I was just browsing a respected music production forum when I came across some tutorials that really made me do a double take. These were “song structure” tutorials. You know… stuff like “How to write a Hard Dance track“. Instruction was along the lines of : put a bass drum on every beat, a cymbal at the beginning of each phrase , bass line running on off beats, etc... that sort of thing. In a nutshell it gave the “formula”, that is to say the rule set, by which each style defines itself.
Now why did these tutorials make me do a double take? Basically I just could not believe that people were honestly trying to write music by constraining themselves to a particular style’s rule sets. I know corporate cock sucking whores like to use formulas to create junk pop in order to sell crap to the masses, but I did not think honest and supposedly creative musicians worked this way. A way, that I might add, is totally foreign to me. When I write, I don’t think “Ok.. Now I’m going to write a trance track” or “hey I might write a song using the 70’s hard rock formula”. I just open up to the muses, let the inspiration flow, and whatever comes… comes. Sometimes what comes is crap, sometimes it is not, and there is always refinement of what was inspired, but for the most part it is 100% inspiration. Music is art, and art is the creative expression of one’s Self (note the capital letter there!). Following a rule set is the antithesis of this. It stifles creativity, discourages innovation, penalises originality and gives birth to ubiquitous mediocrity.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is if you are the kind of person who uses the paint by the numbers version of song writing, try throwing the rules away for a little while and see what it gets you; Alternately, you could just go and die in a fire! :) Try removing yourself from the shackles of genre and just sit down and try to make “music”, rather than “xyz style of music”. You might be pleasantly surprised at what comes out. One thing is for sure and that is that the greats of each style of music did not follow the paint by the numbers version of song writing. They were innovators, they were original, and they DEFINED rather than COPIED styles. Of course everyone is going to be influenced by that which came before them, but there is vast difference between being influenced and plagiarising.