Thursday, January 20, 2011

New Song Diary: Scaling back, dramatically.

I finally got around to notating a bunch of patterns I had come up with, and they sounded really cool in my head. However, seeing them written down and looking at how dull the progression looked, I was disappointed. It sort of took the wind out of my sails, since the song was supposed to be all about layering and complex patterns on top of the skill involved using the left hand.

So I told Yurika about the setback, and she suggested a possibility I had never considered. What about making it a solo piece? Or duet? That concept opened a brand new series of ideas for me.

With my original idea of five people, I was burdened with keeping everyone doing SOMEthing interesting. That's not a surprise; with only five people on stage, each person needs to be utilized constantly. The beauty of a solo piece is that there's nothing to sync up and patterns are strong in their singularity.

Writing a solo piece comes with a whole hell of a lot of unique challenges. As for the song itself, whomever plays it has to sell it. Confidence, technique, style - all of that has to be as strong as the song itself. The song has to be interesting and solid enough to keep everyone's attention focused in one place for so long. You can't look to see what the other people are doing, because they don't exist...

The other side of challenges is with SJT. Traditionally, SJT doesn't do solo pieces. There's no explicit rule of "thou shalt not write solo pieces" or anything like that, but there's a sense that we are a group of drummers and we write songs with more than one person in them. We've had one, maybe two solo pieces since I've been in the group. Our "smallest" songs have six people in them! Also, we don't want any parts in a song that only one person can play, so it can't be overly-complex or a improv-fest that only suits my sensibilities. In fact, I can see where I'll have to really fight to get this song on stage, but first I have to write it. Then I can worry about fighting for it to "be"!

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