Members geek_usa Posted April 5, 2012 Members Share Posted April 5, 2012 I've been recording for as long as I could hold a guitar and pick notes. All of my early songs weren't fantastic but they are etched in history, I can't replicate what I did when I was 14 or 15. I've been living my musician life "on record" ever since then, because I know that there will be a day when I cannot play anymore, or my family wants something to look back on me for. I record all of my live shows (or at least I try to), and I record song ideas and riffs. I also have fully produced and released 4 full-length albums and 3 different band EP's. I was counting up my songs that have been recorded and they are somewhere in the 900 range. I'm making a compilation for my friends and family members of all the material with written documentation and narratives. Do YOU record a lot? If so, what's your methods? and if not, why not? How many songs have you recorded, and do you plan to do anything special with them? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted April 5, 2012 Members Share Posted April 5, 2012 900. Wow. That's a lot of songs. [EDIT: I just realized I never put a number on it. Let's say about 150-155 that I consider 'self-published' -- although there are more than a few that didn't make that cut that I used to perform frequently in front of audiences.] I figure I've probably written about 300 songs, give or take, but many of those have been long abandoned. Back in 2005, I realized that I only have (vaguely) 'proper' recordings of maybe around 30 of them. I was in a bit of a slump, so I decided to get myself in harness. I'm a web dev dude, and blogs were just starting to blow up. I decided to create a blog and put up an informal acoustic recording of all my songs every day until I'd done a year's worth. (I called it A Year of Songs, for that reason.) I was a good boy for about 4 months or so and then I missed a day, made it up, missed a couple days, made them up, then, about half the year through, gave up on the daily thing. Still, I ended up with a couple hundred posts or so that year and kept at it until I'd done most of them at least a couple times -- although, when push came to shove, going through the original ~300 songs, I decided many of them weren't ready for public consumption. I ended up with about 125 songs. Since then I've written another 25 or 30 that have been put up. (After a few weeks of the project, I also started adding little memoirs and vaguely autobiographical microfiction to the blog posts. One of these day's I'll collect all those and put them into an on-demand book.) It was a good discipline -- even if I let that lapse. And, more importantly, it generated some kind of recordings of most of my songs I consider worthy of public attention. Some of those recordings are pretty bad, no question, but they're on the record. I hosted all the podcast download files at the Internet Archive (Archive.org). There've been over 500,000 downloads. (Thanks, mom. Did you listen to any of them?) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Lee Knight Posted April 5, 2012 Moderators Share Posted April 5, 2012 I have no idea. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Oswlek Posted April 5, 2012 Members Share Posted April 5, 2012 It depends on what your definition of "recorded" is. I have roughtly 150 songs that I think have some redeeming quality to them, of which I've recorded at least a camera demo of ~100. Only about 15 have actually been tracked and built into a halfway decent product, though, and I've come to the conclusion that anything short of that might not even be considered "written". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted April 5, 2012 Members Share Posted April 5, 2012 I have no idea. I'm guessing you're in four figures. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Lee Knight Posted April 5, 2012 Moderators Share Posted April 5, 2012 I'm guessing you're in four figures. Not even. I've only started writing again a couple years ago and everything's been here at this forum. So it's not that many. And even before in my stage 1 writing in my late teens there were maybe only 20. So I'd put my number maybe around 50? 75? Total guesstimate though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members kurdy Posted April 6, 2012 Members Share Posted April 6, 2012 I know this sounds funny, but I don't think I have a clear cut answer to this one. I've been making up silly tunes since I was 5 or 6 years old...practically all my life. However, only the ones I've written in the last five, six years are anything I wouldn't be embarrassed to play in public. I have no attachment to anything I've done before then. As far as I'm concerned, the rest doesn't exist. Once I figure out how to do something better, the tendecy is to want to dismiss everything I've done up to that point as crap. So...9, maybe 10? The thing is, I'm not good at juggling multiple things. I write one song, record it, polish it...usually somewhere in the middle I get a litte overwhelmed and lose motivation, and it just kinda sits for a while. Eventually I pick it back up again, and by the end, I'm super-motivated and eager to get it done, once I start to see the finish line. Then the cycle starts over again. One song can take 2 to 4 months. I dream of being prolific, but I'm exactly the opposite. When I think of how many songs I've written and recorded in the last six years, the number is pretty depressing. And music is the thing I love the most, so it's pretty pathetic that I haven't been more productive than that. I know they say quality, not quantity, but I think I take it to a ridiculous extreme. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Capn Spanky Posted April 6, 2012 Members Share Posted April 6, 2012 I don't wanna talk about it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Plaswuff Posted April 6, 2012 Members Share Posted April 6, 2012 It depends on what your definition of "recorded" is. It also depends on your definition of 'song.' I've recorded riffs a plenty over the years, but few of them ever mature into what I'd call a full song. Some old stuff I lost when changing computers, I wish I still had the material I came up with when I first started using music software. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ido1957 Posted April 6, 2012 Members Share Posted April 6, 2012 987,095,135 songs so far. All finished, mixed, and mastered. And I suspect I'll triple that by the end of 2012. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted April 6, 2012 Members Share Posted April 6, 2012 I don't wanna talk about it That just means there's more space in the future you can fill with songs. Sit down, start writing. Don't throw anything out -- you need to be able to see the path of your progress so that you can keep patting yourself on the back for making progress. Patting yourself on the back is huge. You need to encourage sitting down and writing, good or bad. Keep everything -- but do give consideration into what you spend time playing and performing for others. I have a song 'junk drawer,' that keeps all the stuff that got written but didn't spark my enthusiasm. I think I've written some OK songs -- but sometimes it amazes me to see some of the things I've written down -- recently -- and salted away. It's like, wow. Why did I even type that out? But, you know what? If it's got two verses sand a refrain, as far as I'm concerned, you can call it a song. And you need to pat yourself on the back for every one you squeeze out, even if you wonder why you bothered hitting save, at least until you've got your momentum going. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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