speakers.

So there we go. Eventually I will do the things on my list above, and I’ll have a finished song. I’ll eventually put in these lists for my other rough songs I guess.

P.S. I noticed something really odd when I converted the wav. to MP3. Windows media player lists the MP3 at being 3:58 long, but lists the .wav correctly at 3:30. The MP3 I’m certain is the exact same length, it doesn’t appear to be playing the MP3 any slower than it plays the .wav file. Perhaps it has something to do with using a variable bit rate compressions? Does WMP use the bit rate to calculate the time or something? It’s really odd. It’s bugging me.

The other thing that’s bugging me is the song sounds too compressed as an MP3, I can hear it ‘breathing’ and it’s really brought out the compression on the vox. But I can’t be bothered fixing it at the mo. It’s just a rough anyway.

Sometimes it starts with a thought, a sole line or lyric that might occur to me while driving, cooking, talking, thinking, walking the dog. If I have a pen and paper it may eventually become a song. If I don’t, it’s lost forever. My memory is terrible.

But where ideas for songs don’t happen for me, is when I’m trying to write something. When I sit there and try to write a riff, or come up with a lyric. Just doesn’t work. They have to surprise me.

The next thing I do, is sit down with a couple of pre established ideas and jam them out with my computer, or just with my guitar. I have to do this on my own, I can’t do it when anyone’s watching… isn’t that odd? I sing the the words different ways, play the riffs different speeds, and over different chords (with the help of my computer…). I sing a lyric then see what comes out next – it’s usually something cheesy and rhyming. I write everything down, then try and cut most of the cheese out later on.

Chorus’s seem to come together easiest, verses are hard. If a verse sounds too good on it’s own it usually becomes the chorus of another song for some reason. I don’t know why, it’s never a process of logic. The only logical process that occurs is when I sometimes deliberately force myself not to automatically structure songs ‘Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Bridge Chorus Chorus‘. Oh, and when I think to myself… “Not another one in E! Change the key dagnabbit!”

When I’ve got something I don’t entirely hate, I like to record a rough version of it. (The song “secret” on the music page of this site is an example of this) occasionally I record several rough versions of a song (“Bittersweet Love” is about rough version 5 or 6). These rough versions, once upon a time, would be handed over to “the band” to be learnt, adapted, improved, whinged about, cut or whatever. These days I’m accumulating a pile of rough versions that will eventually be recorded to the very best possible quality that my home studio in the corner of my bedroom will give me, and then I’m going to choose my favourites and call it an album. It will be awesomely indie – I deliberatly moved my studio into the bedroom for that extra bit of indie-cool factor. If I had have had a basement to move it into that would have been even better for that whole ‘underground’ thing eh?

I often think about what makes a good song. I think perhaps – memorability. It’s no use writing a boring song that blends into a thousand other boring songs. If you use this criteria then the best song I’ve ever written in one I wrote many many years ago called Flying Cars. I hate it personally. But it’s the song that most people seem to remember from my former band. The recording of it was the second ever session we’d spent in a studio. The timing is awful, the singing un-tuneful, the entire band is loose as hell. But for some reason, no one forgets that song. I think it may have been the simplicity or just the stupidity of it. “Where is my flying car? I want my flying car… I need my flying car… Where the hell is my Flying car?”

I much prefer my more complicated songs with weird timings and odd bits and pieces, but I’ve slowly realised that I need simple catchy songs too. If I’m going to make an album, even an indie-home-made album, I’ll need the simple songs to draw people in, and just a few of the more interesting songs – to keep me entertained