How do YOU think that many of our favorite, famous prog songs were composed?
Vote, please.
A: The entire band wrote the completed song in one session, from beginning to end.
B: A few members only created the skeleton of the song, and the others added to it, at a later date.
C: One band member created the song, and the others adapted those parts to fit their own style of playing.
D: Other (please elaborate)
depends on which band and, sometimes, it depends on which song
D: each member wrote certain sections which were linked together. Example - Supper's Ready.
Tony wrote lover's Leap
Pete wrote Willow Farm
Tony, mike and Phil wrote Apocalypse.
Probably Mike wrote Guaranteed.
Thick as a Brick seems an obvious C.
Most Yes songs were written as fragments by a combination of members, but each member added their own parts (but may not have gotten "writing" credit). Take Roundabout, a Anderson/Howe composition. I'm pretty sure Squire wrote his kick-ass bass line all by his lonesome.
Jon Anderson woke up and all of Tales... was in his head.
You're leaving out jamming and improvisation as the genesis(ha) of some tracks. Also, creating epics by combining a bunch of half-songs (or vice versa: heavily editing a longer improv or jam session).Originally Posted by DGuitarist
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off
Yes: Howe has said they had some incredible jams that were never recorded, and everybody then forgot everything they had played.
Jams are great - if the tape is running!
I've spoken with people who seem to think Yes wrote their epics from beginning to end, and added all of those intricate details as they were writing it. Instead of adding them in after the main song was built.
That blows my mind.
That's basically Howe (ha) CTTE (album) was written. They would write a little, record it, then write some more, record that, until the song was completed and Offord would splice the tapes together. In some cases, they had no idea where the track was going. Bruford left the band because he didn't want to work like that anymore. There is a demo run-throughs of AYAI that has a different ending. After listening back, Howe and Anderson didn't like it and then banged out Apocalypse. Finally, as someone said, YES did jam and would work out arrangements, which by the next day, were forgotten because they didn't record it. Howe said he tried to record the jams so that they would remember the arrangements, but I guess there were times he didn't. He said in interviews that lots of great arrangements were lost.
There is also some interesting practice sessions that were recorded for Selling England where you hear the band working out parts and arrangements.
On An ELP video I have, Emerson is basically writing on the spot and showing the parts to Carl and Greg.
Great topic by the way - I'm always interested in knowing how a song was created and recorded. Neat stuff.
In the case of some people, there's also
E) guy makes demo of song with all parts and tells band "play this or you're fired".
Can you imagine arriving to do something like that in early seventies....!?!?!?
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by accident
In crayon on a brown paper bag.
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can you tell me?
Hmmmmm.
So we have some real thoughtful responses, some levity, and someone talking like Jon Anderson.
I'm on the correct forum, alright.
I'm not sure if he was talking about jamming, as such, or just them coming up with things in rehearsal which no one could remember the next day. I know on the Yesyears documentary, he talks about how they'd come up with stuff that was "too intricate, too specialized, or one guy would be the key to the whole thing, and he'd be the one who couldn't remember his part".
(as a side note, I remember reading that John Deacon came up with the bass line to Under Pressure, then couldn't remember it at first when Queen and Bowie resumed recording after a lunch break or whatever)
I think rock music in general, a lot of music hinges on one guy having an idea, and everyone else giving their input. As an example, the majority of the songs on the Queen records up to and including A Kind Of Magic, having one person listed in the byline. But I have the impression from interviews, that they all threw in ideas. Brian May once commented that he was somewhat perturbed that Freddie claimed sole authorship on Seven Seas Of Rye, even though Brian wrote the instrumental bit in the middle of the song.
I think a lot of times, what happens is let's say someone brings in something he's written, then another guy says, "I've got an idea for an intro to that", then another guy would say "I've got an idea for the middle section" and so on. I think Steve Howe said Yes did a lot of that. Someone would play something in rehearsal, and he'd think "Ya know, if I change the key of this bit, or change the tempo, we could fit those two together". I think Chris Squire said that everything that was written for the band ended up "going through a cheese grater" with the result not being quite what you'd imagined.
I know Keith and Greg have both talked about the story about that first section of Tarkus, the "I suggest you save that for your solo album" story, but I wonder how the rest of it came together. I know Greg has said one of his jobs as the producer on the early 70's ELP records was to sort of edit Keith's musical ideas and fashion them into something that sort of resembling a song. I'd love to know how the rest of Tarkus came into being, ie did Greg have some of the bits laying around, or did he write "song" bits to link together Keith's "music" (I think Greg once said that Keith was good at "composing music" but not "writing songs").
Like who? I remember Trevor Rabin saying that there was a lot of friction between him and Jon Anderson because Trevor liked to demo out the song, then have the band play pretty much exactly what he had on the demo. Of course, Jon likes to write his own lyrics and vocal melodies, and apparently Trevor didn't like that much.
He's one of the guys that came to mind, yeah, though Trevor Horn clearly had a lot of leeway to rearrange and adapt his stuff when they made 90125. On Talk I'd say that's about how it went down though. I've done that myself in some cases, but I always try and yield to a better idea. I was in a band years ago that wrote by jamming and recording the jams. Then we'd work the parts we liked out and structure them. Them we'd play as far as we had worked out and when that ran out we'd keep going, jam again and repeat the process until we found an ending point. Most Glass Hammer music (certainly for the last few albums) is written by bringing in individual ideas, putting them together and then refining and arranging individual parts as a group.
I know that when Bruce and I wrote together, we would have individual ideas, and then one of us would write connecting parts to make a logical flow, to stitch it together properly.
If something sounded too mundane or went on for too long, I would listen and see alternative parts, would work them out, and present them to the band. Most of the time these were accepted, and expanded by the other band members into something even better.
Songs I've written on my own usually take one of two roads:
[1] I come up with every bloody note that anyone plays from start to finish, with minor or no modifications from the band.
[2] I have most of the music written, but I'm stuck on one point, and Bruce goes, "How about doing this?" and a whole new section springs forth from that with input from everyone.
Truthfully, I usually like the results of the second method best. Others come up with stuff I'd never thought of, and the music blossoms into something bigger than I could have conceived.
Steve Howe used to talk about how Jon would bring in a three-chord ditty, then he would Yessize it with a couple hundred chords and some left turns. That was his biggest regret with Magnification; he wanted to add to parts of it, and Jon refused. I think the album suffers for that, and could've been a lot more interesting. But by that time in their relationship, I guess, Jon's "little Hitler" personna was complete.
Gnish-gnosh borble wiff, shlauuffin oople tirk.
I would be curious to know which famous prog songs were actually written quickly - and why they were written faster than that band's other songs. I'm discovering that if you DO want to write original prog material - it isn't going to happen instantly!
In a coke-fueled haze using joint skins on the back of a high-priced hooker.
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There's the way Marillion does it, which strikes me as kind of odd: jam, jam and jam some more while it's being recorded then have the guy who's going to produce the album sift through all that to find bits that can be worked on. They've all expressed frustration with the writing process but they don't seem willing or able to change it.
...or you could love
While B and C are probably the most common forms of rock/prog/band composing, there seems to be no exact mention of: composer of the song writes out all the parts note for note, including drum parts, and everybody reads them and plays them as written and THAT'S THAT. You'll find this a lot in RIO bands. Or Zappa.
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now we know the real reason behind GH's many lineup changes!!
as brilliant as "Supper's Ready" is I couldn't help but feel it's basically a compilation of pieces that were good but didn't fit into their own songs or anywhere else. I wound imagine a lot of longer prog dingers are that way.
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I have employed this variation of D: other: My drummer (who is a Berklee Grad) will come to practice with a complicated groove (something like: 6/8, 5/8, 6/8, 7/8) and say to me...."Hey, can you write something over this"?....We will record him doing the groove then I'll go back, loop the drum part for an hour and jam over it endlessly and start coming up with a series of riffs and melodic ideas that work over his groove. When he returns, I play it all for him and we start sifting and sorting out the weak ones and formulating the good ones into a cohesive piece. Once THAT is done. I'll scratch out a lead sheet for the bass player telling him where he needs to place certain key notes but allowing enough "space" for him to make that part his own....this works for us for the bulk of our material.
Well, I think some of them could have worked as separate songs. I think Lover's Leap, Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man, and Willow Farm could have all worked in that fashion. In the case of Lover's Leap, you'd only need a bridge and a third verse to have a "complete" song. Of course, one could argue that the rest of Supper's Ready is sort of the bridge/interlude section, given that they reprise the chorus bit near the end.
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