Just wondering how prolific people generally are? So how many songs have you written?
For the band I'm only counting stuff that's finished as I have no way to count the random demos and ideas that got abandoned (there's probably hundreds) but I reckon we have done 56 finished songs broken down as follows:
Released
41
Recorded but unmixed
5
Played live but not recorded
4
Xmas Songs
6
Part of what got me thinking about this is that I was watching a youtube video about songwriting and the guy said that basically you need to write hundreds of songs to get 1 good one and given that the "hit rate" of getting from an instrumental demo to a finished song is prob around 4:1 I reckon I have prob written several hundred in the past 10 years.
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The other guy in my old originals band was prolific and would have a couple of new songs every week at rehearsal. A lot missed the mark but every so often he'd stumble on an absolute belter. Over a few years that built up to quite a solid sounding set and a decent album.
I've always thought that was the reason for the old difficult second album syndrome. A band gets signed but by that point they've been together for months or, more likely, years and are signed on the strength of a demo/live set or similar. However, that demo/live set is almost certainly the culmination of cherry picking from months or years of their best work. You've effectively got a new band where their first album is already their greatest hits e.g. The Darkness. Time comes to release album no.2 and you're trying to write stuff that's every bit as good as your best ever work with much less room for error and a record label on your back.
I'm sure it comes easy to some but would be interesting to see how much stuff someone or some band who are prolific cast aside.
We aren't great as a band either - me and the other guitarist are the main writers, but we've both been in a rut/not been giving it the time it needs, so rehearsals for the last year were just us jamming the same ideas over and over with little progress. It was nice to see each other and play loud, as we are all mates, but we probably would've been better just going to the pub for all we got done!
So all that adds up to not very prolific at all...
Whether any of it was any good is a moot point!!
I think two of the bands I was in were quite good, but the writing approach was very different.
For the first band, everything was written as a collective, all ideas jammed though based on a riff or groove that one of us had written during the week. We had hundreds of discarded ideas but maybe got to 20 decent finished songs over 3 years.
For the 2nd and, we all wrote complete songs, either individually or in pairs, which were then tweaked by the band collectively. This band got signed to a small label and pushed out 4 albums (2 with me, 2 without). I can't think of many songs that got discarded once demoed to the band - I guess as they were often complete, then everyone self filtered.
These days, I hardly write anything anymore. No ideas, no inspiration, no time. Mostly I just have other things I'd rather be doing. I think here there is a Johnny Marr (?) quote "inspiration strikes, but it has to find you working" that I think is also true.
The really sad thing for me, is the one or two songs from bands that were either short lived or that never recorded, that I think were decent and I can't really remember them at all.
In total of my 200 I reckon only around 50 have been recorded in anyway.
oh wrong forum, sorry
just because you do, doesn't mean you should.
This is what I've done so far:
https://soundcloud.com/redfordissent
The songwriting has generally improved with each, as I find a groove again, and the vocals likewise. I was never a good singer but feel I am getting more comfortable as I go. Shame I'm mid-40s, eh?
My band, Red For Dissent
In some ways it's more difficult as it's easy to sound very cliched etc but on the other hand you never really have that problem of not knowing where to go next with a song because you already kinda have a map for it (or maybe several possible maps but at elast some sort of direciton).
34 with my last band - 2 albums and 3 EPs
And trailing around that, a cloud of hundreds of ideas ranging from finished songs that just weren't released for whatever reason, songs that I went off, to just a verse or chorus or riff, and thousands of little snippets of ideas recorded on my various phones over the years.
Bandcamp
Spotify, Apple et al
6 acoustic instrumentals
A few electric guitar instrumentals
A few piano pieces
A few Chapman stick pieces
It could be said that I'm not prolific.
Releases: 5 albums, couple of EPs
Got a book with about 170 completed songs in it, there are others from before the book though.
Plus the usual bits of ideas, phone recordings, random riffs etc.
Agree with the notion that it's best to write a lot and not worry about quality at the time, and then edit it down when you're not in creative mode.
Released 3 EP's and contributed to the writing of another one (didn't play on the recording).
Loads of unfinished song ideas and riffs/chord progressions that just never got developed.