TL;DR: Do any of you find there is a conflict between the style of music you hear in your brain day in and day out, and want to hear realized, and the music that just naturally comes out of you when you're not thinking? If so, how did/do you pick which one to follow? Do you do both/all? Do you try to make them work together, even when they seem diametrically opposed? Things you've learned along the way about any of the above?
Long Version: I started out playing guitar and being in bands, coming to electronic music later with NIN and then getting into people like Ben Frost, BT, Burial, Rafael Irisarri and Tim Hecker. Since then i've had this sound in my head that combines the structure of progressive and math rock, and post-metal with the extreme audio processing of organic sound sources (ie, guitar and vocals) like the artists mentioned above. This has been my driving force since 2006, intensifying in 2018, sometimes to the neglect of my guitar skills. However, every song seems like mostly a failure, like the bits aren't connecting properly. I'll become very emotionally attached to these pieces for a while, but then can only see how disjointed they are after a year or so.
But starting in 2018, with amp sim technology really taking off, i started to get back into guitar and creating hundreds of demos just with that, and found that i not only had a very eccentric and personal style with the instrument but that full-blown, elaborate songs would just materialize after jamming for a couple of hours. My hard drive is now full of single riffs, a few bits that relate, and fully-formed, 8+ minute long songs that just need bass and drums. But the sound is very organic, and doesn't work well with synths and drum machines. It's very post/prog metal, band-in-a-room. When one of these songs gets completed with fake acoustic drums and bass guitar, everything sounds like it just 'fits', like the pieces go together. It's suspiciously easy. As such, i don't feel very attached to the songs i've made in this style.
This led me to stall two years ago and i've made very little since as i've been struggling to make the two work together and failing, or trying to discard one approach for the other, which i can't seem to commit to. It has created a massive problem for my creative life, and i feel unproductive. I have very few IRL musician friends and my normie friends just find it goofy (which it is) that i'm troubling myself so much over something that should just be fun. So i would really appreciate any insight the KVR community of artists could offer from those who have been in similar situations, or have a particular angle to see this that maybe i'm just not getting.
So...which is it? What's in your head or what's in your heart?
The Sound in Your Head vs The Sound in Your Heart
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- KVRist
- Topic Starter
- 235 posts since 5 Jan, 2018 from Asheville, NC, USA
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- KVRian
- 598 posts since 20 Oct, 2023
Nothing more nothing less. If it's not fun it gets discarded. Either im dancing, bobbing my head, or my eyes are widening up because it's the "That's It!" feeling or all of the above. Extra points if the song gets stuck and im singing it all day.
Now do these songs come from ny head? My heart? I don't know and don't care. It could come from my ass if it wants just so long as i feel it.
Those who wank on their instruments are just having fun playing and mastering their tool.
Those who write heartfelt songs feel it and thus its a release and that leads to relaxation making room for fun.
From the heart? From the head? The real question is do you feel it. Do you feel it enough where it becomes energy.
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- KVRAF
- 25053 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
For me there is no 'which is it' or dichotomy. I consider music music and don't draw red lines between 'genres'.
First, I had my stuff pretty much together as a guitarist before I considered that maybe what I ought to be doing was exploring composing and working on some material. I had been a musician for ten years before it fully dawned on me (even as I had an epiphany around the time I started on the instrument (moving from drums), hearing music in my head that wasn't an imprint of extant music regurgitated as it were.). Before that, as a student I did create some small pieces kind of emulating the more avant 20th century guitar music I knew from, but I wasn't... full of myself in this regard.
The first I remember someone calling me "composer" was after I had done a four-part thing on my friend from school's Minimoog and a Teac 4 track reel-to-reel. He was a composition major at SFCM. I had moved from guitar performance to electronic music lab for the one semester I was there. So my first substantial efforts were that, 4 parts/4 tracks through-composed (as a teen there was a Minimoog which I borrowed 6 or so yrs later afterwards, so I spent the miserable Charlotte summer doing that, as my girlfriend and I regrouped after a problem out here.). Point of that being, this was a definite departure from little guitar bagatelles or what-not, or composing from guitar at all, as was 'electronic music lab'. I knew from being the 'programmer' of that Minimoog in an original 'prog' band, but not a lot else.
But apart from this kind of thing (the moogs weren't mine and the one in the SF house died), I had to mount a show I could get people enthused/amused about to hear anything I made. So I was doing more than one thing by now, I'd sometimes write purely from a guitar basis; sometimes I thought stuff up in the abstract, very much more explorative than the former; once I spent 3 weeks on a sequence on the first MacIntosh, jerry-rigged MIDI to synths in MIDI's nascency. But I cut my teeth as a free improviser with my newfound friend doing it daily with the idea of creating compositions on the spot. Others were involved, and the interplay between musicians with differing backgrounds striving to make something good happen in the moment was invaluable.
Before I considered to take myself more as a composer than a performing seal, I was a good improviser, I could create melody and a line telling a story years before I wrote in earnest. I was always noodling. It annoyed the crap out of my guitar professor who didn't quite get I could do that without losing attention to what was being said.
Frankly I think that playing with people, as opposed to being isolated or in practically a sort of vacuum (even as I was inventing myself on the instrument (electric) without much exposure to others), is crucial.
So: the things I make now I don't like to belabor, and seldom has there been planning or schema. The majority of it I make something up, go left to right with no second guessing (albeit sometimes punching in where the initial first take ends) and then part-writing the other parts by ear. As to the latter-day paradigm, a DAW and soft instruments primarily, it was a few years before I could mix at all. I don't consider mixing and orchestration to be two jobs but intertwined. I can think like a guitarist but mainly I don't when I construct something. I don't necessarily scheme out a lead guitar part like it's going to agree with the guitar's layout, even.
Back to you: it strikes me that your description of your first way of working involves a struggle with drums and bass. When I was young, I had like a single persona to draw from, so all I did was something I could play all of live as a supposed classical guitarist.
Having been a kid drummer, not any world-beater but competent didn't enter into it at all. Now it does, majorly!
I studied bass players and drummers once I was in the DAW constructing. AND EDITING. (I just watched a 'making of Flex-able' with Steve Vai who described his epiphany when he first saw Zappa take the razor blade to a 1/4" stereo mixdown. I did that bit after SFCM (my focus was tape music), I learned editing the old way first. Editing opens up whole new worlds...)
Eventually there gets to be multiple personae, including as pertains to instruments I don't play particularly well, to instruments I have never touched. But I have worked with horn players, studied multiphonics asking questions, etc. on top of years with a pianist striving to compose in real time.
First, I had my stuff pretty much together as a guitarist before I considered that maybe what I ought to be doing was exploring composing and working on some material. I had been a musician for ten years before it fully dawned on me (even as I had an epiphany around the time I started on the instrument (moving from drums), hearing music in my head that wasn't an imprint of extant music regurgitated as it were.). Before that, as a student I did create some small pieces kind of emulating the more avant 20th century guitar music I knew from, but I wasn't... full of myself in this regard.
The first I remember someone calling me "composer" was after I had done a four-part thing on my friend from school's Minimoog and a Teac 4 track reel-to-reel. He was a composition major at SFCM. I had moved from guitar performance to electronic music lab for the one semester I was there. So my first substantial efforts were that, 4 parts/4 tracks through-composed (as a teen there was a Minimoog which I borrowed 6 or so yrs later afterwards, so I spent the miserable Charlotte summer doing that, as my girlfriend and I regrouped after a problem out here.). Point of that being, this was a definite departure from little guitar bagatelles or what-not, or composing from guitar at all, as was 'electronic music lab'. I knew from being the 'programmer' of that Minimoog in an original 'prog' band, but not a lot else.
But apart from this kind of thing (the moogs weren't mine and the one in the SF house died), I had to mount a show I could get people enthused/amused about to hear anything I made. So I was doing more than one thing by now, I'd sometimes write purely from a guitar basis; sometimes I thought stuff up in the abstract, very much more explorative than the former; once I spent 3 weeks on a sequence on the first MacIntosh, jerry-rigged MIDI to synths in MIDI's nascency. But I cut my teeth as a free improviser with my newfound friend doing it daily with the idea of creating compositions on the spot. Others were involved, and the interplay between musicians with differing backgrounds striving to make something good happen in the moment was invaluable.
Before I considered to take myself more as a composer than a performing seal, I was a good improviser, I could create melody and a line telling a story years before I wrote in earnest. I was always noodling. It annoyed the crap out of my guitar professor who didn't quite get I could do that without losing attention to what was being said.
Frankly I think that playing with people, as opposed to being isolated or in practically a sort of vacuum (even as I was inventing myself on the instrument (electric) without much exposure to others), is crucial.
So: the things I make now I don't like to belabor, and seldom has there been planning or schema. The majority of it I make something up, go left to right with no second guessing (albeit sometimes punching in where the initial first take ends) and then part-writing the other parts by ear. As to the latter-day paradigm, a DAW and soft instruments primarily, it was a few years before I could mix at all. I don't consider mixing and orchestration to be two jobs but intertwined. I can think like a guitarist but mainly I don't when I construct something. I don't necessarily scheme out a lead guitar part like it's going to agree with the guitar's layout, even.
Back to you: it strikes me that your description of your first way of working involves a struggle with drums and bass. When I was young, I had like a single persona to draw from, so all I did was something I could play all of live as a supposed classical guitarist.
Having been a kid drummer, not any world-beater but competent didn't enter into it at all. Now it does, majorly!
I studied bass players and drummers once I was in the DAW constructing. AND EDITING. (I just watched a 'making of Flex-able' with Steve Vai who described his epiphany when he first saw Zappa take the razor blade to a 1/4" stereo mixdown. I did that bit after SFCM (my focus was tape music), I learned editing the old way first. Editing opens up whole new worlds...)
Eventually there gets to be multiple personae, including as pertains to instruments I don't play particularly well, to instruments I have never touched. But I have worked with horn players, studied multiphonics asking questions, etc. on top of years with a pianist striving to compose in real time.
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- KVRAF
- 7426 posts since 9 Jan, 2003 from Saint Louis MO
My short answer is, the heart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etviGf1uWlg
Longer answer: sometimes I make particular plans for a composition, album concept, patch idea, etc. If I try too hard to follow that it feels like I'm forcing it and it doesn't work. So I just go where things take me in the moment.
For a while I thought of that in sort of Taoist terms. Like water in the path of a riverbed, the path of least resistance, going with the flow, stream of consciousness if you will. (Or even if you won't, I will.)
Then I heard Todd Barton talking about "following the sound." I think this is a recurring theme with him. The first time I heard him talk about it, I wasn't really following and not sure if he was high, just weird, or it was my own exhaustion. I made the connection sometime later (won't rule out the other things thought).
But the "head" part can be useful for generating ideas to try which might lead to those inspiring sounds, and a good balance of theoretical knowledge and practice putting it into play makes it easier and smoother to build off of that inspiration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etviGf1uWlg
Longer answer: sometimes I make particular plans for a composition, album concept, patch idea, etc. If I try too hard to follow that it feels like I'm forcing it and it doesn't work. So I just go where things take me in the moment.
For a while I thought of that in sort of Taoist terms. Like water in the path of a riverbed, the path of least resistance, going with the flow, stream of consciousness if you will. (Or even if you won't, I will.)
Then I heard Todd Barton talking about "following the sound." I think this is a recurring theme with him. The first time I heard him talk about it, I wasn't really following and not sure if he was high, just weird, or it was my own exhaustion. I made the connection sometime later (won't rule out the other things thought).
But the "head" part can be useful for generating ideas to try which might lead to those inspiring sounds, and a good balance of theoretical knowledge and practice putting it into play makes it easier and smoother to build off of that inspiration.
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- KVRAF
- 10759 posts since 20 Nov, 2003 from Lost and Spaced
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- KVRAF
- 5690 posts since 20 Mar, 2012 from Babbleon
i don't hear preformed sounds, melodies, music in my head
i don't dream of them either like keith richards did with satisfaction
or paul mccartney with yesterday
if by "heart" you mean emotion, it depends
i remember that when i was making my socalled "songs"
there was no real plans
there were "steps" though
1. select a random tempo
2. create a randomized drum pattern
3. create a randomized bass pattern over the drum pattern
4. create a randomized melody over the drum and bass pattern
5. create 2 or more other sections using the same 3 steps above
6. create riffs that's inspired by the melodies
7. randomize the sequence of the sections to get a song structure
8. create the lyrics
step 8 is the hardest step
the melodies affects what words will come
the words may be emotional or...
not at all
even though i use randomizers everywhere
all the choices are affected by my music collection and
everything i've heard before
the problem is that it's not easy to just be a "songwriter"
well, a really good one, i mean
i don't dream of them either like keith richards did with satisfaction
or paul mccartney with yesterday
if by "heart" you mean emotion, it depends
i remember that when i was making my socalled "songs"
there was no real plans
there were "steps" though
1. select a random tempo
2. create a randomized drum pattern
3. create a randomized bass pattern over the drum pattern
4. create a randomized melody over the drum and bass pattern
5. create 2 or more other sections using the same 3 steps above
6. create riffs that's inspired by the melodies
7. randomize the sequence of the sections to get a song structure
8. create the lyrics
step 8 is the hardest step
the melodies affects what words will come
the words may be emotional or...
not at all
even though i use randomizers everywhere
all the choices are affected by my music collection and
everything i've heard before
the problem is that it's not easy to just be a "songwriter"
well, a really good one, i mean
ah böwakawa poussé poussé
