Q: i am playing a lot - improvizating songs out - and i wonder if i should continue improvizing and get better in that or stop and finish some of the songs i improvized out? like record some instruments around or do a whole new song out of it which would sound less improvizational. how do you find the isudzwiuzdb between those options? what could you recommend me please? or ask me something
A: keep your eligible song seeds in a list. chronologically by date born is usually the most helpful for me. writing is a different exercise from idea generation, and you basically just need a quiet place where you can do your work. once you're sure that you want to engage in the writing process, some important questions will be: choosing which song to work on, and how far to work on it. during 2012-2013 i had the insane idea that i was going to write just a bit on each one and move on. unfortunately this is not a strategy that will ever lead to completion (because there were hundreds of songs in there), and i worked like that for an entire year and didn't even get close to any kind of completion. (but the good news is i gained worlds of experience, and after that i felt i was a much much stronger writer). but finally i shuffled it up and organized them by percentage of completion and knocked off everything from the 70%s upwards (finishing the writing on those.) then of course you would have a whole other decision making process on which one(s) to record. Another strategy i've been using in more recent years is to make a selection from all the songs (finished or non) and stick with that and complete the writing and recording of that song. this is a good and focused strategy, but the downside is that it can be very hard to feel confident in the decision if none of the songs are beyond 20% written. i guess what i'm trying to say is there are many different strategies for choosing, but the one thing that i'm sure of which i'm trying to tell you is that the writing process is a separate process from idea generation, and you should log all your song seeds into a chronological list, and then go about making a decision on which ones to do and work on writing them. but if you haven't had too much experience in doing the actual 'writing', it might be good to just do a random selection or just go in order chronologically, just to see what goes into the whole writing thing. it's very different from improv/idea generation -- it's much more like being a doctor. you look into the original idea, you make a diagnosis, figure out what it is, where it's going, what it needs, brainstorm on what problems need to be solved, etc, and through hard thinking and trial and error, and a bit of imagination, you can find solutions. it can be grueling for the first few hours but once you have those sweet breakthroughs it can be liberating to know that you can take care of any 'song seed' and take it where it is trying to go. hopefully i've given you some information. as you can see i am still wrestling with some of this myself, mostly when it comes to the song selection strategies