Six months in to recording new album . . . five songs and a lot of frustration

EP... win.

 

Nodding. Literally.

 

I'm in the same boat with my own solo album side project. My struggles come from a lack of confidence that what I'm doing is any good, even to just me. I'm now mostly trying to ride the waves of inspiration/confidence and take breaks from it when the muse isn't with me.

 

I record myself as well, so I get what's up... I take solace in the fact that I'm under absolutely no pressure, and no record company executive is gonna make me redo all my bum notes.

 

We are stuck at two well done new tunes and 3 more stuck in the pot..

What is an ‘album’ these days when everyone streams individual tunes. You can choose what makes it ‘complete’ ... a triptych? A story in 4 chapters...

 

Nothing wrong with a four song ep!

 

Nodding.

My first CD was 6 tunes, clocked in about 28 minutes. That seems about right to me, as most 10- song albums have some filler.

So be encouraged, you're 2/3 there! Closer to done than you think.

BTW, I've got songs for two more projects but no longer have the band to pull them off. Very sad about that.

 

I was going to say EP, and others already said it. If you try to force art to occur, something will occur but it won't be art.

I had similar frustration with a band I was in. We had four songs finished after TWO FREAKING YEARS..... I actually wrote and recorded enough music to make a full album but our vocalist wasn't inspired by 6 of the songs... but she also wouldn't come up with anything. TWO YEARS later, I took those remaining 6 songs, approached another vocalist I know who said he'd write lyrics for them and sing on them, did so in short order. He and I quickly wrote 4 more songs (it's amazing what you can do when inspired), got a drummer to play on all 10, and had a completed album in 2 MONTHS.....

The original EP with the original vocalist is still not complete and I don't even care anymore.

 

I've been working on my labour of love project for something like three years at this point, and it's on yet another hiatus just now - not due to lack of inspiration, but rather the difficulty of recording somewhat quiet acoustic pieces in an apartment block in an urban setting. There was also a lengthy break when I didn't have a dedicated music computer to work on.

I'm tempted to kick off my electric LP in order to keep my productivity rate up, but I fear both projects might then lapse into 'unfinished' status and never find their way out of it. It's good to finish what you start, even if it ends up taking longer than you'd hope.

 

Fear not, I am six songs and four years into mine.

 

My old band got together at a warehouse for a boozy, "Exile On Main Street" style weekend to bang out about 10 songs we knew pretty well into a mobile recording system I'd set up. The idea was to keep it raw and off-the-cuff, a statement against the way DAW technology has made music so over-processed. I figured we'd track in two days, do two days of vocal overdubs and boo-boo fixing, and mix in about a week. We planned to be done in a month.

That was 18 years ago.

The recording went down easily enough, but when I went to mix it was a complete mess. I could never get it sounding right, so I shelved the tapes. This summer, I finally got around to putting the tapes in my DAW (oh, the irony) and doing the painstaking salvage work to get it listenable. The bandleader and I have been sporadically chipping away at it since, and it's sounding pretty good now. I'm glad I didn't rush out a hatchet job mix 18 years ago.

I guess the moral of the story is not to rush things- take the time to make something you'll be proud of instead of forcing something you'll just look back on with regret.

 

Love it!

 

If you don't want to accept "filler", then finish the EP and be done with it. Stone Temple Pilots originally planned "Shangri-La Dee Da" to be a double album, but decided during production to toss out half the weaker songs and instead produce a much more focused album. And that was a great album.

If "The Phantom Menace" (Star Wars Episode I) were edited down to about 90 minutes, and the weaker scenes removed..... it still would have sucked, just about 30 minutes less. So I guess that's not a good example. Well, it's a good example of a movie that was composed of mostly crap.

 

Also nodding.

I've only written 2 songs this year: nothing over the last 6 months.
In contrast, last year was a blast of creativity.
I don't fret over it ... it's not my source of income .... and I know these things ebb and flow, much like a tree that fruits once a year.
When creativity fruits, we pluck the passing ideas from the air.

As a side-note: why is there always someone standing behind every politician on TV nodding to everything said?
(Rhetorical question not in need of a reply).

 

Nodding... however... why fret (pardon the pun) about finishing an album... who listens to a whole album these days? Get the finished songs you are happy with out there...

 

Nodding! Year + for me but am finally starting to see the end of the tunnel. As you said, you know what to do and you can do it!