Recording Your Song Ideas

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is David Jackel on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to talk to you about capturing your song idea. Now once you got an idea for a song, the first thing you want to do is record it so you can keep it safe. Chances are you're going to forget things over the course of the day and the new song idea that you have shouldn't be one of those things. So right away find a way to save that idea. Unfortunately you never know when and where inspiration is going to strike. You can be going for a walk, you could be at work, you could be on the train, you could be hanging out with friends, you could be in the bathroom, you never know when or where it's going to be. So one technique that I found is very useful is to use your cell phone. It doesn't matter which kind of cell phone you have, these days they all have them, voice recorders. Now if you're fortune enough to be at home when you have an idea use a tape recorder. Use a tape recorder over any other kind of recording devise. I keep this thing with me by my bed and its been very useful. I must have like 25 to 30 tapes right now stored from recordings that I have done with this thing, because I can be sitting by myself and just have this one idea and play out and then forget about it and then a month later I come back and I just go through the tapes that I made and I hear something and I say wow that's going to be a song. In fact on the last recording I did, I would say about 80% of that record comes from ideas that I got from these tape recordings. So having a tape recorder by your bed is really, really important. There's a famous story about Keith Richards who use to get drunk and keep a tape recorder by his bed and one morning he woke up with a hangover and he heard Satisfaction, he had written the opening little guitarist to Satisfaction and if he hadn't recorded that then it would of been gone lost in his hangover, so it's really important to record these things. Sometimes using a computer to record ideas is good if your ideas are complex. Let's say you had an idea for a harmony where on guitar is doing this...and then there's a melody on top that goes... Playing just one of those two won't communicate the entire idea. So if you have a multi tracking program, sure by all means go ahead and record that, but it might be even more effective just to suck it up, hit your tape recorder, you're going to make a really stupid sound in recording, it'll be like this...but it'll save the idea for you and later on you can make something more sophisticated. "