What I have been doing over the past several months (almost a year at this point) has been to allow the ever evolving song order to help develop the tonal center and harmonic character of the vocals. It seems that new tonal harmonic directions that develop within one song can bleed over into the next if you allow it to. Understanding the synergistics of letting the quality and energy of the last song heard determine how you want the next song to sound has been an integral part of developing the overall sound of Melodic Dirt. I truly believe this churning of song order and development of vocals has been extremely important.
When you function within this strategy and couple it with letting your mind congeal and ferment (take a step back for maybe a day or two) then come back to your previous efforts with a fresh mind and built up energy, the results are exponentially rewarding. The key to this of course is to be recording and saving your progress along the way. I guess being a recording artist it’s easy to forget that many bands do not develop their sound in the recording studio. I know what that is like but nowadays there are so many inexpensive handheld size digital recorders that everyone should be developing their sound and songs by recording then building upon their previous efforts. What I do not recall from previous bands that I was in was the importance of song order and churning the order over and over again to help develop parts.
I’ve been working with 7 songs for the past several months and have utilized this strategy to it’s fullest extent. The best ideas are inspired from other ‘successful’ ideas that we may have accomplished in another song. Not ‘successful’ in terms of social acceptance or financial gains but in terms of ones own standards of quality and expectations. I guess we are our own worst critics for the most part (especially as artists because by nature we want to rebel to a certain extent and don’t really care what other ‘critics’ have to say anyway, right?)
I mean it’s easy to hear differences of strength and weakness when you have a well put together song followed by one that maybe you’re less sure of and felt less confident while recording it. The goal I suppose would be to establish your best, most confident song as the starting cornerstone then indulge in the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ to making the weak link better. Duh, right? Well, sometimes your strongest most confident put together ideas can turn into your weakest links if you keep on developing your ideas based on a tonal harmonic character developed through the evolving churning of song order. I’ve experienced this many times at this point and every time is no less of an epiphany type of feeling than the last. It’s night and day and feels like you’ve been eating stale cardboard tasting cracks for the past few weeks when you then get to indulge in a 5 star 5 course meal or whatever. It makes all the trials and tribulations worth the fight, worth the struggle and worth the sacrifice.
See you on the flip side soon. I’m hoping to be finished by the end of April but ultimately it will be finished when it is finished. And yes I will be re-copyrighting what needs to be.
song order as part of song development
