Don't forget about songs
(02 Mar 05)
How do I know?
Well, when I started to write songs, I guess I was in a situation that a lot of people are in when they start out writing… I had some basic chops, I had a lot of role-models (I was a huge fan of Steve Morse already, and of course I wanted to write something similar to his music) etc.
The first songs I wanted to write were quite complex (considering my skills at that time). I sat down with some paper, a pen and my guitar and started to write little bits. Parts that I thought sounded cool. I had no clue how to approach song-writing, so I just tried to combine a bunch of little ideas into a song.
The net result? A song that sounded very awkward, and I wasn't even able to play it all the way through, cuz I had put it together from several little bits.
It got even worse later… I started to study music theory, started to listen to more complex music. I tried to challenge myself, and put together something impressive.
I remember when I told a friend about mixing time signatures, and he went "Well, wouldn't it be cool if someone wrote a tune that went: 1 bar of 2/4, one bar of3/4, one bar of 4/4, one bar of 5/4 etc, up to, say, 15/8 or something?" Then he laughed. I didn't laugh. Mainly because I had already written that song. I couldn't play it though. So I knew I had to change SOMETHING.
What helped me was that old acoustic guitar I had bought from a friend. I used to sit outside in the evenings, on the old playground where I used to hang out, all alone, and play some chord progressions.
Then, suddenly, I came up with this 4 chord-progression with open chords. It sounded very nice to me, and it was fun to play it over and over.
After a while I rushed home and recorded it with my old tape recorder… 10 minutes of that chord progression and another one which I made up from the same chords. Then I started jamming over it.
It was a slow progression, rather "majestic". So when I did my usual routine of playing all my fast licks over it, it didn't sound very appropiate. So I just relaxed and started using 4 or 5 notes of the major scale to create a nice melody that fit the chords. And it sounded very nice. I enjoyed that so much.
And after an hour or so, I had 3 or 4 different melodies that actually were like a vocal melody. And I was like "Man, I think I just wrote my first REAL song, because this sounds very nice" (and for a change, I was able to play it myself)
(By the way, years later I played that chord progression to a friend of mine, country-singer W. Malende. And he liked it enough to ask me to write lyrics for it. It turned out to be the first song of mine that he recorded vocals for, and those vocals were based on the melody I had written back then. Also, even later the same chord progression made a re-appearance in my song "Canyon Of Spirits". If you have heard that song, you know that it's a slow song which has some rather simple melodies and no shred-licks. I am very proud of the song though, since it does have melody and emotion, IMO, and shredding over it wouldn't have worked at all.)
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