New Song Ideas that Will Have to Wait

I came up with some good ideas for song creation in the last 24 hours, but I was totally thwarted by Neavey this morning. I was on my way to the basement to start recording something, but she woke up with an awful cough as soon as I got out of the shower at 6:15.

I realized when I went to bed last night that the rhythm I want to use for a lot of the album is a really fast snare-kick-snare-kick pattern, similar to what XBXRX and Melt-Banana use a lot. The jungle rhythms can be used too, but not as much as what I'd been thinking before. I also realized last night that I can start creating these songs by stomping on my tambourine as I play my guitar. I can even shout nonsense words or rhythm counts as I play. Then I can come back and recreate it all, once I have an actual song. And each song will only be a minute or two long, with little space in between.

And I don't have to use my tracker for every bit of rhythm. Not only do I have a tambourine, but I also have the percussion sounds on my keyboard, which I can play loudly and distortedly through my amps (I don't have neighbors underneath me anymore), using my fingers on the keyboard. I remembered that in the shower this morning. That might make the creation process a lot easier. The thing I haven't quite figured out yet is whether I should try to add drum loops to what I create organically, after the fact. It won't be easy, even if I use a click track, because my rhythms are going to be very sporadic, even spontaneous. A click track might only hold me back.

One thing I might do is interrupt the more organic parts of the song with rhythmic electronic parts. I could do a whole spontaneous recording, totally improvised, add all the organic percussion, and then insert drum loops with overlaid guitar and bass into certain parts of the song. So something like last week's clip, which was mostly structured ahead of time, could come between parts of a song that were created spontaneously. It could all fit together into something extraordinary. Or it could all be a big mess. But maybe a brilliant mess?

Anyway, the next step, as I was going to do this morning, is to press record and start playing, stomping and shouting, using the chords that I used for the clip last week in various creative ways. Then I can figure out what to do next. This could actually be fun. Too bad it will have to wait until next week. I hope Neavey doesn't make a habit of waking up before 6:30!