Turning a Song into a Record

After getting a good grip on the idea of writing songs, the natural next step is to figure out what the song should sound like. Often, a well written song will do the work for you. Competent lyrics and intentional chord structures can offer up quite a good road map for fleshing out the sonic qualities of any given song. Words like dark, bright, sad, angry and joyous enter the flurry. Emotion is your friend. Technical jargon takes a back seat to the natural feelings experienced by the music makers. As my friend likes to say, "I'm just following my nose on this one."

Everything deserves a fair shot.

The biggest early stumbling block I see in the world of production is the fear of getting it wrong. People will spend AGES on one guitar part without even considering the rest of the song. While this can work, I find it really slows things down. When I'm trying to get started on a song, ideas come quick. Most of the time they arrive significantly faster than I could ever imagine getting the part to sound perfect. I'll be halfway through tracking a scratch guitar part for the verse when the exact vocal arrangement for the chorus arrives in my head or it dawns on someone else in the room exactly how the drums should hit in the bridge. Harnessing this kind of energy can be quite chaotic if you aren't prepared to get it on paper or into your daw. Often times, my sessions start out as idea maps where the parts only hit 60% of the right notes. Wrong notes are okay. Put your inner musician's ego in the garbage.

Asymmetry is cool!

Maybe it's just me, but when I was first starting out, I always tried to make my productions symmetrical. If a guitar part was panned one way, I had an identical guitar on the other side at the same volume playing the exact same part. Thankfully it became quite clear that this mildly ocd habit was incredibly limiting. To overcome this, I try to imagine the frequency spectrum equalizing instead of the instruments. For example, the high end of a rhythm acoustic guitar on one side can be quite complementary to a hi-hat on the other. A symmetrical production will NEVER sound wide or expansive.

It is possible that you're doing to much..

Something I hear quite a bit from producers across the industry is the concept of knowing when to stop. Dense productions are awesome, but burying the most memorable lyric is not. Keeping an eye out for the focal points in different sections is vital to create something memorable. Similar to Miles Davis' sparse approach to melody and improvisation, timeless production can be viewed in the same light. Overdoing it is a great way to suck the life out of a song.

In my opinion, there is one statement that makes its way to the top of the pile. FINISH THE SONG.

This art form like all others, is a practice. Recordings are meant to be a snapshot of not only a feeling, but of the period of time they came into existence. The raw emotion of a new song is something easily conveyed in a record. The artist's intent is often in the most clear in the voice memo they took on their phone right after coming up with an idea. The sooner they get fleshed out, the more accurate the finished production will be.