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Long Distance Song Writing
For a couple bands, especially ones who find themselves in a similar situation to ours, writing music year round can be difficult. For all who are unaware, for the entire life of our band, each member has been at a different college in a different part of the country. It’s always tough when you’re faced with a dilemma like this, but it doesn’t mean the creative process has to wait until summer break.
Depending on how your band typically writes its music, there are a couple ways to bridge the distance. When we’re home usually Sam and I will sit down with all of our ideas, pick out the ones we like best at the moment and work towards putting together a structure and melody. This brings us to our first step for long distance writing; record all your ideas. There are tons of free recording programs online and you don’t even need to get a fancy one, just make sure your computer has some sort of mic to take in sound. Since I don’t have a Mac, I prefer to use the program Audacity, but really for the longest time I just used the tiny program that came with windows. This is even a good idea even if you’re not in a long distance band, just so you won’t forget your ideas.
With all this new webcam technology out now, you can virtually be right next to each other playing through your ideas together and talking them over. Skype is a great program for free webcam chat, and really makes this shortcut more manageable. But, if you don’t have a webcam, no worries, there are other ways to continue the communication. Sam and I like to IM back and forth while listening through each other’s ideas. I’ve found that this has actually improved our song writing when were in person because we all are much better at verbalizing what we are thinking musically.
Once we’ve decided on the ideas we like, usually we’ll both go to the drawing board, and come back with a recorded song of where we think we can take these ideas. Sometimes these drafts are similar, sometimes very different. The bonus of this though, is we still get to have two different ideas to either sift through ourselves, or ask the other members about. Again we’ll talk it over, email works as well as IM, and even Facebook chat will do as well. When we’ve decided on what we want, Sam will draft a final acoustic version, and either send it to me or play it for me over the phone. When we’re happy, we’ll send it out to the other guys, after they have their input, everyone has a final copy to start drafting additional parts or improving their own parts.
When in a long distance band it’s important to constantly be sending stuff back and forth to your members. Even if you’re not going to spend the time right then writing it, it let’s your mates know where you currently are in your writing style, and what kind of ideas you’re looking to implement in the new music. I know, at least for us, our musical tastes could change overnight and we could be drawing inspiration from something completely different than from what we were the week before. So keep everyone updated, and keep the lines of communication alive. Keep the creative juices flowing as best you can.
Thanks for stopping by and reading the article, I’d love to hear about some other tactics if anyone has any, we’re always willing to try something new!
-Mike
McTwist
