Working with concepts

Inspiration can be a bitch, it strikes you when you are at your studio, goes away when you sit on the chair. Seems to flourish when you dont have time, disappears when you have plenty of it.

There are a couple of things you can do to help inspiration show its face and help you write a song.

Working with concepts has helped me a lot lately to start pumping out ideas and making a song.

Here I will show you a couple of approaches that I took that helped me not only in makings songs but also in learning about sound design and other stuff.

1.

This was a moment in my life I listened to a lot of Gui Boratto and loved slow synthetic colorful yet dark sounds. Also I watched Breaking Bad

Investigating in sound design and the concepts of sounds, sound waves etc I came out with the idea of making a whole song just with Ableton built in Analog synth.

With this background I came with the concept of dark clean sounds and learning sound design with just one synth.

Except for the kick I synthesized the hats, snares, bass, leads pads and everything on the song trying to limit the use of effects just for a couple of spacial effects. With the sounds synthesized I made a kind of slow evolving track which I then added a couple of vocals I took from a Breaking Bad episode.

Here is the finished thing.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3DQ4RDSy-Y

2.

As my artistic name is Alchemy I was reading about this form of science and some of its spiritual aspects. I came the word Albedo. This represents part of the Magnum Opus in the Alchemical process. It is that is associated with whiteness, purification, and opposites. 

I also had the idea of making a full length album and being a fan of progressive rock I wanted to make this the main approach to a song.

Here my concepts where, opposites, a progressive rock driven long song at least 9 mins, and purification.

The outcome was a 10min song that starts with a kind of crystal sounding electronic synth that then is taken over by lead guitars and breakbeat drums, and changes into a piano organ driven glitchy section and then into a kind of violin dialog to finish in a break and a mainly electronic part comes in and then is finished by a mixture of both worlds.

A preview http://soundcloud.com/alchemy1/albedo-teaser  and the finished song on my bandcamp (alchemusic.bandcamp.com)

In conclusion:

I think the idea of thinking about concepts before writing a song can really help as it will limit but expand your creativity within a certain domain. Anything can be good, a colour, a feeling(cheesy right) a building, a photo, a movie, a style of music everything. It will give some kind of guidelines that I think will optimize your workflow.

Hope it helps! Thanks!