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just a little curious... when writing music, do you keep everything in your head, record on staff paper, use programs like guitar pro or sibelius or...?

what order do you usually find yourself writing in, if there is a particular one?

Ideas come at random and I have to find a piece of paper or something to record the idea. Sometimes it comes in big lumps sometimes small bit which I sift through my notes and idea recordings and piece stuff together later.

guitar/bass i memorize it except this one song I wrote for my (then) girlfriend. I wrote like half/most of that down. two years later, and i don't remember where its written down, but I still remember it.

composition/more formal stuff I write with finale, but I haven't done that in ages.

various audio/video recording devices. an idea will hit me, i'll scramble for the nearest recording device (i always have something with me that'll do the job) and i get it down. later, i'll work out the idea more fully. sometimes, if I find I want to hire session guys or something, I'll write out jazz charts for them to work from but that doesn't happen often.

I always have my iPhone with me, so I use that to record ideas. I'll usually sit down with my acoustic and hit play and a few minutes later I'll stop it and listen to the whole thing and take out all the riffs/licks/melodies that I like and then I usually like to hear how they'd sound with some meat, so I plug in my electric and I re-record with all the "good" riffs that I want to use for something. Now I have a bunch of files on my phone and itunes with riffs and stuff that I need to try to figure out how to make them into full songs. I also need a drummer!

Another funny thing I do is whenever a riff or melody comes to mind I whip out my phone and I'll usually hum the riff and then get home and listen to it and translate it to guitar.

I'll just sit there when I get bored and noodle around till I find something that sounds cool, then I'll try to find ways to improve it, play that note there blah blah. If I think it's good enough to use I've got a notebook where I write all my music down... in tabs.

sloppily and all at once. Every so often I come up with a whole bunch of song ideas but them forget most of them overnight.

all the albums that I've done by myself have all been written/recorded in basically one sitting.

I'm no good with real songs though, everything I write is more open ended and improvisational.

Mudfuzz wrote:Ideas come at random and I have to find a piece of paper or something to record the idea. Sometimes it comes in big lumps sometimes small bit which I sift through my notes and idea recordings and piece stuff together later.

yup that sounds about right

I usually map it out on paper like "intro, verse, chorus, verse, soft part, meedly-meedly part", etc. And I always remember it later when I look at my notes and see things like "the part with the flanger" or "epic part"...actually a lot of my songwriting is kinda spur of the moment while I'm recording and if I mess up but like the idea I'll rerecord it with that part in it.