Pick Up the Pieces
If you’re having trouble coming up with a full song from scratch, try the next-best approach—dipping into your archive of leftover song fragments. With a little finesse and creativity, you can piece together these previously unaffiliated parts, sometimes with surprisingly successful results
All of us long for those rare instances when a fully fleshed-out song unexpectedly materializes in one gulp, title included, as if through some cosmic connection. Such “bolt-from-the-blue” moments can be fleeting, however, and while waiting for the big one to arrive, don’t forget that many outstanding records were actually the sum of various musical fragments, some of which may have had nothing to do with one another beforehand. With a little finesse and creativity, you can pull together your own archived bits and pieces, often with surprisingly successful results.
First, save everything. Songwriters know that random ideas frequently come in fragments—you’re walking along and suddenly there’s a snatch of melody with a line attached to it, but nothing more. Over time you may have compiled a small stack of these orphaned choruses, riffs and intros that never really went anywhere. If a song fragment is good enough to set aside rather than delete, why not just finish it? For many of us, the longer an idea sits around uncompleted, the more it loses its luster, to the point that you wonder what you ever saw in it in the first place.
Nevertheless, what may help is a fresh set of ears—that is, put the piece away for now and revisit it once enough time has passed so you can reassess with a new perspective. Or consider playing the fragment to a respected source, who may be able to offer a path forward once you’ve lost all objectivity. Whatever you do, trust your judgement, and never delete anything that initially piqued your interest, even if it’s been around for years. In the meantime, you may find it helpful to organize these ideas into separate subfolders—one for choruses, another for riffs or intros, and so forth.
Be prepared. Even if they’re just brief bits of words and melody, are you ready to capture those spontaneous urges before they vanish into the ether? Having at least some of your gear armed and ready to activate is helpful, even if it’s just a single mic on a boom stand or an electronic keyboard with a dedicated patch to your recorder. At the very least you can use your phone’s voice-memo app to quickly preserve any new arrivals on the fly until you have the chance to do a proper demo.
Be flexible. What if you have an unfinished section of music that was written on acoustic guitar, but you’re now halfway into a synth-based track that could use a good bridge. Do you pass on the acoustic bit because it has an altogether different sound? Absolutely not! In fact, reimagining a stray piece of music using brand new instrumentation may be exactly what you need to get the part moving again. While it may seem challenging at times, try to be flexible and willing to experiment with your ideas throughout the writing and recording process.
New life for old parts. You can also use your folder of unfinished business as a sort of spare-parts warehouse from which you can cull sections of guitar or keyboard chord progressions, licks, and fills, as well as any other ingredients, for the purpose of building a new song. These days even basic editing software allows you to adjust the tempo, tone, and pitch of a sound file (within reason), thereby making it possible to fly in and recalibrate parts at will. That way even if you can’t complete a long-abandoned song idea, perhaps you could at least find a second home for its drum or click track.
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