Dan:

Usually, for me, both strategies you mentioned in your post are occuring simultaneously: often, I will have a mental image, or a real cool phrase or word that I use as "inspiration". On the other hand, I often have a few stray "pieces" or "riffs" or "chord sequences" or "melodies" floating around that are looking for some structure....they are looking for a good home in a song.

For example, right now I have a chord sequence based around the key of E minor...and I am messing around attempting to find the right structure... I will keep noodling around until something that sounds "good" or "'right" shows up during my practice time/ goof off with the guitar time.

-dp

That's very true, I always have a tough time with writers block unless I can get a moment of repeated inspiration. Singing/humming a tune seems to work best for me since while with my guitar I can't work out what I want to do. When I hum my options are open and I just roll with what ever I want, it's an easier way of improvising without having chops. I try to come up with as much of a song as i can without thinking of how it would be played and then transcribe it later. Unfortunately it always seems to happen while at work, school, driving, etc... so it's tough to remember. Sometimes even just a simple taped drum beat, repeated drone of a bass note, or song name can get the gears turning.

Surf in Seattle?

Dan,
I posted this same question some time ago on SG101 at Yahoo, and Ferenc had a response that I still reference to this day. I'd recommend seeing if you can find the archives there and track down that message. I know I started the thread, but can't remember much beyond that.

~B~

DannySnyder
But just ask Ivan or Ferenc or Dave Wronski, if they've crafted their songs within 10 minutes, somehow I don't think so.
Danny S

http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/SurfGuitar101/message/1691

That's a link to my long winded post about songwriting from Dec 2002. Bill, thanks for starting that interesting conversation about songwriting, I am happy to know that you remember it. I still stand by that post, though some of the points could be expanded.
I remember asking Ivan why he never responded to that thread and he said he didn't like analyse the process.
To answer Danny, no I have never written a song in 10 minutes- my songs are like festering rash that I scratch at until they bleed, scab over and heel. Sorry if that description is too graphic...
ferenc

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Wow Ferenc, what a fantastic essay on songwriting. I think as it stands or expanded, this is a great insight into the process, from one surf's top talents.

And I'm not just saying that because I'm in a band with Karen....phhhttthhhht!

Danny Snyder

"With great reverb comes great responsibility" - Uncle Leo

Playing keys and guitar with Combo Tezeta

Formerly a guitarist in The TomorrowMen and Meshugga Beach Party

Latest surf project - Now That's What I Call SURF

I have written a song in less than 10 min... "Iron lung" was improvised into a recorder. and then learned by the band. So it would be like... about 3 min.

Some songs write themselves.

THe NEpTuNeS

Samurai, Ferenc's article can be found here.

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Brian
Samurai, Ferenc's article can be found here.

This is a very good set of perspectives, and I hesitate to add anything. But, I have mixed feelings on the subject. I have been studying 'creativity' for 40 years, and contrary to popular opinion, there is nothing all that mysterious about it, and there is quite a bit that is known and understood about it. Creativity can be cultivated, in a variety of different ways.

Bob Dylan always said that he wrote music because he wasn't hearing what he wanted to hear. He wrote the songs that HE wanted to hear.

That is one of the tools in my toolbox. I write the stuff that I LIKE. Your mileage may vary. There was a time when Bob Dylan had not written a single song. His girlfriend, Suze Rotolo took him to see The Threepenny Opera, by Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill and he was particularly struck by the song Pirate Jenny. He wanted to write songs like that. He began to compose almost immediately after this inspiration. The more he composed, the easier it became.

I have found this to be true. I think that a successful tune has an architecture, like a building. It has a foundation. The foundation can be many things. For me, the foundation is always a chord progression. But of course, there is logic about how the chord progression can work, and how it can work with a given rhythm. I find this aspect of composition to be 'play'. It's a series of experiments where different chord changes are tried with different rhythms, looking for something that will work. Once I have found this, I look for the melodic possibilities that lay over, through, and under the chord progressions. Again, more play. Sometimes problems will emerge, and the solutions to those problems can reshape the entire approach. Sometimes those problems will cause me to scrap the rhythm and alter it, or restructure the chords. It is an iterative process. Once I have found a pattern that seems to have possibilities. I will spend days, weeks, months exporing that, and other patterns as well. Sometimes they go together. When John Lennon played the first part of 'A Day In the Life' for Paul, Paul said he'd been working on a piece for months that would fit perfectly in the middle. Peanut Butter and Jelly. But every time I play the new pattern, I vary it in some way, tempo, rhythm, melody, counterpoint. Songs tend to evolve in this way. I never want to reach a point where I say, this is finished. I just want to squeeze all the juice out of it. Learn everything that it has to teach. Usually, I get bored with the game and move on to a new game--because my prime objective is not to have a set of tunes that I play over and over for other people, or to produce a single timeslice recording of the tunes. But for those who are, I think this approach leads to the 'discovery' of tunes, rather than the 'construction'.

I, personally, am a minimalist. Sometimes I will decorate to make a point, but my philosophy is to find the simplest structure to express the idea or feeling of the tune. I right size it, tweak it. Again, you have to find what you like, what works for you.

When I first started composing, it was hard. I was hyper critical. This is bad. Good taste is the enemy of creativity. You have to be willing to take risks and humiliate yourself--there have been so many times when I thought what I was playing was soo baad I was embarrassing myself--but when I went back to study the recording, I found out that it was pretty good, and there was something useable there that could be refined. You have to stick with it. It's like churning butter the old fashioned way.

It used to be that I would write maybe two tunes a month, then 4, then a tune every day, till, eventually, I would write 1,2,3 occasionally 4 new tunes every day. But I always write at least 1 tune a day, unless I am separated from my guitar. Even then, I may hum a new melody. The important thing is discipline. You do it every day. I have written 299 original tunes since Nov 07, and over the past ten years, close to 2000. In my entire life, close to 2500(But about 500 was planetarium soundtracks).

Everytime I work out a new tune, I record it. If I ever play it again, I vary some aspect of it. I try not to ever repeat myself exactly. My goal for the past 10 years is to never, ever play the same thing twice. My my goals are different than most musicians. I am trying to play the instrument like you might speak. If every time you spoke you could only say phrases that you have memorized, that would tend to limit the conversation, wouldn't it? Well, in fact most people do learn certain linguistic protocols that they iterate infinitely.

'Sup'?
'Chillin'...
'See the game?'
'Yeah, sucked...'
'What's YOUR deal?'
'Grillin...'

One way to cultivate your creativity is to avoid cliches and struggle to find new metaphors for your perception and experience. If words are the organs of perception, then new words will define new perceptions.

That has been my approach to music. To me, music is a language, an ancient language, a language of Shamans, priests, and medicine men, technicians of the sacred, who knew how to use it to unfold a shadowy, unseen world. Early music reflects this. The old music reflects this reality. That is the language I want to speak. You learn it through play. Play like the play you played as a little child, with wonder, and fascination, and discovery. Of course, your mileage may vary...

Seamoor Glas
The Iterators

I want to write the songs I've already heard. I don't realize it when I sit down to write. I've written Jewel of Duende twice!

In my previous comments about song writing, I focused on my own approach, and neglected to outline some of the general principles that have been identified for the cultivation of creativity . So, here are the remarks I left out. If you are looking for ways to harness and increase your native creativity, here are some recommendations from the guys that study this stuff for a living.

There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that have been found to be essential for creative expression.

The first and most important competency is "capturing"--preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them. Morning pages, are a perfect example of a capturing technique, for writers. It is an excercise to take a moment in the morning to write 3 pages about something, anything. You do it every day. It gets the juices flowing. There are many ways to capture new ideas. Otto Loewi won a Nobel Prize for work based on an idea about cell biology that he almost failed to capture. He had the idea in his sleep, woke up and scribbled the idea on a pad but found the next morning that he couldn’t read his notes or remember the idea. When the idea turned up in his dreams the following night, he used a better capturing technique: he put on his pants and went straight to his lab!

The second competency is called "challenging"- giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas.

The third competancy is "broadening." The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections--so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things.

And the last competency is "surrounding," which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become.

You need to learn stress-management techniques to help cope with the rejection that goes hand in hand with creativity. New ideas, are by definition, unfamiliar to others. You have to learn not to fear failure and even to rejoice in it. When I’m failing, I say to myself, "I’m in good company. I’m in the company of some of the most creative and productive people in the world." I fail a lot. Constantly. Other people's fear of the new and unfamiliar is something I take for granted. The phobia is called misoneism. But it's all grist for the mill.

The creative individual thinks of failure as a new opportunity: Okay, why did I fail? What was wrong? Let me try to do something else. Let me go forward with it. Let me try again. It took Edison over 300 experiments with different materials to achieve sustainable incandescent illumination.

In the laboratory, failure also produces a phenomenon called resurgence--the emergence of behaviors that used to be effective in that situation that leads to a competition among behaviors and to new interconnections. In other words, failure actually stimulates creativity directly. It really is valuable. Fail often.

There’s also a stereotype that creativity is just involved in the generation of ideas. But after the ideas are generated, you then have to evaluate them, sift through them, embellish them, repair them, revise them and get them tested, which all means that the creative process is actually quite complex.

But you’ve got to capture now and evaluate later. A big mistake people make is to start visualizing the criticism or the feedback while they’re still generating. That can shut you right down.

One thing I like to do is make all problems open-ended. Never say, give me three ideas for this; always say, give me at least three. You found solution 'A', now let's find 'B'. When tasks are open-ended, a lot more ideas are generated. I also like to use what I call "ultimate" problems with kids. Those are problems that have no real solutions. Children have great fun with problems like those. Ask them questions like "How could you get a dog to fly?" or "How could you make the sky a different color?" "Could you make cheese from Chipmonk milk?" "What if you could make the ocean freeze at room temperature? How would you thaw it?"

You can also supply your kids with idea boxes and folders-special places for putting drawings and poems and scraps of anything new. That encourages capturing on an ongoing basis and tells children that their new ideas have value. Some of the toughest problems I ever faced were solved by my 5 year old son. You need to do the same thing with your own creative work to consistently reinforce the notion that your creative projects have value, and any fragment of an idea, phrase or image might come in handy. Dave Arnson once told me that for him, the hardest part of song writing was finding an appropriate title.

Creative blocks are a reality every step of the way. How you deal with blocks is part of the challenge. Playing with other mediums, such as painting, or writing can be effective stimulants, or playing a different instrument. Sometimes you just need to take a break, and give the back brain a chance to process.

I used to work for a CTO who kept a guitar in his office. Every time he had some serious problem solving to do, he would pick up his electric guitar and play for 20 minutes. Then he would sit down and write some serious code.

But you can also be strategic about how you’re going to use those breaks. Salvador Dalí made deliberate use of his naps to get ideas for his art, for example. While relaxing on a sofa, he’d hold a spoon out over the edge and place a plate on the floor beneath the spoon. Just as he’d drift off to sleep, his hand would relax and the spoon would fall. The sound of the spoon hitting the plate would awaken him, at which point he’d grab a pad and sketch out interesting images he might have seen in the semisleep state. Thomas Edison used a similar technique to get ideas for his inventions. And the good news here is that we all experience this state-the so-called hypnagogic state.

Seamoor Glas
The Iterators