For Those Who Can't Get Their Songwriting Moving | Book Review: "Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers"
Introduction
My bible for songwriting is Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers (the title of this note article is my own loose translation), published by Ableton.
Whenever I get stuck and can't move forward with my songwriting, I open this book to find the motivation to keep going.
When I first started reading it (in 2021), it was right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I had plenty of time and a growing desire to read my first book in English, so I ended up reading this book, which was "conveniently" not translated into Japanese.
I believe I bought it on Kindle for 1,200 yen back then, but the entire book is available for free. I just realized that now. Since it's a browser-based version, you should be able to read it while translating it into Japanese.
What kind of book is it?
↓ It's a book with themes like this.
(Loose translation below)
Songwriting is full of walls. You don't even have the energy to launch your DAW, and you stand frozen in front of an empty project with no ideas coming to mind. Even if you manage to create one phrase, you get stuck there and it never turns into a full 5-minute song, or you force it to be longer and the arrangement ends up monotonous. The result? What an amateur-sounding song I've made. Oh well. I'm done, I'm done.
For those of you like that! Let me teach you how to keep your motivation going! And so on.
It's a book like that.
The chapters are broadly divided into three parts.
Problems of Beginning (I can't get started on my song!)
Problems of Progressing (I can't get my song to develop well!)
Problems of Finishing (I can't get my song to finish well!)
There's no point in introducing every single tip in detail, so I will write about how I interpret the contents of this book and what actions I take.
1. When you can't get started on songwriting
Well, let's assume you forced yourself to launch your DAW. But we still freeze in front of the empty screen the moment we launch it.
What to do? I have developed five main approaches.
(a) The "Once you make a cool sound on the synth, go from there" method
For starters, launch Serum and load a sawtooth wave. Tweak the filter and envelope, and once it starts sounding nice and squelchy, add some unison or distortion effects. Then, set the modulation knob to control the cutoff, resonance, or any other parameters you like.
If the sound gets nicely intense as you move the modulation knob from left to right, you've succeeded. It's actually quite cool to be able to wiggle three or four modulations, but that makes it impossible to manage the timbre, so I ultimately limit myself to two knobs.
After that, I just record while tweaking the knobs a lot, and build the song by adopting the best takes. It's fun. I feel like this approach is somewhat similar to that of people who compose mainly using hardware. It's a right-brained, intuitive approach.
However, since Serum is a wavetable synthesizer, it really comes with a lot of presets, but everyone loves the basic waveforms like square, sawtooth, and triangle waves, don't they? I'm still struggling to master Serum myself.
(b) The "Rip off the components of an existing song to make a completely different song" method
In this method, you load an existing song into your DAW and analyze it.
While analyzing the spectrum or actually inputting the melody to do something like "ear copying," you diligently examine the song's tempo, chord progression, melody shape, and hidden flavors you wouldn't notice unless you listened closely. In the process, you make a note of anything you think is good.
It's fine to spend about an hour on one song.
Repeat this for a few songs, create a list of "good" things, and launch a blank project.
From here on, forget about the original songs and build your track using ideas from your "good" list. Since I don't have the skill to make a song that sounds like an existing one anyway, even if I imitate someone else, the finished product ends up sounding nothing like the original. So, it works out perfectly. Perhaps if someone with perfect pitch or a real talent for copying songs used this method, it might sound too similar to the original and raise suspicions of plagiarism.
Anyway, this method was incredibly powerful for me.
(c) The method of using equipment you've never touched before to take advantage of the novelty
Once you launch a blank project, load anything you've never touched before. A new synth, a new reverb, a new sample pack, gear you haven't touched in three years—anything is fine. Just use that gear or timbre to build the core of the song.
In my case, I download one of the many modules or sample packs included with Ableton Suite, try to make a song, and if it doesn't work, I move on to the next one, repeating this process.
(d) The "Past trash projects are actually a treasure trove" method
The other day, I reopened all my project files from 2020 onwards. Lo and behold, a treasure trove appeared.
What I mean is, there are piles of projects that I started using methods (a) through (c) above but ended up giving up on. Of course, some of these are unsalvageable, but a surprisingly high percentage of them contain things where I think, 'Wow, this is a good idea, but I just didn't know how to expand on it!' Often, even if I hit a wall in the past, I can finish it as a song now. It's a fun dialogue with my past self, so I highly recommend it.
(e) The "Incorporate the good parts of a genre you hate" method
I'm still feeling my way through this one, so I haven't really found the words for it yet.
Anyway, the idea is to listen to a genre you hate and try to incorporate the good parts from it.
I don't really have any dislikes, so I tried listening to 1950s American blues, a genre I've rarely touched until now.
Unlike club music, which makes you dance with a flood of dense sounds and rhythms, there is an atmosphere that lets you feel the groove through the air. I was able to repurpose this into the idea of intentionally creating gaps within a song. Not just simply removing the kick, but something like muting all sounds except for one part...
This part is shallow. Too shallow. Haha. I need a bit more training. I'll come back later.
2. When you can't develop your song well
The starting point is the stage where you've cleared the first hurdle and started to feel, 'This is becoming a song!' At this point, for me, it feels like a loop of about 4 to 16 bars has been created.
At the very least, this little loop feels cool! It's got a good vibe! But a song needs a duration of 3 or 5 minutes, and you have to grow this 'looping something' into a 'song'.
This is quite tough. I think there is only one solution I can say I'm 'doing' myself.
Copy the development of an existing song and apply it to your current track
First, since it's hard to create 1 (a song with development) from 0 (a loop without development), you can just copy the development of an existing song entirely. I think everyone struggling with creating development should do that.
You don't necessarily have to take the development from a similar genre or a similar song; when you're making techno, you can imitate the development or the way breaks are inserted in your favorite house track.
3. When your song won't finish well
Well. By this point, it's a 5-minute song, but it somehow sounds amateurish. In particular, I want to do tasks like placing instruments to the right or left, or adjusting the volume balance to groom the rough track, but I don't know specifically what to do.
Thinking about mixing (placement of timbres, etc.)
Here, I will share a basic concept.
Music and painting are the same.
I think the quality of my work changed significantly before and after I learned this.
In a painting, for example a landscape, things in the foreground are brighter, and things in the background are darker or duller. That's because reality is like that. I believe it's because the air is not perfectly transparent.
Music is exactly the same; the foreground is brighter, and the background is darker or duller. That's because reality is like that.
Now, what do bright and dark mean in music? It's the frequency range. For timbres that don't take the lead and that you want to make dull like distant mountains, you use a band-pass filter or similar to cut off the low and high frequency ranges.
Conclusion
To you, who find your music production coming to a halt: read this book! It contains many more detailed and fun tips that couldn't be fully introduced here.