I belong to a MeetUp group called Portland Music Producers, which has weekly online meetings where members discuss what they’ve been working on, their goals for the coming week, and ask for help or advice. There are also “music challenges” for anyone who wishes to participate. Last week a new challenge was announced: to write and record a song from scratch in 60 minutes.
At the moment I’m living in a very small apartment and, aside from my Yamaha keyboard, there’s not enough room for me to set up all my recording equipment permanently. I was going to unpack and set up my multitrack recorder and drum pads on the dining room table, but that’s a lot of trouble for just an hour of work! Instead, especially since I thought I would do something along the lines of Filter or Cocteau Twins, I would use my Nintendo DS Jam Sessions for the guitar parts, then assemble drum patterns from samples in Audacity.
I sat down at the Yamaha and came up with a few chords. After recording the music, I began working on lyrics. The word block popped into my head and I just jotted down whatever came to mind, a mix of free association and stream of consciousness. When I recorded my voice, I “creatively mispronounced” the lyrics, to cover up the fact they were complete nonsense—mostly English words with a little French. For some reason, however, I could not get my microphone to work, so I recorded the vocals on my phone.
By now the hour was nearly up. There was no time to rehearse anything, do retakes, or do any mixing other than setting the levels, so no panning, no equalization, no effects. From start to finish, it took me 67 minutes. It would only have been 63, but due to one little technical glitch towards the end of the process it took me an additional four minutes to finish. When I was done, I threw together a quick video ’cuz, you know, I like making videos for music! I looked over the lyrics for a title, and from a line in the chorus—men on the side, looking askew—I came up with “Distraction Spies”.
Trying to do this in 60 minutes felt like I was diffusing a bomb—afterwards I was incredibly stressed. However, I proved to myself it could be done! “Distraction Spies” is very short—if I’d had 90 minutes I could have written a second verse and probably a bridge as well, plus done a better mixing job. “Distraction Spies” has potential, though, and I may expand upon it in the future and make a proper song out of it.
It wasn’t until a day or two later that I remembered, when I was in the bands Dynamicaracket and The Weird Brothers, we tended to write songs very quickly, often writing and recording entire albums in an afternoon. The contexts were a little different, however. Dynamicaracket’s music often emphasized atmosphere over melody or structure, and lyrics were usually improvised. On the other hand, The Weird Brothers had a very talented guitarist (Kain Thornn) who could effortlessly play chord progressions without rehearsal and, while lyrics were usually written in advance, they were often of a juvenile and humorous nature—we weren’t trying to be Shakespeare or Dylan or The Beatles!
June 21, 2024 update A couple of days later, other members had begun posting their songs. One member did a guitar instrumental and upon hearing it, I thought, “Why didn’t I do something with the only ‘instrument’ I can actually play: my voice?” There was still time to submit another song. This time I did set up my multitrack recorder (and got my microphone to work). I thought I would do a sort of Ligeti-inspired improvised choral piece. I lay down a conductor track, then sang two tracks worth of root drones. I added three more tracks of vocals, one in falsetto. For each of those tracks, I didn’t listen to the ones already recorded (aside from the drones) to make the music as random as possible. For some reason the name Llewellyn popped into my head, so I looked up several other Welsh names (Merwyn, Cadwaladr, Terfel, Leyshon) which became the “lyrics” for the falsetto track. I finished in 54 minutes, bringing my average to 60.5 minutes, lol. I then cobbled together another quicky video:
thejogolandgroup 