Editing? Arranging? Writing?

What is it to craft songs in 2008? The roles of producer and writer are eroding and melding before our eyes.

So, it’s back in the day and you have a big artist and a big session. Everything’s tracked at once, because overdubbing hasn’t been invented yet. No studio is booked until there’s a killer song with a killer arrangement and killer players are booked and your singer is in town and so on and so forth.

There’s a reason that sidemen used to wear suits to a gig. It was an event. There’s a reason those cats practiced until they could read a chart for the first time straight down, and make it swing, baby. Time was money and a lot of people’s time was being bought. You don’t waste time with anything less then the best, because any weak link in the chain kills your product. That’s why you had to have great writers, a great arranger, great players, a great room, and so on. Everything had to be captured in one pure moment of coordinated sonic bliss.

These days, like today, I, the songwriter, sit in my studio. I write, and then I can immediately begin creating a reasonable facsimile of an arrangement. My drum samples are fat and I know how to use them. I play a passable rock bass part with enough time to get it right. I can program or play live keys. I can sing the demo. The one thing I can’t do is guitar, but one of these days I’ll start hacking our power chords out of sheer frustration, mark my words.

The point is that I can begin on steps B, C, D, and Z before step A is done.

Today I am working on a song called, “A Sovereign Nation Sleeps Beside Me.” I haven’t finished the song. Oh, there’s a song there, I have 2 verses and a chorus… it’s a song. But it really needs a bridge, and I keep avoiding it, because I can start on making sure that the drum and bass and keyboard parts and tempo and melody are all fitting together…. just… so. I tweak and massage and move notes around and mess with compression ratios on demos that no one will hear.

Some of you say… what a waste of time! You haven’t even finished the song yet! To them, I confess that they’re right. Sorta. Technology does allow people like me, the post-digital-audio-revolution guys to fix and edit and twiddle our knobs right into a whole lot of nothing. It does result in time that is technically, wasted.

But there’s another side to this thing.

See, after a day’s work, I have 2/3rds of a song to listen to. I know now that when I wrote it and sang it out loud for the first time with just a piano and a piece of paper in front of me that I sang it too fast. Once there’s a drummer supporting the vocal, the whole tune wants to settle back about 8 beats per minute. This is a really important thing for us to know before we hire a drummer, and a room, and have to produce a complicated session sometime in the near future.

Sometimes, the line between a toy and a tool is thin, indeed.