WHY NOT REWRITE?
and is a great way to actually utilize material that otherwise would stay dated. It’s tempting to do my entire new album this way, but I’ll make sure I write a few new songs, too, just so I don’t get out of practice—this method is such fun, though, and it makes me feel so good to know that a song really was a nice number—it just needed the right clothes before I introduced it to the music world. I’m even finding that I can feed old cassettes into the computer—this really helps you locate the exact bit you need from that old rehearsal—now I’ll probably try editing them and seeing what I come up with—the sound quality may be poor, but I can always clean that up later when I decide how the song will go, and can just redo those bits on instruments/voice/computer and give them the needed professional sound at that time.
EXPERIMENT!
Don’t be afraid to be silly with this exercise—this is half the fun with this approach. I’ve known of people who would just randomly put bits together on computer or using the scraps approach and have come up with some novel ideas. Try putting that melodic guitar solo with that rap tune, mix sequenced riffs of only a few beats long with each other to make up full 1 to 4 bar groups and see how they fit (or don’t fit), put that children’s lyric to a heavy metal arrangement, or try that humorous lyric with a serious instrumental you came up with. Sometimes, the contrasts between different bits can really make for a catchy and noticeable number. You can always just try a different combination—none of this is written in stone—and you may even find a better fit down the road. The important thing, here, is to just play around with the different bits and try to force them to fit, rather than to place natural combinations together. If nothing else, you will at least have a good laugh. If things go well, you may complete yet another song, one song more than you would have had if you hadn’t tried putting these orphans together.
So try doing a little housecleaning and get the old music library a good once-over. Sometimes, just looking at an old lyric has been enough for me to get suddenly inspired and come up with a new arrangement so I could finish
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