To Write a Song...

Fake it till you make it

Last night was the first time that I sat down and tried to pull together all my little melodies to see what worked together. It's probably the longest I sat with my guitar in years... It was really relaxing and something I should be doing more honestly.

For those interested, I have never had a lesson playing guitar. I learned a few chords and found tabs online to pretend to played some of my favorite songs, but that's about it. Oh, I was really good at Guitar Hero, but uhh... yeah...

When I was younger, my brother was a huge Creed fan. When their album Weathered came out, the guitars from My Sacrifice struck me because of their unique sound. I discovered that Mart Tremonti tuned his guitar to a variation of Open D5 (D-A-D-A-D-D) and I absolutely loved the sound on my acoustic. I later learned that John Rzeznik also uses this tuning for Black Balloon when performing live and I'm sure many more. My guitar has been tuned to this tuning since I was 16 and I've never gone back.

I started to pull together some lyrics, but I'm more or less writing little snippets of thoughts and gathering them in a single document. I'll start to find the common threads and hopefully organize something of value. I was fortunate enough to attend a meet and greet and Q&A session with my favorite band of all time Nothing More. I had asked the band their process for writing a song, does the music come first or do the lyrics? Jonny Hawkins said that it's definitely a process where they pull pieces together and experiment. I'm using this process myself to see if I can come up with 1 solid song that I can be proud of.

Should I share the guitar and lyrics in their work in progress?