By Michael Tedder. Or perhaps you require more proof. More like Born to Record 8 Songs. More Like This. Despite a Guilty Verdict, R. The 25 Best Fall Albums. Recommended Suggested for you. The InsideHook Newsletter. News, advice and insights for the most interesting man in the room.
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Look closely at those songs — are there any connecting lyrical or melodic themes? Are they strong enough to build your album on? At the very least, these songs might inspire new ideas, or jumpstart a concept you already have in mind. Consider already-written material for your album. Spend a significant amount of time crafting new songs. You can perfect the songs later. For now, explore ideas and make room for inspiration to strike.
As you work on the songs, also work toward developing your own unique sound. Inspiration can come at any time, so be prepared.
Carry a pen and notebook with you everywhere. Use a voice recorder app on your phone to capture lyric or melody ideas on the fly. If you are co-writing songs with someone else, agree on how to split the music rights during the writing process. If you get stuck on one, put that song away and start work on another one.
You can come back to it later with fresh eyes and ears. Practice frequently. Organize specific times for practicing and stick to that schedule as closely as you can. Consistent practicing will help you hone your craft. Think about why these variations might be happening.
Do you need to rehearse more to work that kink out, or should that change be incorporated into the song? Allow them to develop organically. Book gigs and perform in front of crowds as often as possible. Performing will give you the chance to perfect your songs and test your new material out on an audience.
Pay attention to their reactions and get feedback from trustworthy people in the crowd. Collaborate with your bandmates. If you are the front person or the main songwriter of a band, it can be difficult to relinquish full control. However, you have to give your bandmates room to interpret your vision while still putting their unique spin on the sound.
Allow room for their creative juices to flow. Respect the suggestions and input of your bandmates. The songs will be better for it. After honing in on what you envision as the thematic heart of your album, explore your concept more deeply by writing even more songs. In general, most completed albums range from 8 to 12 tracks, so try to write around 20 songs. If 20 seems like too many, just aim to write as many songs as you can.
Part 2. Choose the best tracks for the record. As you narrow down the final tracks, think of the album as sculpture. Produce only the best of your music. Choose the songs that truly showcase your musical talent.
Arrange the track listing with emphasis on the first track. Research has shown that the earlier a track appears on a record, the more likely a consumer is to listen to it. Give the album a title. Go through your lyrics and see if anything jumps out at you as being title material. Bands often use the title of one of the songs as the album title.
If you decide to go this route, choose the song that best exemplifies the theme or mood of your album. Rehearse the songs to prepare for recording in the studio. For example, Godspeed You! Every album is the product of its time.
Production techniques make all the difference. Take house music from the late s and compare it with current dance music. The sound of the instruments, the way the album is mixed, the compression settings, etc. If the technique is interesting, an album scores higher on my list.
This goes hand-in-hand with production technique, but I break it out as its own category so I can pay attention to this specific aspect separately. This is all about the instruments, the timing, the variety or lack of variety of sound timbres, etc.
The stacks of sounds make things different. Where did the album come from? Many assume that technology has determined the length of the release.
And it is true that recording length has generally followed technological constraints: the minute LP and the minute CD. However, both of these technologies were partially guided by music, not the other way around. The speed of revolution, size and other factors of the LP were set by its developers, Colombia Records, to accommodate 45 minutes, enough time to hold the majority of classical compositions. Popular artists then began to fill up these LPs with collections of songs and, eventually, musicians from Sinatra through to the Beatles were creating full-length artistic statements.
Moving forward a few decades and allegedly Beethoven's Symphony No 9 was used to determine the length of a CD. Many artists felt pressurised to fill the entire capacity of a CD and the overlong album was born. I'll be intrigued to see how many great albums you can name from the CD age that are longer than 70 minutes. A theme, or dare I say a concept, is going to help an album hang together.
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