Fast Writing

Is it worth talking about a topic that's not interesting to begin with? I mean, sure if you want to brush up on your talking skills, but who'll listen? In the end, you decide what you want to get out of your exercise.

I would suggest also focusing on learning how to come up with good thematic material in a short time. That's just transcribing and internalizing a lot of melodies. I once had a 3-week gig where I was required to shell out a completed 3-min EDM tune every day. Production can be a damn time sink, and there's also mixing, so every day I needed to come up with something that works, and do it ASAP. The gig paid well, and was a damn good exercise.

Try something similar for yourself. Spend an hour or two transcribing melodies, then give yourself an hour to come up with something interesting. Do this for 3 weeks (or 20 times, if your schedule doesn't allow daily practice), and see how you feel about it. Worst thing that can happen is that you lose ~60 hours. But I don't think writing and transcribing is ever a loss.

 

Hi Samuel*,


I’m frequently surprised, time and again, just how easy it is to misunderstand or not fully understand someone, no matter how much care they put into articulating themselves. I may have misinterpreted what you wrote, so I might be way off base, but for whatever it’s worth ––

You might consider the possibility that the way you’re conceptualizing this is too binary. You may soon find that “1st idea no matter how bad” vs. “idea that you’re really happy with” turns out to be a false dichotomy. (No shame; happens to all of us.)

I would suggest that there are any number of valid ways to look at this. Aaron’s already given you a good one. Here’s another possibility; one which keeps making sense to me over the years:

In a sense, you’re asking how to decide which ideas you should grab … but, flip it and reverse it: which ideas grab you – and won’t let go?

Which ideas, regardless of their objective “quality,” regardless of how excited you are with them, simply won’t let you drop them, simply refuse to be ignored? Which ideas flood your brain with a kaleidoscopic torrent of possibilities, developments and variations and different harmonic contexts – so many possibilities that it’s like drinking from a firehose and no one could possibly write fast enough to get them all down?

Which ideas get under your skin to the extent that, having written down everything you could possibly think of, you decide you’re tapped out and it’s time for a coffee break –– but by the time you turn the corner into the kitchen, you’re already hearing yet another development of that motif?

This all probably sounds like I’m saying “go with the idea you’re happy with,” but it’s not quite that. It’s more like, “go with the idea that takes possession of you.”

I have (very) occasionally, without much effort or revision, scribbled something down and thought, “Hey, that’s pretty cool. I like that just fine, even though I wrote it.” More often than not, these kinds of snippets very quickly end up getting tucked away in a drawer somewhere. No developments of them come to mind, and I wager that’s because they’re simply beyond my current composing chops, and forcing it to happen has rarely worked for me (could be a psychological hangup on my part). Perhaps someday I’ll suddenly realize “oh, I know what to do with that one thing from 3 years ago …” More likely, they’ll get burned when I die (by the time I build up better chops, I’ll probably be taken by different ideas).

But 99 times out of 100, it’s the things that are so innocuous you might not even call them “ideas” which end up grabbing me and not letting go. If you were looking over my shoulder, you might ask yourself, “Why the hell is he bothering to write that down? It’s nothing special, just an arpeggiated sus chord …” And you’d be quite correct, because you wouldn’t be hearing the kaleidoscopic whirlwind of nascent possibilities flooding through my brain, swirling around the little dots desperately being scribbled down before they evaporate forever, forgotten like a dream.

Hmmm, I’m a bad example, so let’s go with an example that’s probably given so often, you might call it cliched ––

Beethoven wrote his 5th and 6th symphonies in parallel. (They were even both premiered at the very same concert.)

If we could go back in time to when both works were just snippets and scribbles, not even a rough draft yet, which do you think Beethoven would have “liked” more or considered “better” — the motif from the 5th, or the melody that kicks off the 6th? At a glance, the melody from the 6th is instantly more like-able, more fully-formed, more recognizable as an "idea." If he’d been trying to decide between the two, he’d probably have gone with that one.

But that short-short-short-loooooong motif from the 5th kept burning in his brain such that he couldn’t abandon it. It grabbed hold of him to such a great extent that the 5th became the first time someone employed a motif in more than one movement of a symphony. That's why it's endured so well even though frankly, some of his other symphonies are objectively "better" on the whole. Beethoven came up in a time when reusing a motif in several separate movements would be considered kind of lazy or unimaginative — but he trusted his instincts, bucked the trends he’d inherited, and was so influential it became a watershed moment in musical history. Soon enough, those composers which hadn’t abandoned the symphony for other forms, started writing more and more symphonies dominated by one central idea, and by the early 20th century, this had become the norm rather than the exception. (For all the reasons Mike talks about in his classes; making an idea recur + keeping it fresh & varied = more and deeper connection with your audience.)

Or, a similar cited-so-often-it’s-almost-a-cliche example: John Williams’ shark motif from Jaws. I highly doubt that the first time he heard that half-step, he thought to himself “that’s a great idea” … more likely, he just heard all the myriad, near-infinite transformations he could subject it to.

If you prefer a more “pop” example, Bob Dylan spun an entire song out of a phrase you probably hear 3-4x per week: “most of the time.” Maybe at the first glimpse of that idea, he thought something like “naw, not very good, don’t like it enough” … but then he heard more and more, and had to write it all down.

So in most cases, I’d say grab the idea that grabs you and won’t let go. But there are no hard and fast rules that are true each and every time. Sometimes, you do have to grab an idea – Williams came up with dozens upon dozens of possible candidates for the Close Encounters “doorbell” motif. The one we know today didn’t exactly rise to the top; at one point he and Spielberg just kind of decided, “Hell, why not that one? It’s good enough.”

And here, too, he took that idea and ran with it, all the way to an Oscar nomination. (He didn’t end up winning, because that year he was also nominated for Star Wars, which he did win. He’s one of the few who’s lost an Oscar to himself!)

And of course, both of the Williams examples ended up going much further than mere Oscar nominations – they wove themselves into the very fabric of popular culture. To this day, little kids born decades after those movies were in theaters sing that half-step in swimming pools, and hum that doorbell motif when aliens are mentioned.

But I digress. Everyone experiences these things a little differently. Listen to people you respect, then clear your mind and trust your instincts. As Aaron said, no time spent transcribing or composing is truly wasted.

-Sam


*Weird, typing that it feels like I’m writing a letter to me-when-I-was-5.