The song we composed was very hard to plan out. There were so many ideas and riffs flying around that we often found it very hard to concentrate and work on one singular idea. You can see all the ideas on the composition progress page under band composition. Coming into this I knew what I wanted the track to sound like. However, I’m not working by myself and I am working with a band so we needed to have a discussion and see in what direction we are going to take this song. I compiled some of the songs that inspired me and I liked. Here are some of the options.
This is one of my favourite songs ever made, by one of my favourite bands in the world. We have extremely talented musicians in this band so making something at a similar level to this is not impossible. I really liked the contrast between a slow chorus with a nice soothing emotional vocal to the fast raps during the verses. We have a great singer within the band and we also have Robert who is not opposed to rapping. A rap part in this song could work really well. We could also change the intensity of the song at points to make it interesting, just as they do in this song.
This option is a little bit too far away from our vibe but I thought I would include it anyway. I love this song and the energy that it gives off so I referred heavily to this when researching songs. I really like the rawness of this song as well. We are not a professional band so it’s likely that when we play this it will sound a little bit messy. However, just like this nirvana track, we could play into the rawness and realness of the mistakes. This was just an option.
We covered this as a band in the last project so we were all really familiar with the song. I really like the mellow tone this song plays while also delivering such a strong emotional message. This would be a great track to look at. We did decide that we wanted the track to be a little bit faster and more upbeat so we started to explore other options. However, I would be lying if I said I didn’t refer back to this track more than once.
When we wrote the first riff for this song, it sounded very much like a 90s Britpop song. This is one of my favourite genres and eras for music, so I was very happy for it to sound the way that it did. The song sounded good and it had this groove to it. The riff was later tweaked and it took this element out of it. However, this was still a great reference track that helped me come up with some good ideas for this song.
After listening to all these reference tracks we came up with a structure. The structure was Intro, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Bridge, Double chorus and Outro. This is a pretty standard layout for a rock song and it sounded really good when playing together. We wanted to incorporate rap into the track so we put the rap in the verse. The verse is just the bass and drums which is a nice change when the rest of the song has the guitar in it. We also slowed down the chorus just like Feel Good Inc. This also gives the listener a nice break while still building anticipation for it all to kick off again. We had a pretty solid plan when it came around to rehearsing to the song. Rehearsal videos can be found on another page along with the development of chords, riffs and drum patterns.