I can already imagine the reactions to saying that halfway through the month, I'm starting over. However, I have been pursuing an idea for two weeks now, and it has started to feel like a dead end. I didn't know how to take it anywhere in terms of riffs or chord progressions. The idea I started with doesn't fit as a chorus, so it became the verse. But a song has to go somewhere, and this doesn't.
There's an idea encapsulated in all this that my work here is just practice, where practice isn't the final performance. It's preparing for the performance. As I said in the previous post, I'm working off the idea that I just need to start writing songs, and write lots of them whether they're good or bad, to learn and to gain skills related to songwriting.
In some ways, I've made the task even more difficult by deciding to record the music too, rather than just sketch the song out and maybe transcribe it into GuitarPro. But that difficulty can also be good -- struggling against learning versus the learning feeling too easy increases the durability of learning, according to research. [Reference]
Let's go over some things I learned from this attempt and so far this month:
Programming drums and having good rhythm on something like a midi controller turns out to be hard -- as with most of these things, I haven't tried to do it before, and I haven't tried to learn drums before. I do have some hand rhythm coordination from drilling downpicking rhythms with my right hand on guitar. But it didn't translate into immediate skills on the midi controller.
A suggestion I had was to start looking at how songs put together drums on Songsterr, and so I've been digging into inspirations and songs that sound good but keep a similar simple structure. There's even the ability to grab the 8 bars of a drum groove from the Songsterr GP export into GuitarPro, as a better way to work on figuring out rhythm under a verse or a chorus. This is a lot less "shot in the dark" than listening to drum loops/samples in GarageBand and trying to imagine how it'd fit my music. I think a lot of drum loops are meant for modern pop music where there's a lot less variation and fills going on in the drum track, but I am going for the opposite. I want to have that feeling that a drummer has played along and is helping to drive the energy or pacing of the song, rather than a "flat" or robotic level of engagement and accommodation from the drums through the whole track.
At first I wasn't sure whether this was going to be useful, but I got introduced to this concept in week 1 and didn't write about it yet. I now have a basic skeleton of a track in GarageBand that I can "Save as" to start a new song, that includes spots for left and right rhythm guitars wired up to the correct input from my HX Stomp, a spot for a midi drum track, and at the top, an audio track where I can drop in a "reference track" to refer to for mixing. I haven't yet learned much about mixing and mastering tracks because I haven't had enough to justify it. The things I did see when I was trying to learn more about that, seemed like they were extra plugins or things built into Logic, and I'm not sure how much I'll be able to do with what is just built in to GarageBand. But this doesn't have to sound like a polished track. I can accept that it can be rough and that I've accomplished something, when I get to the point of worrying about mixing and mastering.
I haven't yet decided whether I'm going to try to include a midi bass track in this, since I'm not satisfied with the bass instruments built into GarageBand for this kind of music, and I'm not going to go buy a plugin for it.
This is just a quick idea that I found interesting enough to talk about here. If you have a given chord progression, say of 4 chords in a key, you can choose to "smooth out" the transitions by using inversions so that more notes carry from one chord to another. For cases where you want the chords to feel smooth and connected rather than disconnected or big jumps in pitch, this can be useful. Before this, on guitar I would use inversions because they were more accessible on a spot on the guitar neck. Now I'm thinking more about what notes carry. A lot of folk music seems to make use of this with arpeggiated chords on guitar, but I'm thinking more like synth notes and heavy chords underneath the main melody for this kind of prog-metal-adjacent music I'm trying to make.
I'm convinced that my mind likes systems and understanding how the puzzle fits together. That's how I work in my day job and how I am able to solve complex problems there. This makes it hard to learn new things -- it's hard to learn a little bit about everything and apply that learning to solve problems. Sometimes my approach seems a bit scattershot, but I also go deep on the things that trip me up, and that leads to an uneven learning landscape. It's harder, because of this natural learning style, for me to keep everything "dead simple" and agree to just try to focus on the next step when I haven't yet figured out "the whole thing." What "the whole thing is" for writing instrumental music in this style, I'm not sure yet. I do know that when I see videos of folks recording into their DAW doing similar styles of guitar-based, instrumental prog metal music, I'm not yet understanding all the things that they're doing, whether it's theory or song structure or recording techniques. I have a lot of unknowns left to learn.
Having the meta-awareness of how I'm learning this while I learning is also allowing me to tune a bit. I don't have to get stuck and keep trying to bang on a dead end, as I've mentioned in this post's intro. I can course correct and go back to another spot where I can get more learning done for the limited time I have this month.
I'm not throwing this out. It'll still live on a save file. Someday I might come back to it. For now though, I'm going to start over with a new idea.