Reid Rosefelt
Well-known member
Sometimes I have a burst of imagination and I come up with a chorus or some other important part of a song. I don't think this is unusual for songwriters. I sit down with my guitar or in front of my keyboard, and suddenly my vague idea for a song becomes more concrete. But it often happens at times when I am too busy with other things to be able to drop everything and develop the idea.
In those situations, what I used to do was scribble the words and put guitar chords over them. If I went back to the song within in a week or two, that worked. The melody came back to me. But I have notebooks full of songs like that, dating back decades and I have only a general idea of what I sang back then. Meanwhile, the reason I wanted to write the song has passed. It’s rare that I try to finish them.
I read that people played their songs into phones, so I tried that. That did not work for me. I sounded so terrible in those recordings that, more often than not, I thought “This is a bad idea. What was I thinking?” But it might not have been such a bad idea.
In the past month. I got ideas for the choruses for two songs. In both cases, wasn’t possible for me to drop what I was doing and stay with them.
Enter Synth V. In one case, I put the chords into NI’s Session Guitar Picked Acoustic. In the other, which was more of a piano song, I put the chords into Band in a Box. It took me about 15 minutes on both.
With these backing tracks in Cubase, I plonked out my melodies using Keyscape. I dragged these melodies into Synth V and added my lyrics (I prefer to work in standalone). I had to spend a few minutes massaging the vocals so they were decent. When I brought the vocals back into Cubase, I used plugins to improve the vocal and backing track and even threw on IK’s One, my favorite mastering plug, in the master bus, as it ups the volume and makes everything sound better. At this point, I’ve probably spent 45 minutes to an hour on each one. But the result in both cases is that I have versions of the choruses sung on key by women. That is the game plan--I want women to sing these two songs. I'm hoping that I can build my guide track for the singers, starting with these choruses.
I output to mp3s and send it to my working computer, phone and iPad. From time to time, I listened to them. One continued to sound good to me no matter how many times I played it—so that was a keeper. The other melody sounded good, but the lyrics were bad. Every day, I put new lyrics in the second one and sent out another mp3. Bad, bad, bad. I kept trying every day. Finally, I came upon something that didn't cause me too much pain to listen to. And that was enough for me to make the decision that that was the chorus to my song. I’d write everything around it, and hope that in time, I would find a lyric for the chorus that I’d actually like. Despite my issues with the lyrics at this stage, I liked the melody, and the meaning of the lyrics expressed what I wanted to say in the song. And as I worked on the song, I finally found words for the chorus that I liked.
In those situations, what I used to do was scribble the words and put guitar chords over them. If I went back to the song within in a week or two, that worked. The melody came back to me. But I have notebooks full of songs like that, dating back decades and I have only a general idea of what I sang back then. Meanwhile, the reason I wanted to write the song has passed. It’s rare that I try to finish them.
I read that people played their songs into phones, so I tried that. That did not work for me. I sounded so terrible in those recordings that, more often than not, I thought “This is a bad idea. What was I thinking?” But it might not have been such a bad idea.
In the past month. I got ideas for the choruses for two songs. In both cases, wasn’t possible for me to drop what I was doing and stay with them.
Enter Synth V. In one case, I put the chords into NI’s Session Guitar Picked Acoustic. In the other, which was more of a piano song, I put the chords into Band in a Box. It took me about 15 minutes on both.
With these backing tracks in Cubase, I plonked out my melodies using Keyscape. I dragged these melodies into Synth V and added my lyrics (I prefer to work in standalone). I had to spend a few minutes massaging the vocals so they were decent. When I brought the vocals back into Cubase, I used plugins to improve the vocal and backing track and even threw on IK’s One, my favorite mastering plug, in the master bus, as it ups the volume and makes everything sound better. At this point, I’ve probably spent 45 minutes to an hour on each one. But the result in both cases is that I have versions of the choruses sung on key by women. That is the game plan--I want women to sing these two songs. I'm hoping that I can build my guide track for the singers, starting with these choruses.
I output to mp3s and send it to my working computer, phone and iPad. From time to time, I listened to them. One continued to sound good to me no matter how many times I played it—so that was a keeper. The other melody sounded good, but the lyrics were bad. Every day, I put new lyrics in the second one and sent out another mp3. Bad, bad, bad. I kept trying every day. Finally, I came upon something that didn't cause me too much pain to listen to. And that was enough for me to make the decision that that was the chorus to my song. I’d write everything around it, and hope that in time, I would find a lyric for the chorus that I’d actually like. Despite my issues with the lyrics at this stage, I liked the melody, and the meaning of the lyrics expressed what I wanted to say in the song. And as I worked on the song, I finally found words for the chorus that I liked.
