Boys And Dance Floors
[audio:http://ethanhein.com/music/Revival_Revival_Boys_and_Dancefloors.mp3]Revival Revival vs Janet Jackson
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There are as many different ways of writing songs as there are songwriters. Barbara Singer and I have arrived at a good one, so I figured I’d share it with you in the hopes you find it inspirational.
Like all of our tracks, “Boys And Dance Floors” began life as a string of looped samples in Reason. Here’s the sequencer window.
Each brick is eight bars of four-four time. The top two tracks are different samples of “What Have You Done For Me Lately” by Janet Jackson, just synth bass and drum machine. Both loops are the same basic groove, but with subtle differences: one has a backwards cymbal crash building up to the end and the other has a quiet crash at the beginning. The third track down is a sample of Barbara singing “Fire, fire” in an intense voice that we have filter sweeping in at the beginning and end of the song.
Peach is for the intros and outtro. Light blue is verses. Green is choruses, with the darker green as the prechorus and the lighter green as the chorus proper. Orange is for instrumental breaks and purple is the bridge. If we ever try to release this thing commercially, we’re either going to have to license the samples or program something else. Hope Janet’s people are willing to make a deal.
We built the song as a complete instrumental before adding any vocals. Barbara improvised several tracks of guitar over the beat, and then we went through, found the best licks, and copied and pasted them into phrases. The bassline is just a guitar part pitch-shifted down an octave.
We shuffled the sections around and layered them into verses, choruses and a bridge. Then we bounced the instrumental and spent a few weeks living with it. Barbara prefers driving around and listening to work in progress. I like having it on my ipod while going about my daily life, having it come up in shuffle, hearing it juxtaposed against our other tracks and whatever else is in the playlists.
Barbara “wrote” the vocal melody by recording some scat-singing and improvised nonsense syllables. She also did some recordings singing and playing live guitar with a drummer. We ended up using the cymbals from one of those recordings in our final track. Finally, Barbara sat down with all of the rough recordings and a legal pad and spent an hour sweating out lyrics while I hung out and read Facebook.
In cutting the final vocals it became apparent that the chorus melody worked better as the harmony part to a different, lower melody, so it took us a few passes to build that out. We ended up with a ton of overdubs on that part, nearly all of which stayed in for a nice thick sound. About half the vocal tracks have Auto-tune on the T-Pain setting, half are dry, and there’s one through guitar distortion for texture.
The songwriting process is a lot like cooking. Everyone has a preferred method. There nevertheless is a core set of best practices, and while you’re free to invent your own approach, some of the rules are inflexible. People have certain metabolic and sensual needs from food, and we have certain emotional needs for music. People like repetition and symmetry, but they like the patterns to break a little bit unpredictably. It’s a delicate balance. You want your song to be orderly and structured enough to be memorable, but it should be chaotic and open-ended enough to make each subsequent pass through it a lively experience.
You can assemble the components of your songs together in whatever order suits you. I’ve tried assembling the pieces in many different orders, and this is the one that produces the most consistent results for me:
1) The beat.
I prefer a literal beat, a sample like the Funky Drummer or a drum machine loop. The right hand part of guitar playing is good for figuring out beats. You can just tap your foot or hear beats in your head. But for the music I like, the beat has to be strong and definite, the foundation of everything else.
2) The key center.
Something I learned from hip-hop producers is that drum loops are usually strongly pitched. A lot of the time, the pitch of the kick drum establishes your key for you. Even if you end up using a different key, try tuning your drums so at least they’re on the fifth or somewhere similarly early in the overtone series.
The key might be as simple as a drone or as complex as the rapidly shifting harmonic progressions of classical or jazz. I myself prefer drones because I find key changes box me in, they inhibit improvisation and audience participation.
3) Some loops.
In my current practice I like to have literal loops, samples or copied and pasted pieces of recorded improvisation. When I write with an instrument, on paper or in my head, I’m still hunting for good loops, it’s just a different storage method. If there’s going to be a bassline, what are the bass loops? If there are going to be keyboards or guitar, what are the loops going to be there? Are there going to be repeated licks and countermelodies, chord progressions, percussion parts? Where do the loops stop and start?
4) A line.
The melody, or a chant, ideally vocal, or played on an instrument with vocal qualities. The focal point for the casual listener. In my jazz life I used to start with melodies and build around them, but now I find that too much like picking furniture and then trying to build a house around it.
5) Lyrics.
Outside of hip-hop, Cole Porter and the sixties folkies, I can take or leave lyrics. Humming, wordless vocalizing and scat singing work fine for me most of the time. There are plenty of songs I like where I can’t understand the lyrics at all. If there are going to be words, they have to make musical sense before semantic sense. Some of the best song lyrics are meaningless.
Lyrics do have the virtue of making a sung melody easier to remember. If you want to learn a bebop solo, see if there’s a version by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, it’ll be a lot easier. Like, I learned most of the solos in Freddie Freeloader thanks to Jon Hendricks’ version. Flatten out the melodies and update the slang and you have rapping.
As I argue at length in this post, I don’t believe much in originality in music. It’s easy to be unique, you always sound like you. But it’s hard to generate ideas that have never been used before. In my opinion, the quest for novelty is a waste of energy. It distracts from the hunt for what’s hot, right now. Even this “original” song by me and Barbara is composited together from pieces of existing music in our respective heads. It’s not just the Janet Jackson beat. The guitar parts are directly inspired by PJ Harvey and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Some of the vocal parts come from the Supremes, some from Britney Spears. Some of the production techniques come from Justin Timberlake, some from Daft Punk. It’s all a big collage.
But that’s us. How do you guys like to write?
Update: the KLF give a detailed and hilarious accounting of the writing of their number one hit from 1988, “Doctorin’ The Tardis.” They use mostly the same process I do.