How do you save your songs?
 

I compose and practice at random and often realize I can no longer remember parts of my own compositions. I try to webcam when I get something I really like and think I won't remember. Audio recording works some, but I find I need to make notes somewhere in addition. I don't like tab much, but see its potential. I am organized ( by necessity) at work and home, but not with my guitar playing. A friend is always after me to "finish some of those songs you write" because I seldom get one done from beginning to end. I have loads of fun 'noodling' and will investigate new things energetically.



Advice?

Just start writing a well put together and coherent song from beginning to end.
You will find most of the time it is a lot more work than noodling. You then will
get a better idea of what it takes to remember it. Yes it's wood shedding,
recording, tabbing, video, eating a lot of fish, whatever it takes.

I've always been pretty organic about remembering stuff I'm writing: If I remember it tomorrow, that means it's a good enough idea to work from again.

If I don't remember it, I don't care.

Survival of the fittest, so to speak.

It weeds out the noodles, most of the time.

HE
http://www.howardemerson.com/lessons.html

I always respect the folks that are confident their song ideas will stick in their brain if they are good. My mind tends to forget even the best ideas if I don't capture them somehow. I try to get a rough take of any decent ideas captured in GarageBand on my mac. Just quick and dirty. Lots of times I get good ideas when I'm driving and need to capture them quickly when I get back to the house.

If I have something crop up that I really like I'll sit down in front of the computer and use the built-in mic to do a quick recording. Maybe I use the built-in camera on my Mac to capture left hand fingerings too (I use QuickTime Pro to capture the recordings, though maybe GarageBand will also capture video????). The sound quality stinks, but all I am really aiming for is saving the idea for future reference. I can spend an hour or more working on an idea on the guitar and then lose it the next day if I don't do this (though some of these things get rediscovered!).

The truth is though that I hardly ever go back and listen to these clips! The reality is that I tend to operate more the way Howard described, though it makes me feel much better that I have those clips!

I have a half dozen or so fully-developed original fingerstyle pieces that I particularly like, and I almost lost one of them 6 months or so ago. I had not played it in some time, and had been working really intensely on learning some complicated classical piece (this sort of concerted effort on a new complicated piece seems to erase older pieces from my memory - really really frustrating!), and I realized one evening that I didn't remember quite how to play the older original piece. It took me a few days of playing it off and on to reconstruct the fingerings for bits of it.

My daughter has really gotten on my case about me not recording the things she hears me play all the time. So now I have built-in computer mic recordings of most of my stuff, and I'm slowly working on getting recordings using good quality mics.

I've been thinking of making a list of all the things I play (not just original compositions or original arrangements, but EVERYTHING I have mastered) so that I can make a point of running through them all at least once a month or so for "maintenance" purposes. As things are now, I tend to neglect some of them, and then, as described above, I discover one day that I have forgotten how I used to play something that I used to play all the time. An equilibrium between acquisition of new pieces and forgetting of old ones seems to develop, resulting in me having maybe about 18 full fingerstyle pieces that I can play from memory reasonably well at any given time, with the "playlist" gradually changing over time. This is very frustrating!

Look into a portable recorder like the Zoom H4. They are easy to use, the Zoom records in stereo and they are small. I use a computer with mics into a Tascam US-122 so I'm tied to a computer. A portable device allows you to record quickly and you can go into any room that is available in your house.

I have a mic on the computer, and I would have about '0' songs without it. Often times I just used it to play into, and the song ends up "as is"

A tape recorder would be another alternative, you can do 'line-in' to put it on the computer.

IF Keith Richards did not use a recorder when he was in a drug/stupor, we would not have 'Satisfaction'. He found it like 2 weeks or? later, never remembered putting it down.

One of my last songs, I knew the chords, but I could not figure out how to play it. I recroded it, and boom, there it is.

Pantamount to a composer. Us anything you can get until you can plop down 150 for a T-4.

I use my laptop and have the Master Writer program. I use its audio record function from the internal mic in the laptop.. I usually run through the music and just say out loud the cords , capo position , or cord forms and position (F form at third fret etc. then I do another take with any lyrics I might have

I’m in Howard Emerson’s camp in that if I stumble across something (be it a chord progression or a riff) I’ll write it down after a couple of days if it has stuck with me that long. Then I’ll either write it down or record it; and since I’m an old school guy sometimes I do both. If it’s something that I start to develop, I’ll put it on a tab sheet on the computer.

Bill

Pretty much this for me too. I've got a Boss Micro BR which also comes in very handy.

+1 on MasterWriter--helped me organize and finish songs that had been dangling out there for years. I love it!