A musician guest to our website posed a great question to me recently, and I wanted to share the answer with the rest of the Toobix community:

“What process do you go through in creating your music?”

Unlike most artists, I take a highly left-brained approach to writing music in that it is very systematic; however, my initial inspiration often comes to me spontaneously.  It’s funny, but it seems to be when I’m doing something completely unrelated to music that the inspiration comes.  This includes everything from walks with my dogs to showers to drives in the car, but my best melodies and rhythms come to me in dreams!  Yeah, I usually wake up with a song in my head and have to run to my studio to record it as fast as I can before I forget it!  When it’s 1 or 2 in the morning, I usually just sing the ideas into my microphone and figure them out on the piano later, but weekends are great because I can just go in there and let loose.  I’ve written an entire song in a day that way before.

After the initial ideas, my difference engine kicks in and I start to add the rest of the pieces of the puzzle.  I usually try to write the entire song first with minimal instrumentation.  It’s usually just synth, bass, kick and closed hat although I really like to try and add the mid-frequency range percussion if I can.  After the basic outline to the song is written including the main melody section, variations on that, and breakdowns, I go back and add transitions between the different sections, fills, variations to the percs and synth lines.  Basically, this part of the writing process is making the track more complex and adding variations so that it doesn’t ever get boring.  Besides how the track moves you emotionally with the synths and rhythms, this is the most important aspect of my songs.  It’s the #1 positive comment I get.  As a matter of fact, I was at a song writer’s conference this week and one of the artists said just that.  They said that they never got bored in my song.

At this point you’re probably saying, “So you basically write a song without a beginning or an ending?”  The answer to that is “Usually yes!”  The reason being is because I like to know what a track says before I decide to introduce it or sign it off.  I approach prose the same way, and do this about 90% of the time.  1 out of every 10 songs, though, start with an intro.  “crusher” was one of those tracks.  It happens sometimes that the intro just defines the song as a whole, so I just go with it.

I used to take TONS of time to do the above process.  I mean months.  Shamingly, sometimes I would take years!  I used to think that the song would be better the more time I spent on it.  Well, I do believe that the more effort you put in the better the result, but now I have a little bit different feeling about time.  By taking too much time on a track, I would loose the overall feeling of the song that sails in with it on its inception.  Not only that, I would loose the overall vision for it because I would end up with too many variations on the original theme.  The end result was definitely a longer, more complex track, but there was almost too much going on in it and also too many themes crammed into one track.  For this reason, I now tend to take my initial idea and fill it out completely without making 10 different variations on the melody and the drum track and the bassline and the….you get the point.  The end result is a more coherent thought AND a thought that I can write in 3-4 studio sessions that are usually about 1-4 hours a piece.  With this method I’ve been able to write approximately 2-3 good songs a month!  Much better than 2-3 a year even with a high-intensity day job!

After the song is written, I take off the song writer’s hat and put on the producer’s hat.  This is when I mix and master it.  My approach to mixing is getting all of the volume levels for each of the different instruments and sounds set so they sound good with each other and then use effects and equalization to make sure they don’t get in each other’s way.  Getting those levels right are so important because you’re really mixing to make sure the song tells the story that it is supposed to. 

The mastering process for me is taking the song as a whole and making it sound better.  This is different than the mix because now I’m no longer tweaking each individual instrument, but I am tweaking all instruments together.  My process usually involves compression, final eq, non-brickwall limiting and or maximizing, but it really varies depending on the track and what the end medium is going to be. 

And that’s the gist of the process!  I know it’s sort of a methodical way to make music, but I look at it as more of an artist-manager relationship.  My right brain is the artist and makes the music and my left brain is my manager and keeps my right brain on schedule!  Who knew that split personalities could be so useful for a musician?

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