Unfamiliar Soil: stopwatch songwriting

Exactly how much is between me and a new song?

Geraint Luff
Aug 23, 2017 · 6 min read

Last Saturday, I spent one entire day making music on a pretty tight schedule. My initial plan was incredibly optimistic: make one piece of music per hour, any length, any genre, any quality. When that hour is up, move on to the next piece.

I didn’t stick to it completely, but that sense of a ticking clock was important, and I learned a lot about what’s actually between me and constantly churning out new music.

What I Made

I created a couple of finished pieces and a few shorter loops, but by far my favourite result from the day is “Unfamiliar Soil”.

(My partner and I will be moving house soon - although we’re not going very far, a lot of important things happened in that house, so this is a song about that.)

This piece took 2.5 hours to go from a title/concept to the recorded and mixed piece of music you hear above. Although I had set myself the goal of one piece per hour, I hadn’t actually expected them to be particularly good, so I was pretty surprised that it didn’t take much more time to produce a song I was pretty happy with.

An Efficient Setup?

When I shared that piece in a songwriting forum, explaining some of the context, one person commented “I bet your studio setup is pretty efficient!”.

In this case, “studio setup” is a very flattering name for a Macbook Air balanced on top of the digital piano in my sitting room.

And no, it really wasn’t very efficient at all, at least at the start of the day.

The Day

The start time was at 9:00, so from about 8:00 I pottered around making sure that various pieces of kit were plugged in and talking nicely to each other. One important thing was ensuring that my digital piano was connected to my computer, so that I could record notes using the keyboard instead of clicking them in with the mouse. I also pondered for a bit, and scribbled a few potential song/track titles on a piece of paper.

At 9:00 I opened up a new project. At 10:00 I stopped, exported what I’d made as an audio file, took a moment to breathe, then opened up a new project and started again.

After the first two rounds, it became incredibly clear that my “one piece per hour” goal was not going to happen. Far from my vision of intense productivity, all I’d managed so far was a couple of 10-second loops, and it was pretty demotivating.

The Learning Process

However, at the end of each iteration I thought about what had been taking up my time.

  1. First iteration: I spent a lot of time switching between piano and my laptop on the chair, so for the next round I propped up my laptop on the keyboard.
  2. Second iteration: I got tangled up in selecting my drum samples and configuring effects to get the drum sounds right. It does make a difference, and it’s quite satisfying, but it wasn’t the rapid-fire creative process I’d hoped for. So, I saved what I’d created as a track template, so I could start with a ready-made set of drum sounds for the next round.
  3. Third iteration, I got as far as creating a longer loop and even recorded some vocals, but I couldn’t get my fancy-pants piano synth to work. So, for the next round I found an adapter and plugged my soundcard directly into the headphone socket of my digital piano. I also saved the configuration I’d used for the vocals, so I could use it in the next round.
  4. Fourth iteration, I started by picking one of the song titles, and it went incredibly well. When my hour was up, it felt so close to finished, so I extended it into 90 minutes and had something you might optimistically call “demo-quality”. After a break for food, I decided it was worth finishing more properly, so took another hour to tweak the vocals and add a couple more details to give it a better sense of motion. I uploaded it to SoundCloud, titled it “Unfamiliar Soil”, and moved on.
  5. Fifth iteration, I only managed to create a short loop again. I suspected that the problem was trying to weave a complete sound for a short section and then extend that into a track. In contrast, for iteration #4 I had done the opposite and aimed for a bare-bones arrangement first, then gone back and filled in.
  6. Sixth iteration, again I started by picking a title (Castle Under The Sea), and I had made good progress by the end of my hour. I decided to continue, but I was pretty wiped out by that point and it took over 2 hours to get from there to a finished/mixed product, so I called it a day.

So What?

The completed pieces took longer than my original one-hour goal, but they were also much better than I’d expected. I could (and probably will) put another few hours into them to tweak and polish.

But beyond just the finished pieces, the whole experience was completely awesome for figuring out exactly what’s between me and a completely new song, at any arbitrary moment.

Benefits Of The Slow Way

I definitely wouldn’t conclude that most of my musical creation should work on this fast-paced schedule.

Writing a song from start to finish in 3 hours or less means using saved templates to shortcut some of the more time-consuming tasks. These tasks and templates are usually of the bread-and-butter sort, but there is creativity in every step you take. If I used those presets every time then some things would stay the same for every track, consistent but not new.

More than that, as a digital musician part of my creative process is finding new ways to wire together effects and create different sounds - this is what I fell into in iteration #5. Plus, as a programmer and mathematician, I write my own audio effects/synths and think up new transformations to try out.

Even without any of that, I am always listening to music, figuring out what I like or don’t like, singing their tunes or playing their chords and seeing what feels right in my voice or under my fingers. These are exploratory forms of creativity, and their result is instinct and understanding rather than new music.

The actual steps of writing, recording or mixing a song are in some way the later stages of a much longer creative process, and to focus too much on the finished product doesn’t acknowledge that.

Benefits Of The Fast Way

However, the biggest thing I learned from this was how to separate these exploratory stages from these steps that actually produce a piece of music . Previously, if I were just “doing music”, I might start with the goal of writing a song, but end up playing around with an existing song, obsessing over effect configurations or even writing a new effect altogether.

The extremely tight time-constraint drove me to avoid or shortcut any of the steps that would slow me down, illustrating what a minimal songwriting process needs. With this perspective, it’s clearer to me how “creating songs”, “creating sounds”, “creating audio effects” and “absorbing music” are separate forms of creativity, and I think it’s useful to not get distracted by one when I really want to be doing the other.

Also, Whoah…

I didn’t realise that it was possible for me to create something even half-decent in so little time. I often think of creativity as a floaty, ephemeral process that has to be given space, but sometimes you can crystallise that out into a finished work very quickly, and that doesn’t need to come at the expense of quality or emotional depth.

It cast some light on the different ways that creating music can work for me, and I definitely hope to do this again.

)

Geraint Luff

Written by

Music, maths, audio and code.

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