Need some help expanding songs

[Guest]

So basically, I have a lot of songs I've made which I like conceptually, but have trouble expanding. I have ideas, I pick instruments and create patches, I put it down into audio, and then all of a sudden, I get stuck in a rut. I was wondering if anyone here had any suggestions for getting past that block.

 

Here's some examples of incomplete segments, where I was unable to think of ways to expand without making it overly repetitious

 

 

 

Here's one where I tried to expand, couldn't get any new melodies to fit into the puzzle, tried reusing, and it just comes out a repetitive mess

 

[Lucas]

Do you compose music since a long time ?

 

Because I do since about three years and always had these kind of problems : beginning a song has often been easy and exciting, making me discover things and ideas that really sounds good to my ear, and all that happens in a very natural way. Then comes a point where the natural becomes harder to find. I feel the need to make the song more consistent, to make some developments that could carry the melodies and the whole stuff during a time that I consider to be reasonable for the actual song.

 

And for me that's the hard part of the process. At the beginning I just used to stop the current song and go for another one because I was just discovering completely new tools and was full of ideas and wishes of experimentation. I tried a few times to force myself to finished the song but, and, even if retrospectively, when I hear the result, it's not as bad as I felt it to be when I composed it, it may sound a bit forced.

 

As the time past I continued to experiment in a lot of directions, and I think I've gotten better in making song structures, and now (actually quite recently) I feel better at ease when it's time to make the melodies and all the elements of the composition a whole song, even if some failures always happen sometimes.

 

For example, the song I'm working on since about two weeks and which is almost ready to be mixed was very easy to develop first and then I spent about one week stucked on its middle part, trying to find a melody that I re-write about five times and which never satisfied me. Yesterday I found something that I liked and that's almost it, I'll mix it for the end of the week I think.

 

In conclusion, sorry about this quite long introspective digressions, but all I wanted to say was that, if you are new to music composition (and that is maybe wrong ; in that case my current post will just hit the wrong points), maybe you should just try to force yourself sometimes to finish your songs, but don't pay too much attention to that : I think that finding melodies and musical ideas is the most important part of the job, because they are(imo, again), the most important part of the song. Would you prefer to hear a track made with a succession of catchy things that sound quite disorganized putted together, or a perfectly organized structure fulfilled with uninteresting melodies ?

 

Anyway the excerpts you posted right there are full of good ideas in my opinion, and no one prevents you from aborting them right now and come back to them later when you'll feel more self-confident.

 

I just don't want to give you ideas like "you should put a pad at 35:00 with that given chord scale" because this would be a way to standardize your music, and the only standard you have to put in it is the one coming from your imagination.

 

So I hope that you will find some interesting points in my own (short) experience, but it's not even sure that it will match yours. The reason I wrote thins long post has nothing to do about wanting to impose my thoughts, just that those thoughts grown on me a lot since all this time discovering and experimenting with the musical tools I know.

 

Good luck to you !

Lucas

[hardcode]

im not experienced in production by any stretch, but it seems that the worst is when you dont even like the track youre working on anymore and finish it becomes a chore. i guess this is way easier of a hurdle for people who get paid for what they produce. for people like myself who just try and produce for fun, well, what the hell use is working on a tune you dont even like anymore. i guess you just dont want the work you already put in the go to waste. thats my problem, for example sometimes ill have this 3 or 4 second section that i worked a lot on but i know it just sounds dumb, but i have a hard time just wiping it, so ill end up spending even more time trying to tweak it to make it sound ok, when its really a usueless attempt because it just sounds dumb to begin with. so i would say that you are already a step in the right direction with basic ideas, at least you arent painting yourself into a corner

[Guest]

Thank you both for your advice. I've been making music for about three years, and I actually started out having it be much easier for me to compose, pumping out melodies left and right. Later I got persnickety about my sound, and started messing with analog & other electronics, and I think my new-found perfectionism is part of what's making it hard for me to compose. I'll certainly follow your advice Antape, even if your story isn't exactly the same as mine.

 

Of course, other suggestions are still welcome.