Greetings and request for workflow guidance

[superflux]

Hello all,

Greetings from a former TAXI member (and veteran of a single Road Rally), who's looking to get back into this after a very long hiatus. Last time I was here, my (future) wife was the songwriter, and I was just her drummer and attempting to facilitate the promotional side of her efforts.

I am a long-time live player, with a little over 35 years of gigging experience. I'm now looking for a new creative outlet, and would like to take the plunge into instrumental composition. I have engineered and produced enough of my wife's original tunes that I have a fair handle on the technical side of things. I won't know if I have an aptitude
for writing material suitable for libraries until I give it a go.

Can anyone give me a little advice about how to write that first batch of instrumentals? Is it better to try a bunch of different ideas, the way a singer/songwriter would, or is it
smarter to take a theme/feel/groove/mood and come up with multiple variations of it before moving on to the next idea?

Also, does it make more sense to start right out trying to create material that satisfies the criteria in a listing, or is it preferable to write what comes naturally at first and see where that takes you? Implicit in this question is the (perhaps foolhardy) assumption that one would be writing commercial enough sounding material that there'd eventually be some use for it.

I recognize that no matter the methodology one uses, many hours and many tries are required before one can expect to realize any success. However, I wondered if
there is a more sensible way to organize one's efforts, material and output.

I apologize if this is too open-ended a query. Thanks for any wisdom that anybody can share!!

Steve C.
Little Rock, AR

[mojobone]

Nice to meet you, Steve. Naw, there's nothing wrong with your query and as my ol' Oxford sensei* used to say, there are no dumb questions, only dumb students.

I'm gonna say, if you need to write in bulk and you know a style/genre in a fairly intimate way, you should multiply ten (or more) genre-appropriate chord progressions by twenty-five (or more) similarly appropriate beats. (if a genre doesn't have ten chord progressions and twenty-five beats, it's probably a sub-genre)

That should yield you 250 tracks, so from there, all you need to do is add enough instrumentation and/or percussion/SFX and/or naughty bits to keep them interesting for roughly two minutes each. Library/Production music tends to like compatible sections that are easily edited and where the mood doesn't change, yet the intensity can be easily varied in editing/postproduction. Good luck!




* Dr. John Hartford, OBE, D. S./Al Coda, OB/Gyn