Posted on 
Aug 06, 2004 09:28 pm to remember stuff you prolly gotta record it. i use my cell phone's voicemail. recorders of any type are good.
there's a big long older thread about how members write songs in the archives somewhere, i think.
what i've been doing recently is saving up riffs and working on finding choruses for extant verses, or verses for extant choruses, when time allows. so, every week i pick out an old unfinished song or riff and play with it for no more than ten minutes at a time, but going back to that song every few days until i have eliminated so many wrong approaches that the right ones start to show up. i've had one of my riffs for over a year and tried recording it with three different verses. i liked the chorus progression a lot but the verses i tried all sucked. i kept trying different ideas logically and systematically until i discovered the reason nothing was working. it had to do with the fact that every verse i'd tried was basically a turnaround, and i needed to move to an asymmetrical-feeling progression that didn't feel like it kept resolving on every pass.
hats off to persistence and logical explorations, i guess. i prefer to write riffs out of pure inspiration or feeling, but arranging has never been a strong skill with me. so when it comes to stringing things together i have to actually think in words why something might be sounding unsatisfying. thats cool with me, though, since i believe that this music stuff is a pretty even blend of unquantifiable inspiration and blue collar craftsmanship.
i still don't know what this smiley-icon i'm using is meant to signify but i'm gonna use 'im.
p.s. what part of iraq?
