Comments on: Trifonic: When Is A Song Done?

By: redgnu

redgnu — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:18:11 +0000

First of all: really cool that you share your creative process.

Seeing this video, reminded me of my ongoing struggle, to actually "create" a song. Like from start to end, with progress.

Let me explain a little further, I work with ableton live mostly, and most of the time in session view.

So what happens, is that, say, I start with a drum beat, then create a bass loop, and maybe some strings to acomply it.

At that point, either of two things can happen:
1. I end up trying to add more and more sounds together (making it into a cacophony).
2. I start creating a lot of small variations on that first loops.

What I would like to know, is how to turn a bunch of loops into a song. How to get some progress into it. Are there some guidlines / rules that you use? Like song patterns (intro - chorus - bridge, etc.). Or is it just a matter of having a theme, or object that you want to "describe" with a song?

By: Torley

Torley — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:15:31 +0000

I'm so glad you shared your candid thoughts on this, LT! It's such a universal topic for anyone who… creates. I struggled with it for a great many years before finding acceptance: a song is never really “done”. But at some point, like a child, you send it out into the world. It may come back to you remixed, it may take on other lives of its own — and heck, it can be remastered (which is not just “icing on the cake”, it's vital to presenting music) — but what pleases me the most is that I *know* where my song has traveled. For example, someone writes to me with encouraging words saying “I found out about your music from so-and-so…”

Especially for the more editing-centric types, let me know if you relate: I'm sometimes tempted to keep applying one more little stuttery glitch, one more variation in harmony, but altho those details contribute to the overall appearance like one-day stubble, I eventually feel the song wrestling free of my grasp and wanting to be set free at last. This is a tough one because it sounds vague, abstract, very gut-oriented and certainly about intuition, which is why ultimately, I present my reasons, my examples as the music itself… not words.

This may not have been such a feasible, practical view in earlier years, but thanks to the flexibility technology gives us to constantly shape art, it's really a process — or a continuum or wave — not a point. (Kinda quantum mechanical, I know.)

By: nick

nick — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:44:04 +0000

a guy i write with thought it up while we were in the middle of mixing a record once, and it stuck. we were always operating on a 150-250% rule beforehand.

By: cheekyrapide

cheekyrapide — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 07:00:26 +0000

This is such a *big* subject. As a total nobody, I've listened to two great inspirations talk about “doneness” and the idea of 'song' – Roger O'Donnell from the Cure (who did his first album on just one one Moog Voyager) and Robert Pollard from Guided by Voices (who believed in writing one song a day). I came away from both discussions feeling that a 'less is more' approach was the way to go. I guess that's the idea of a self imposed deadline (which I've never been able to enforce). It's also sometimes hard to apply that in electronic music when production is so intrinsically linked with the end composition; after all, you always want to see how the new Ableton Live 8 Corpus plugin will sound with your loop!

I'm really enjoying your posts; please, please keep them up!

By: Morgan Williams

Morgan Williams — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:09:34 +0000

In Management Science there's something called the "pareto principle" which says that in manufacturing systems, 80% of the defects, mistakes and inefficiencies in a product can be attributed to 20% of the process defects. i.e. you solve 20% of the process inefficiencies, and you solve 80% of the problems with the product.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_analysis

By: LT

LT — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:02:01 +0000

Nope, they're not surround speakers – Brian just has his back to our workstation.

By: entasmiquity

entasmiquity — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:01:25 +0000

That's a good suggestion. One thing that I struggle with when a
project drags on is that the vision almost necessrily changes. The
sound I was trying to capture in 1995 is not the same sound I might
try to capture now. Your “2011 remix” idea is a good way to work
around that.

By: LT

LT — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:01:12 +0000

I actually think “can't improve it” and “will ruin it if I do more” are pretty similar rules, and smart approaches.

Completely agree that narrowing down your options is absolutely essential, whether by limiting yourself to a certain concept, mood, set of software/hardware tools, or some other means.

By: LT

LT — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:54:55 +0000

15 years?? Wow. That is some serious patience.

My suggestion: Whatever you have by Christmas 2010, just declare it “done” and let the world hear it. You can always do a remix for Christmas 2011 if you feel the need to refine it further.

The nice thing about tracks that are for your own projects is that, even if you declare them “done” at a particular point in time, you can always go back for a reinterpretation. That's what we did with Emergence and the subsequent Remergence EP.

By: LT

LT — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:43:06 +0000

Interesting… When we were working on Emergence, we found ourselves with a lot of tracks “in progress” for a long time. We weren't exactly sure where we wanted to go with everything musically. But once we finished Parks On Fire and a couple other tracks, we suddenly felt we had a clear creative direction and were able to finish up everything else relatively quickly.