Motivation

I finished this song in a week. That includes writing > final master. I was in the Cosmic Academy program, and they had us write one song a week so we could learn how to actually finish things even if they were at 80%. I think I work the best under heavy constraints like single week periods, because then I am still interested in the project by the time I finish it. I've had many songs I write that I lose interest in by the time I get to mixing, so they never get finished.

Approach

I wrote this song using a main loop I think I found on Splice. I stretched and modified it, and then started to build the song around it. I think the most important lesson I learned was changing my approach, which tends to be vertical instead of horizontal writing. In vertical writing, you write in chunks ie. verse, chorus and make those chunks complete before moving on. That feels the most fun to me, but it kills creativity. I learned to instead write horizontally and then once the skeleton of a song is done, I can go back and fill in the gaps layer by layer until the full piece emerges.

Structure

The song is a fairly standard dubstep piece, so I had a lot of similar songs I could look at for structure and copy those. It follows the tried and true verse - build - drop sequence. I found it helps to imagine the energy of a crowd if the song were being played out, so you want something catchy in the beginning (ie. the trap beat I have) to get people moving. Then settle down so that you can have contrast between the very quiet parts and the drop. That's basically all the song does till the end, is build then drop then quiet then build again , etc.