Your process

[bobbydj]

1. Start messing with instruments until I come up with something I like - a groove if you will

2. Turn on all my gear.

3. Hear a hum somewhere in the chain.

4. Turn everything on and off until I decide it's not the gear.

5. Start turning off lights, electronics, anything that could be the culprit.

6. Say, "fuck it" and decide to just record.

7. Make sure instrument is in tune.

8. Decide I need a different instrument/sound for the groove.

9. Get the new instrument going.

10. Now I Forget the groove was.

11. Decide it's too late to record and go to bed.

I have like hundreds of these "songs."

#10 - I'm fucking weepin'!

Me, first I kind of 'perhapsthemoon' it. Next I pretty much 'Huskerdude' it.

More recently though, I just sit down and start a loop, play bass over it (a vile, distorted thing), press my slap-back pedal on (into which is plugged my electret mic) and sing. Something I love emerges within minutes. Or at least this has been the formula since August last year. Miraculous. It can't last, I swear. I don't know what turned me around from a SLAG scenario to this prolific machine. It coincided with me buying a 424 and my slap-back pedal thingwy.

I write lyrics there and then - tune first, lyrics next. Mad crap - surreal doggerel. Insane, twisted felderal. Just jot it down, quickquickquick. It comes out like The Fall ( )!

All that - bass, drum loop and vocals - goes down onto track one of the 424. So I have to get the levels right. Stressful! Actually, no. I track with cans (I have to - the neighbours are twunts). That leaves me 3 tracks, which, over the subsequent months, are invariably tracked with guitars (2 and 3) and b-vox (4).

Weeks (sometimes months) later I mix 'em.

So much for the 'band' I call 'Full Crumb'. My other "band", The Destruktors, is totally a straight to stereo cassette affair. Tends to be keyboard and sample based, though I'll sing too sometimes. This 'band' is a much darker bastard than Full Crumb. Influences are BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Throbbing Gristle, '80s synth pop and I dunno - Baader Meinhoff, esp. Astrid Proll.

Which leaves Trilemma. This is definitely a posh band - high fi - 'cos we record 99% of our stuff on a R8.

[SLAG]

SLAG LOL!!

I think everyone can relate to that in some way..

Me :

1) Girlfriend writes her poems

2) Boyfriend makes noises into the Mac

3) We sing the poems and edit them till they fit the music/mood

4) Then we have crazy sex to the music

5) If the sex is good for us both we mixdown, if not we can it!

Damn, that sounds great! Does your girlfriend work with other engineers?

[thenumber]

with the band:

one of us will bring in a song written on our respective instrument. we jam with it, fuck it up, and write parts on the other instruments. sometimes its a whole song thats brought in, sometimes just 10 seconds of one. sometimes we'll molest other half-written songs and insert them into the new one.

with the other band:

ill write a guitar part, or many related parts, or someone brings in a piano part, and we structure and write parts that enhance the structure.

with myself:

ill be fucking around with an algorhythm in puredata, and send a midi representation of it to renoise, where i assign samples/vsts to the channels. sometimes its the other way around, and puredata is used as a reciever or effect. guitar is jammed along, sections of it are sampled and fucked up and added to the song. ill make 1 or 2 fully realized sections of the song, then start from scratch for the 3rd using the exact same sounds. transitions are then attempted, usually resulting in 4-5 more sections. then the whole thing is listened to on loop for about 4 hours, while i diagram on paper the path the song takes, and what it SHOULD be taking, then i attempt to realize that. then i put it away, come back a few months later, and chop and rape what i had to add it to something new that i like better. etc etc

[YOUR KONG]

heh - not to ride on Slag's coattails, but if it's a bad night:
1) Put kid to bed, iron clothes, etc
2) Sit down with tune in head
3) Start recording software (you can see where this is going...)
4) Play keyboard. Wonder why no sound is coming out
5) Try it with other keyboard. Try it with other tone module. Disconnect and reconnect MIDI cables
6) Swear profusely
7) Read manual
8) Get all my crap to work via some ridiculousness magic-ish nonsense (oh, I need minimize and then maximize the window! of course! ...huh?!)
9) Record for 10 minutes, realize it's way too late and go to bed
10) On the way upstairs, promise self that when I make it, everything will be recorded live in a room to a friggin' two-track, like they did in the old days.

If it's a good night, then...I usually come up with hooks/lines in my head while I'm doing normal stuff. So I slap those down and throw down a loop for a beat, and whatever else I need but don't want to play. Listen to 4 bars gives me ideas for the arrangement, for the next four bars, etc. It all comes together when I listen to it.

I try not to mess with fx while I'm recording & arranging, but if something *has* to have a dub delay, then I'll pop that in there.

I'm not sure I'm satisfied with that process, though, because unless you have a clear vision it can lead to lots of meandering. For one of my next tracks I want to write and arrange it on piano, THEN record it and slap down the synth sounds. Sometimes I try to record everything in MIDI (same thing kinda), but my system has huge latency problems that only get worse when I use MIDI, which is the opposite of what you would expect...

[Greenlander]

I come up with a melody which will be a verse or chorus or "other". I might attach it to something I already have or wait until something occurs to me that might fit with it. I them fret over the structure of the song and reach absolutely no conclusions. So I leave it for a few weeks, months, sometimes years until my helpful subconscious decides how it should be. Then I bring it to the band and at some stage we might decide to record it. I then panic and write the lyrics the night before the recording session.

Easy.

[bluetarp]

I've got a guy comes once or twice a week with a couple of chords and a lyric sheet. We do a tune. A couple of days later I mix it down. The next day I listen again and hate it. But before I get to do anything he comes by again with a couple more chords and a lyric sheet.

Repeat... we're actually gonna publish this stuff.

I've never written a tune in my life. It's really all I can do to write a bass part.

So breaking it down, what we do is:

Arrange

Click <or> drums and guitar if guitarist is avalable - if not then

Drums

Guitar

Bass

Lead Vocal

Guitar

Guitar

Chick Vocals, chick vocals, chick vocals, chick vocals, it's never right but good enough.

That's a good five hours' work right there.

Five hours mixing.

Three and a half minutes of extreme dissatisfaction.

Repeat.

We've got a deadline. I really appreciate the folks who say it's never done. I can't imagine letting this stuff go out in the shape it's in but a lot of it's gonna have to.

Keep it fun and don't take it too seriously - i guess....

[Jackson Michaels]

Lyrics are usually me saying something funny to a friend of mine and then thinking about it for awhile and deciding to write a song about it. I forget it untill I try to go to sleep and I don't let myself go to sleep untill I've written lyrics, sometimes if they don't come out good enough I'll try and rewrite them immediately.


Ideally it goes like this for the music (I play in a one-man electropunk band):

1. I practice for about an hour and a half in the afternoon and stop when The Simpsons comes on at 5.
2. I play bass or guitar while I watch The Simpsons and a melody or chord progression or a hook will turn up.
3.I keep playing this and doing variations on it untill I have enough parts for a song.
4.I go back to the bedroom and come up with a beat on the drum machine for the song and maybe start programming
5.another episode of The Simpsons comes on at 6, I watch this episode and eat at the same time.
6.I go back to my room and write all the parts into the sequencer and put in the program changes and sequence the parts together and I have a song.
7.I practice it untill I have the lyrics memorized, I usually judge how good the song is by how quickly I'm able to remember it when I play (I think this will probably indicate how well the audience will remember it at a performance)

[JES]

Man, you are some tortured artists. Tortured by your gear, at least. I try and set aside a little time now and then to get stuff set up right so that when I'm recording, I don't have to think about things like hum. Doesn't always work -- right now I'm in DC offset hell, but it's a tried and true technique.

--JES