Culs de sac....

August 3, 2010 2:49 PM

I've posted something similar to this before - apologies - but I think it's an area where we could really help each other out. I've got a few tracks - some of them good ones - where I've got so far and hit a brick wall. I'd bet you all have some of these too. Huge frustration. It would be cool to post mp3s of these stalled tracks on the off-chance that someone can suggest ways to unlock or resolve them. They'd probably need some kind of tag to distinguish them as work-in-progress. A form of collaboration I guess....
posted by MajorDundee (24 comments total)

I think it's a good idea.

Maybe just an occasional thread like this would work? We could post links here to off-site hosting and that way wouldn't have half-finished stuff up permanently if we didn't want to.
posted by Karlos the Jackal at 3:43 AM on August 4, 2010


Yes! A thousand times yes!

Also, a nice user-friendly way to do the off-site hosting would be great.

Dropbox, perhaps?

This will definitely benefit the shy musicians amongst us.

Some will surely say that the music collaborators page is enough, but, alas, I think more is required.

Cortex, what think ye?
posted by Zenabi at 4:31 AM on August 4, 2010


As an apt example, just this morning I woke up with the song title "Who Put that Speculum in My Sock Drawer?" and hovered betwixt a D major 7 or an E min 7 flat 9 starting chord.

-stage whisper- (lyrics for that anyone?)

User-friendly hosting is going to be important.
posted by Zenabi at 4:39 AM on August 4, 2010


Threads to chatter about unfinished stuff is great, yeah. I think off-site hosting for stuff that's not fit for standard Music posting is the best plan, I'm not all that hot on building a secondary on-site infrastructure for hosting mp3s unless this turns into something where there's a really established utility though I'd be happy to talk about that side of it in the future if it does take off.

General threads like this that are sort of general discussion about unfinished stuff are obviously fine; I think it's totally okay for people to (continue to) make song-specific posts to if they have a specific thing they want to workshop as well. We're not exactly overwhelmed by the existing traffic over here, so there's no problem with that sort of thing.
posted by cortex at 7:38 AM on August 4, 2010


Also, a self-service thing like dropbox is probably your best bet for autonomous hostin' and postin', but I've got scads of free space on my own file hosting account and don't particularly mind throwing up an extra mp3 now and then in a permanent and bullshit-free space if that's helpful to people. If you're not in a hurry, feel free to email me the mp3 and I'll toss it up when I can.
posted by cortex at 7:41 AM on August 4, 2010


Yeah...that makes sense, cortex.

What would be nice is a "depository" with folders grouped by username wherein everyone can upload their unfinished business, and "finishers" can pick and choose which style and user to collaborate with.

I can't help thinking that there might be a demand for this, but that may be because I belong to the group of people that can never
posted by Zenabi at 7:50 AM on August 4, 2010


I agree that this would be a great new practice to develop. It's a step beyond sharing our own stuff and it involves a more active participation (from whoever chooses to participate, voluntarily). I'd love to see it happening.
posted by micayetoca at 8:04 AM on August 4, 2010


As an apt example, just this morning I woke up with the song title "Who Put that Speculum in My Sock Drawer?" and hovered betwixt a D major 7 or an E min 7 flat 9 starting chord.

Oh my, that's a toughie. Anyway - how is your cervix?
posted by MajorDundee at 1:34 PM on August 4, 2010


Aha! we have a sliver of chorus.
posted by Zenabi at 1:38 PM on August 4, 2010


I know most of you are comfortable with IT stuff, but I'm not very competent/confident with it at all (e.g. "sockpuppet" - I beg your pardon? Are we doing ventriloquism now or what??). Can someone do a step-by-step idiot-proof guide to where and how to post these stalled tracks? Think of it as akin to helping a doddery old gent who smells of stale piss across a busy street i.e. a near-saintly act done pretty fucking quickly.
posted by MajorDundee at 1:47 PM on August 4, 2010


Aha! we have a sliver of chorus

Christ....you probably need surgery then. How on earth did you get a choir up there? Sounds to me like you have one of those roomy ones where it's a good idea to write your name on the soles of your shoes before engaging with it.....
posted by MajorDundee at 1:51 PM on August 4, 2010


I like my angels thinly sliced.

This whole frontal lobe needs to be removed, it seems.

I've heard of successful DIY appendectomies. How difficult can it be? Hmm...Let me give this a shot.

*drill and scalpel noises*

"Daisy, Daisy...
posted by Zenabi at 2:21 PM on August 4, 2010


"...give me your answer do. I'm half crayyyzzeeee.....fuck...I dropped it.....gimme that flashlight....no,no not that one...the big fucker with 3 batteries....ohh My GOOOOD!!!"
posted by MajorDundee at 2:29 PM on August 4, 2010


"My God... it's full of stars!"
posted by Zenabi at 3:03 PM on August 4, 2010


I like this idea alot and having a permanent off-site repository would be awesome for everyone who wants to participate.

Like cortex, I have a ton of unused webspace that I pay for but will never be used. I think making it accessible to everyone by using FTP would be fine.

I don't have much time to participate here these days so this is something I can do to SHOW SOME SUPPORT! Boo Yaa!

Seriously, I'm gonna call my service provider right now and see what I can do.
posted by snsranch at 3:58 PM on August 4, 2010


Bah, scratch that. My ISP sucks donkey balls AND won't support external FTP.
posted by snsranch at 5:48 PM on August 4, 2010


Dropbox is really good for this kind of thing and worth installing. Easy to put stuff up, easy to delete it.
posted by unSane at 7:02 PM on August 4, 2010


On the general point of hitting a roadblock with a song, I have a few approaches to bust it out. Not guaranteed to work, but reasonably reliable.

1. Most songs need at least three parts. Verse, Chorus, Bridge. (Often four, but usually -- not always -- a minimum of three). Oftentimes you run out of steam because you only have two parts, which brings me to...

2. Pillage your other roadblocked songs. I can't stress this one enough. What other songs are blocked? Crash those fuckers together, until you get three parts that work together. Result: song. Most of my really good songs have come from colliding two disparate ideas together.

3. Loop what you have and make a looong version which you can play in the car over and over again. It usually becomes completely obvious what's missing and where it needs to go. This is my most reliable trick. I create a 'singalong mix' which has no vocals and the musical parts repeated over and over again, then play it in the car at top volume. At a certain point you just become DESPERATE for it to do whatever it is the song needs.

4. Try singing harmonies without the lead vocal. You get new melodies this way which lead you in new directions.

5. Half speed it.

6. Same chord progression in minors.

7. And so on.
posted by unSane at 7:27 PM on August 4, 2010


Pillage your other roadblocked songs.

My friend Brian has very effectively done this over the years; he's definitely a cobbler in a way that I'm not (I tend to either bang a song out at a go or leave it to die by the side of the road with the polite fiction that I'll Get Back To That), and so whenever I check in on what he's doing I end up hearing bits and pieces of other songs that never quite came together. Makes for a very interesting sort of living document of where he's at musically.

One thing I've been trying a bit lately is taking an idea that I knocked out on one instrument and transplanting it to another. It's interesting how my different physical approaches to e.g. piano vs. guitar makes the same core idea produce significantly different treatments, partly because they're obviously different instruments but partly because my specific idiomatic approaches to making music in that physical mode differs as well. I'm kind of excited about something I started banging out on piano this morning and then carried over to my acoustic, because it was like, oh! That's...different, even though it's the same Thing.
posted by cortex at 10:31 PM on August 4, 2010


Pillage your other roadblocked songs.

or (and this might be one of the most exciting things about the idea behind this thread) pillage someone else's roadblocked songs: "hey if you put your bit with my bit, we got us a runner...".

unSane's list is useful and i do most of those things when stuck - particularly the car thing. But the problem is that if the stalled track is what I'd call a "vibe" or "feel"-driven thing, rather than straightforward melody, the real problem is one of momentum. Just running out of gas. And it's very difficult, in my experience, to restart those kinds of tracks because they're kind of mood dependent. Don't know if that makes sense......
posted by MajorDundee at 1:28 AM on August 5, 2010


Dropbox is really good for this kind of thing and worth installing. Easy to put stuff up, easy to delete it.

Actually, something like soundcloud might be better because you don't need to put any software on your machine and you can make the songs private and only invite select people. Just a thought. Sorry, don't think I'll be doing this, but thought I'd drop that idea for ya.
posted by sleepy pete at 1:43 AM on August 5, 2010


Thanks -- Soundcloud is sweeet. Major Dundee, check it out... it takes about five seconds to sign up, and you're done.
posted by unSane at 5:15 AM on August 5, 2010


One thing I've been trying a bit lately is taking an idea that I knocked out on one instrument and transplanting it to another.

Yeah, this. The piano riff on my SUMMER'S CALLING challenge track was originally a guitar part which I had had around for a decade but could never figure out how to expand it.

Swapping instruments usually changes the feel and timing more or less radically and often suggests a whole bunch of other variations, modulations, or related parts -- which can then often be transplanted back to the original instrument.

You usually find that what you come up with on one instrument is something you would never come up with on another, and often feels quite strange to play.

Another trick I have, especially in a groove-based song, is to loop the parts in Logic and then overdub more and more parts on top of it, trying to make each one completely different. Guitar solos, vocal harmonies, pads, whatever. I do this for days and weeks sometimes. Then I start trying to arrange them, chopping up the structure brutally as required, just trying to get something that feels dynamic. Usually this means trying to find the hook and making it the chorus, and structuring everything else so it builds to that in a musically logical way.

I usually end up throwing away 90% of the stuff I've recorded, but it's really nice when different parts start to lock together.

So on that SUMMER'S CALLING track you can hear a funky little guitar riff come in over the piano on the intro, then there's a couple of 12-string riffs that come in later, one of which is picked up by the lead guitar at the end. All of that stuff, plus the vocal melody, came from transferring the guitar part to the piano, looping it, and overdubbing repeatedly, plus just grooving along to it in the car and trying to hear the song.
posted by unSane at 5:29 AM on August 5, 2010


Echoing what others have said about Soundcloud - you caan not only keep your recordings semi-private, people can annotate certain parts of your songs - great for collaboration!
posted by Cantdosleepy at 6:18 AM on August 6, 2010


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