# Making A Song Into A Song



## ClockRadio (May 7, 2012)

Here's something that's always fun to hear musicians talk about. When it comes to you personally, what's the general "process" you tend to follow when you write a new song (or song-like-musical-sounding-thing)? Not necessarily the way you come up with ideas for a song, but the actual path you take from idea to the finished product, whatever it may be.

 Some people can think up and record an entire song within a day, some people slowly piece together little unrelated pieces they come up with, and some can rewrite and rerecord the same piece of music dozens of times before they feel done with it. Sometimes a persons music never even gets completed, and the same songs just kind of evolve into new ones over time. There are so many different ways to get that final finished song, and I'm sure someone here has something interesting to say about their way of doing it.


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## ThisisGabe (May 9, 2012)

1. Words
2. Then melody
3. Then writing the chords over the words
4. Then arranging it for the instruments
5. Recording the backing insrumentation
6. Recording the lead vocals over several takes
7. Mixing together the best takes.
8. Mixing/mastering/editing it to a final product. 

I've been making songs since '98.


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## Oly (Jun 9, 2012)

No set process for me.

sometimes I get an idea for lyrics and music together, but not often. Usually music that has lyrics for me, I either writ the lyrics first and then write music after sitting on it for a while that fits to the words, or more often i save them until I write music that I want to put words to and then browse my lyrics until I find something I can fit in.

For lyrics there's a couple ways I write them. sometimes I get the idea to write about a certain concept or topic and start just throwing down words and phrases that relate to it, and moving them around until they have some kind of flow that I like. this method works best when typing on a computer, since you can cut and paste to move stuff around easy and play with the words that way.
the other major way I come up with lyrics, is that I get a phrase or line in my head, write it down, and then just try and continue the narrative. It's worth noting that I don't focus on rhyming typically, and most of my lyrics are written in a somewhat narrative style - either in a first person perspective, or structured like a passage from a story.

For music, depends if I'm working with physical instruments or electronic music.
for instruments, I typically try and come up with a chord progression or set of chord progressions that fit together. Once I've got a structure in that way, I either start writing for other instruments, or more often I start searching for words to go with it. sometimes I work on a melody at the same time, sometimes I jsut go for something that fits rhythmically and just sing it as the root note or talk it.
for electronic music, I usually do one of two things: either I get an idea for a synth line/chord prog/whatevr and make that first, then start building parts to go around it until I've got a wall of sound loop, then start arranging it - copy it a bunch on the timeline, and start hacking parts out, moving them around, creating variation, and composing new parts when I get ideas for them.
the other main way I do electronic stuff is to start with a groove, usually drums and bass or a piano or other polyphonic instrument, and lay out the structure that way. then I start composing more parts, tweaking the arrangement if it needs it, all that kinda stuff.

For electronic music I usually try and mix as I go along, but at the same time I try not to get too bogged down on tweaking things really heavily, as once you start adding more into the song you might find that carefully programmed sound doesn't quite fit with 3 other synths going on top of it. So I try and get everything as close to what I envision the final mix to sound like, but keep it a bit loose until the arrangement and composition is more or less complete. That way I have a stronger base to work off for the mixing process; it's like doing a puzzle that's already half solved in a way. 

I don't do a lot of mixing of recorded instruments as I don't have the facilities to record well, but the process is usually the same as mixing electronic stuff overall. Just the details of what I do to each track change. Usually I'm gonna be a lot more subtle to recorded stuff; the nuance is from the performance, it doesn't need to be programmed in. I make sure the levels of all tracks are balance, add FX where they feel appropriate, compress and EQ things if they need it.

One thing i do a LOT of, no matter what I'm mixing, is parallel processing. If you don't know, that's where you essentially split a signal to two or more tracks and process them differently. so for example I might split a guitar part to go to three tracks, keep one as it was, compress and/or overdrive/distort the fuck out of one and mix it low to add some body to the sound, and EQ out the lower frequencies from the third and then apply some stereo effects to it to get it sounding bigger. I also use a lot of send tracks which are also parallel processing; one example is instead of just putting reverbs on every individual sound, I have 1-3 sends with different reverbs on them(one short and bright, another long and dark, etc.) and then send every track or select tracks to each reverb. This has two benefits, one is that it sort of 'gels' your mix more, makes it sound more like everything is actually in the same room - this is especially important in electronic music as it can make it sound far less synthetic. the other benefit is that it uses less CPU power, instead of having like 10, 15 reverbs all over the place, you have just a couple. 


These are all just sorta patterns I've fallen into because I found they worked well for me. I sometimes vastly deviate from all this - sometimes intentionally, sometimes because it just seemed natural to do it differently. But most songs I make tend to follow this process at least loosely.


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