I use to jam with friends quite a bit, but i would never bring in my own instrumentals that I had already recorded. I would just jam until I found a riff within that jam session with the other guys. I'm willing to admit that I don't want other people to fuck with my arrangements. This leads me to believe that i would be a terrible band member, because I can't stand someone taking one of my favorite riffs and fucking with it Anybody else have a hard time with this? I realize the old argument "well your riffs can take on a whole new life etc..." but i think i'm doomed as a solo artist

ugh, sometimes i feel the same way.

I play with two groups and in one group i'm the sole guitar player and we tend to write a lot of songs from the ground up - usually around a drum beat, so i don't find my riffs getting fucked with too much because we're mostly writing on the spot. But trying to write riffs on a drum beat, either simple or complex is really constraining. Sometimes it sparks creativity that i may not have had otherwise, but most of the time i find it limiting.

In the other group though we have two guitar players and we write the majority of our stuff through jam sessions though i do occasionally bring in the odd riff. The problem with writing music this way is that it's far too easy to get stuck in a 4/4 beat because jamming in odd time signatures is really confusing...so this really fucks with my riffs. I always hate what happens to them once they get arranged into a 4/4 beat.


Despite all that though, i love the experience of playing music live with other musicians and that's something that you can never replace with solo recordings. There is so much room for evolution when you have a few other people to bounce ideas off of.

I certainly understand this point...and i've had some wondernul nights of jamming with friends, no question about it. I guess i'm just selfish when it comes to my songs that I write by myself at home.

i remember bringing a couple somewhat complete songs to my old band. i thought they were pretty good songs, 2 of my best. one of them i played start to finish and everyone just kind of picked up around it. the other guitar player/bass player came up with a complementary riff and then we wrote a bridge around that and it sounded fucking awesome. for the most part, that song stayed true to what it was (plus the new bridge), except it actually amped up a bit.

the other song actually ended up making what i had as the verse and bridge switched around to the bridge being the verse, the verse being the chorus, and my original chorus being the bridge. really weird, but it worked out better than my original arrangement. that never would have happened without the others input.

What are your expectations of drummers? My son, a drummer is open to input but not being dictated to. You get much past tempo and he starts to get prickly.

But Stephen, you were so great in Pavement

good drummers don't need much direction as they know what to do

yeah normally i try not to give much direction to the drummer other than in working to get the right tempo, timing, etc. I might throw out a suggestion for a fill here or there but usually i try to let them to their thing.

It's funny you mention pavement, because i just read an interview with SM where the interviewer asked him why the song "harness your hopes" never made the BTC record, because that song was clearly a standout. His response was something like "The cymbals didn't sound right to me"

I think you just have to find the right band dynamic.

Every band has a different setup. In Queen, whoever the chief write would get all final say so on a track.

I am not unlike the ts. I write songs the way I write songs. I don't necessarily want somebody comin in an wantin to change it around, a whole lot. I would rather the other musicians fill in the space around me, in a way.

What I find interesting is how easy it is to sound original if you just write songs as a band. All the different little nooks and crannies in each individuals music taste smelting together is what makes music interesting. Why the general public doesn't subscribe to this school of thought, I'll never know

Coincidentally, the band I'm in is writing songs right now. We are shining up all the stuff we had written before along with jammin up some new ideas. It feels like we are really starting to come into our own, now that we have a solid jam space and a plan of attack. We have 6 songs in the bag, now. They need some final touches but we'll probably have them posted somewhere, in the next couple months.

We don't have rock star visions, but we would love to be able to gig regularly, at least on a regional level. We also wanna get our song ideas recorded and get somethin of studio quality to spread around.

I play with a drummer who's main influences are Rush, Scorpions, and King Crimson. He's a monster drummer, but if I called him "the drummer" he'd get pissed and insist on being called a musician. He took up playing guitar and writes music., usually a riff in an odd time signature and sometimes it sounds cool, but because he has no concept of music theory or keys, it always sounds dissonant and too rhythmically complex. When it comes to playing in a band, he insists that he gets as much input for his riffs as the people who play the guitars, but if I told him that I put down a demo with a certain style of beat, he'd listen to it and then just do his own thing on the drums.

Is that fair? If he has a specific rhythm for a guitar part, I'll learn it and do exactly what he wants, but then when the people who generally write a lot of music (the guitarists) ask him to do something its like pulling teeth to get him to follow the blueprint.

He's a nice dude and the best drummer I know, but its really frustrating sometimes.

part of it is learning how to communicate to the point where you can get what you want out of people who are more proficient with their instruments. you can be honest with people in your band about what you like and don't like.