[Nick Ryder]

Morning all.

I was tidying up may hard drives recently and realised that I have many, many songs which I recorded but will never see the light of day. This is because I do not feel they are good enough to inflict on the public

Seriously though, for every one song I do inflict on the public, there will be about six that I have abandoned. Some of them probably aren't too bad, especially when comparing them to country music, but I do feel they represent me well enough so I will never release them.

How is it for you guys? Are you in a similar position or is the the opposite whereby you release literally everything you write / record?

[pompeyjazz]

Not everything that I write get's to be released. I've got loads of snippets lying around on my hard drive but having said that if I've got an idea, I usually persevere and if it's not working as it is try something like a different tempo or using different instruments

[Nick Ryder]

Hi, John @pompeyjazz

Interesting. I think the way I am looking at things now, especially as some doors are beginning to open for me (I'll fill you in later about that), my approach is very much that less is more. What I mean by that is if someone hears something I have released which is not to a certain standard, then they will move on and not give my music a second chance. I know that's what I do when I hear something I do not rate by an artist.

Of course it may be that what I consider good is still not good enough, but at least I try.

Looking at my hard drive and I bet there's 100 or so songs is various states of completeness, and most of them are average at best I feel.

The more experience I get in this game, the more I'm realising that the elevator pitch approach is the way to go for me at least in terms of what I am hoping to achieve.

[PaulAds]

I only have a handful of ideas that I haven't used up.

I think I tend to get 90% of the stuff I begin finished and put out there...possibly because I get discouraged quite easily...and that usually comes before I've committed to recording...and also because I'm not very prolific (certainly not these days) so there just aren't that many ideas presenting themselves.

I guess a sniff of success would go a long way...but I'll never know!

I'm pretty relaxed about it all...I often think I've done enough over the years to not worry if nothing else came to fruition...although I'm sure something will when the time is right.

I think I'm very much lyric-driven these days...so if I haven't got something I really want to say, or if I don't feel like I can say it really well, I don't bother anymore.

[MonnoDB]

I have SOOOOO many unfinished songs in my DAW... and more still in notebooks with accompanying voice recordings... Sometimes I go back to them, but mainly, I move on and write another! Generally I feel if it's going to take, it will.. But then I have a very strange relationship with my songs.. I love them when I'm writing them, and invariably think they're crap when I've recorded a demo of them. I have a very dodgy internal quality gauge!

I've just released and in theory am still tweaking the mix (and I will in a couple of days when it's settled) but in reality, I sat down last night and started writing a completely new song.

Great to hear that doors are opening for you @Nick Ryder . I guess I came to this late so have always viewed it as a mixture of fun and therapy!

K

[PaulAds]

Another thing to perhaps bear in mind is that many of us are doing it for different reasons to one another...

I haven't pitched anything to anyone since around 1994...and even then I did it very half-heartedly...not really wanting and certainly not expecting anything positive to come from it.

That was probably when the penny dropped that, at 26, I was too old, ugly and lacking in charisma to get anywhere in the music business and that the stuff I write simply wasn't commercially viable anyway...

Like quite a few here, I drifted away from writing songs for maybe 20 years or so, before picking it up again, still writing the same kind of stuff but with even less in the way of ambition, beyond taking the opportunity to say what I want and enjoy writing music again.

I forgot to say that I have around 40 voice memos on my phone with various ideas on them...but none of them have darkened my DAW

I did once suggest a "Frankensteins Laboratory" section of the forum, which would be like a repository of orphaned ideas that could be picked up by anyone who fancied taking one on and possibly giving it a new lease of life.

I still like the idea, actually...

[pompeyjazz]

I can ditto your comments @PaulAds although I probably gave up trying when I was younger than you were ! When I started writing again around 9 years ago my initial ambition was to be able to record and release a half decent song. Don’t know if I’ve achieved that yet but I’ve had great fun trying and met some lovely people on the way including a lot of you guys on here. These days I’m more than happy to just be doing my open mic nights, banging out the odd album or two and helping out folks who are new to the home recording process by doing the odd teaching session. I’m off to University next week to study Music Technology so I’m sure I’m going to learn a whole heap of stuff and more than anything give something back