How To Cut & Paste Song Ideas

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is David Jackel on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to talk to you about cutting and pasting song ideas. Now in the course of writing songs you're going to have a lot of half written songs. I have got hundreds of these stupid things where I sat down with my tape recorder, I got my notebooks, I got this one, I got a whole bunch like this, things where I have these really cool ideas but they're not finished. In your collection you have hours and hours of different song ideas that you can actually cut apart and paste together to create a really good song. So one thing that I often do is I'll have one idea for a song just a basic chord something like this and I don't know where to go with it. Then I'll go through my tape recorder, I'll go through all my different tapes, I go through my notebooks and then I'll discover something else that's in the same key like this...and I think well that'll go great after the first part. One of the great things about cutting and pasting song ideas is that nothings wasted. If you come up with a great idea for a song and then you can't think of anything to do with it, years may go by where there's this little snip it that you couldn't do anything with and then later on you'll have a song that comes up and you'll say, I don't know how to end this. Then you remember the old song and you'll say oh of course I'll just put them together. I did this with my most recent band The Daily Pravda. We have a song which has done decently well on local radio called She's So Mature and I have written the verse and the chorus and I liked it and I didn't know where to go with it. I thought well, I can just go back after the solo and finish it with another chorus, but that would be really boring and then I remembered another song I had written back when I was in college that went something like this... I never did anything with it, but then when I was finishing up She's So Mature, I though oh wait a minute that would be the perfect ending. I'm so glad I used that it added a whole new dimension to the song, it gave it that much depth and I thought this is a great technique and now that's all I really do when I write songs, is rather than going back to the obvious ending of repeating the chorus I try to tack on something completely different. I want to start at one point and end at a completely different point and mixing and matching, cutting and pasting is the perfect way to do this."