DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

So, one of my new goals is to make a CD of original music. The first tune is “in the can” but still suffering at the inept hands of an amateur producer; once he’s done fiddling I’ll release the song here.

That leaves me about 6 more songs to write. To begin, I’m trying a new approach, which I’ve dubbed “cut-and-paste songwriting.”

Songs are constructed from parts: a verse thing, a chorus thing, a bridge thing, maybe a solo, maybe an intro, maybe an outro. My old band used to create these parts during improv jams, which we’d record and subsequently mine for usable material.

In a jam, one person throws down an idea, someone else picks it up, plays along, changes it up, throws it back, etc. Collaboration happens in realtime.

Now that my bandmates have all grown up and moved away, jam time is hard to come by. So we’re doing it virtually instead: I set up a low-fi version of my recording gear at my band’s low-fi studio by wiring up three mics on my drum kit (Bonham style!). I put one mic in the kick drum and hung two overheads, mixed them to stereo, squashed the signal half to death with my compressor, and recorded the remains.

I tracked a couple minutes of each of four grooves, taken from my own groove library. For example:

Sanitized For Your Protection (drums excerpt)
Stomach Grapes (drums excerpt)

I sent these drums-only MP3s to my personal bassist, who laid down some great bass lines. For example:
Sanitized For Your Protection (drums + bass)
Stomach Grapes (drums + bass)

We have finished three such parts so far, and there’s a rumor of a 4th. I will attempt to add a dulcimer melody to some of these, and leave some for the guitarist. (As Andrew says, guitar is just a garnish anyway.)

We’ll exchange another round of grooves in a month or so, and then I’ll begin assembling them into songs by cutting and looping various sections and pasting them into arrangements. I’m sure we’ll be refining the parts and especially the transitions as we hone in on something we like; this initial assembly will just get us the basic outline of the song.

This approach gives us some flexibility: if the melody or lyrics demand a longer or shorter verse/chorus/whatever, we can make the edits easily before tracking the final arrangement. This gives all the players an opportunity to have a voice in the song structure. It’s a response to the sessions last Fall, in which the guitarist had to supply melodies and lyrics to fit arrangements that had already been finalized; the compromise was entirely one-sided. The new approach, if it works, should allow for more-equal collaboration.