Brute Force Metal Songwriting

Let me tell you something that happened last week which completely changed the way I look at writing.

I was just messing about on a keyboard and I happened to come up with a really cool melody on a synth.

My dad heard the melody I came up with and told me to record it, and so I did, and I had this wave of inspiration which led me to create a pretty solid EDM track within an hour or two. (If you don’t know, I started my production journey with electronic music!)

After a couple hours though, the wave of inspiration left and I’m sure you can relate to the feeling of “what now?” that I experienced.

I started by trying to come up with vocal melodies as the track was missing a top line, besides a synth lead.

The problem was, I couldn’t get anywhere!

Every attempt I made at a melody went nowhere, and the longer I tried the more I doubted I could come up with anything good at all!

I even started to doubt whether I was as good of a musician as I thought, and if I actually had the skills to pull it off!

I was about a minute away from calling it a day and quitting when I thought I’d give it one more go…

I remembered I came up with a melody a couple weeks back, and I thought maybe it might fit this track.

So I sat down and sang this melody onto the track and something exciting happened: it worked!

In fact the melody worked so well that it gave me a fresh sense of inspiration to continue working on the track and do by the end of a evening I had a solid demo that I could be proud of. Success!


Now I think there are three takeaways from this experience:

1) When you get a rush of inspiration, lean into it and try to squeeze the most out of it – they won’t come around too often!

2) Sometimes you just have to try over and over again, and accept that not every idea will be a hit (easier said then done I know!). But at the end of the day, you only need to get the part right once!
I’m calling this brute force songwriting; not always fun, but often necessary when you’re not in a creative flow.

3) Keep a good record of your existing ideas because you never know where that one riff might end up or where that great full might be useful. Keep phone recordings, videos of you playing, whatever. Just make sure it’s recorded!

Good luck!