Yesterday was awesome. As some of you may know, my friends Fred, Pat and I were playing the "20 Song Game".
I woke up around 7:30 am for breakfast, made a lunch and met Fred at the studio at 8.
We went to see Pat to establish some rules for the game. We established different keys and tempos for every song ;
Ex;
Song 1; F minor 135 BPM
Once we did that for 20 songs, we were ready to start the game. We all went to our separate studios and at 10:30 sharp, we started.
It was 12 hours of writing, no time for second guessing my ideas or thinking : "Is this good enough". First idea that came to mind, I would record. I was obviously doing "Ghost Lyrics" (Lyrics that you replace later on) because I didn't have time to think of anything clever. It was more about the idea of the music and the vocal melody. I had prepared a "Songwriting Template" in my recording software and placed microphones and cables so it was basically pre-soundchecked. All the instruments were already pre-processed and my faders were pre-mixed in the software...It was basically plug and play.
I was recording drums, then moving to acoustic and electric guitars. Would do a quick bass track. Sometimes I'd play piano and then I'd end up with around 7-8 minutes to come up with a vocal melody and record it.....really intense! What saved time was that I would only record a verse, pre chorus and a chorus because the rest pretty much writes itself out once you have that. I also threw in back vocals haha
In situations like these, time is the enemy. Every second counts and you have to make the most of it. I ended up writing/recording 16 songs. At the end the day, we bounced everything, met in my studio and had a listening session of our work. Everyone's work was really creative and we all ended up with awesome songs. I really had a blast. I'll definitely use a few of these songs for my future albums.
My brain was seriously in Overdrive after that day. I didn't get a good night of sleep but I still feel awesome.
That experience really made me realize that we often second guess ourselves, which is not always a bad thing, but in many cases, it's a reason why we can have writer's block and not be as creative as we should.
Later
John
ps: there might be typos, I'm in lazy mode and I don't feel like re-reading the whole thing I just wrote hahaha