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I haven't had a live band in years, which has changed the quality control/weeding process immensely. I did have performers who sang songs that I had already written in Reason/Cubase, but they often served as the very last layer of filtering.
Firstly, I tend not to write songs down when I first come up with them. Or, if I do, I write down just the main verbal hook, and maybe a Gregorian style sketch of how the music should go with them. If a song germ isn't catchy enough for me to remember it, then it's unlikely it will get written.
Then, there's a lag in the demo-ing stage, between the song getting blocked out in Reason, and then properly demoed with vocals and all, in Cubase. I often wait from overnight to a few days to finish a song. Songs which are catchy or have something compelling about them will get finished much more quickly, while those that aren't will languish in the sequenced but still in progress folder.
Finally, once a song is finished, then it goes into the final QC stage of going up on the MySpace, being played to other people (manager, the performers in my previous band, friends) and has the final YesOrNo. By the time it's got through all that previous filtering, there's usually very little debate beyond a very little bit of arrangement. But that was the nature of my Svengali/Songwriter role in that band.
This of course has been very different in other bands which were more collaborative.
― I Am Totally Radioactive! (kate), Friday, 2 February 2007 11:13 (seventeen years ago) link
one good test for me, i think this works better with repetitive/form music, rather than linear music....
listen to things on a micro scale. loop 4 bars/8 bars/whole sections. if it gets boring, it probably is boring.
with band based stuff, i try and play with people who i respect so much i'd never question what they're doing. granted, most of our stuff is improvised. i think of my drummer as some sort of self generating beat machine. i'll play something he'll complement it. of course. same goes for the rest of our players. looking back at older bands it was those horrible "hey mr bass player, why don't you try doing this kind of groove, look watch me play this" moments that really killed everything.
― george bob (george bob), Friday, 2 February 2007 14:10 (seventeen years ago) link
I feel like a lot of times my band gets rid of songs in progress not because they're bad necessarily but because they just aren't coming together fast enough. The most satisfying songs are the ones that come together really quickly, because it seems like there's something really natural about how they come together. We have a few songs that we really labored over and ended up keeping, but they seem more stilted and artificial. However, I think this might just be an insider perception, since I'm aware of how they came together.
Anyways, there's usually a consensus on what's working and what isn't, but I think I'm a little pickier than the other members, and there have been one or two songs that I took out of the set because I didn't want to play them anymore. It isn't so much about crowd reaction as it is about how I feel when I play the songs. If I feel awkward or unrocking when I play them, they generally fade out of the set pretty quickly.
― n/a (Nick A.), Friday, 2 February 2007 17:17 (seventeen years ago) link
eight years pass...