Last night I was chomping at the bit to get started, but I managed to wait until midnight and play by the rules. When midnight rolled around, I picked up my Strat and started noodling around with some different chord progressions to get myself into songwriting mode. It didn't take long before I had the nugget of a new song, and I went from there.

The plan was to write as much as possible until I just couldn't write any more. Then, if I wasn't too tired already, I'd switch over to arranging and programming some of the stuff I'd written. As it turns out, that plan went off without a hitch! I stayed up very late, but I accomplished a lot.

I wrote four songs, so I'm one third of the way to my planned 12. The following states got their musical treatment last night:

• Illinois: The song is titled "What Came Out When I Opened My Mouth," and it's about a drunken phone call I made from my sister's place in Chicago several years ago.
• North Dakota: "The World Is Flat" recounts a slightly obtuse version of a cross country move. I have changed some of the details because, well, that's what you do when you write fiction intended to be more interesting than what really happened.
• Ohio: "Cincinnati: Free Parking, A Romantic Evening, Sleeping In and Decent Coffee" is my attempt at a pretty little instrumental. I wrote it on the guitar, but I am hoping to arrange it for a fake string section or small orchestra. I've got this killer sample set for orchestral instruments, particularly strings, and it's about time I got my money's worth out of it. There may still be a guitar in there somewhere when all is said and done, but I don't really want it to just be guitar unless I'm just running out of time later.
• Indiana: "That Night" recites the details of a dream where Our Hero meets two famous guys who are both originally from Indiana. Namely, David Lee Roth and John Mellencamp. It's a waltz.

I did actually start writing a fifth song last night, or at least I had a chord progression and part of a melody I really liked. I will try to flesh that one out when I get back to work this evening. When I couldn't think straight any more for writing, I switched over to Sonar and started assembling.

Here's how I usually work when a song has a fairly "standard" arrangement: I program a simple repeating drumbeat for the length of the song. Sometimes I'll do something different for the chorus and verses, say, if the phrasing changes so drastically that it merits more than a simple backbeat for one and not the other, but either way this is basically a "metronome with some feeling" for the entire song. Like, it's usually just snare and kick. Nothing else. Then I plug an electric directly into a preamp and just play the guitar part more or less the way I think it will be set up. This scratch track doesn't sound as nice as a well recorded guitar, but it serves to let me really finish up the drums without having to constantly go back and play the guitar again to hear how they fit together. Then, I finish the drums. After that I record the bass part. After that, I will delete the scratch guitar track and record any and all guitar parts properly. After that I add incidentals like synths or strings or whatever, and I do vocals last. Sometimes there are a few small incidentals that get added after the vocals. If there are background vocals, I usually do them after the lead vocals too.

So, along those lines, before I went to bed this morning, I managed to finish programming the drums and recording bass for "What Came Out When I Opened My Mouth." (That song is still put together with the scratch guitar track at the moment.) I also put down the simple version of the drumbeat for "The World Is Flat," but I realized as I was doing it that that drum part is going to be really simple anyway, so it's unlikely there will be much more to do to it even as the rest of the recording takes shape.

I went to bed some time after 5:00 am. I got up around 7:30 to make a few phone calls and chat with Ab, and then around noon I went back to bed and slept until about 7:00 pm. So here I am now ready to roll another late one working. At some point I'll need to be awake during the day so I can plug in and record the loud stuff, but for now I have plenty of writing and programming to do, so I can work up here in relative silence.

In related news, I saw my friend Jake listed among the participants on the NaSoAlMo site today, so yay and good luck to him!

what's on:
"Bonesaw" (Jackie-O Motherfucker - Wow / The Magic Fire Music)