As the title implies, I have been writing some songs lately, and I’m trying to stretch my songwriting capabilities into new territory.

In the past, my song-writing talents have been limited strictly to metal songs.  And they are not very hard to write.  You shape a power chord, slide it up and down a few frets, and scream whatever you have to say into the mic.  Done.  OK, it’s not actually that easy, but it’s not necessarily what I could consider “hard”.

But writing songs where the key matters (and isn’t always just a down-tuned D), and you have to consider chord progressions and *gasp* guitar leads, it’s definitely a beast of a different sort.  However, I have been making some headway.

I’m amazed at how much I have been influenced over the last few months to write, and not just because of the guitar lessons my wife got me (although that hasn’t hurt).  More than anything else, it’s the style of music I’ve been listening to that has really helped stir my creative juices.  A healthy does of bluegrass,  folk singer-songwriters, some old classic rock and (of course) a sprinkling of thrash metal have given me a lot of room musically to just experiment and try to come up with something.

None of the material I’ve written is terribly original.  In fact, I try desperately to hide its derivative nature.  But I look at these songs as practice… something to get me started.  Melody lines are a little hard for me (see paragraph one), so I am taking a lot of time making sure the melody fits the chords I am using in the song.

I’m pretty much just picking a key, and experimenting with chord combinations.  As I have been watching and attending live music shows (for added inspiration), one thing that has so far baffled me is when to and when not to use the capo.  I didn’t see much need for it.  That is, until I was putting some chords to lyrics I wrote down yesterday.  The chords I had sounded good, but they were just not in the key I wanted.  For the roots of the melody I had in my head, they needed to be up a couple of notes.

Duh!  I threw a capo on the 3rd fret and tried my chords again.  Voila!  The song sounded much closer to what I wanted, and I was able to get the first half of the song wrote, as well as putting down a melody line (the first time I’ve actually written down the notes to a vocal line).  I was pretty excited!

My song-writing challenges continue.  I feel like I’m working backwards a little.  We’ve moved onto the electric guitar and classic rock/blues leads in my weekly lessons.  But I am using the stuff I’ve learned on the acoustic to write these practice songs.  I guess it’s just more what you are motivated to write, because all I want to do right now is write acoustic stuff.  Maybe once I get more comfortable doing leads and getting confidence in that area, maybe I’ll have to throw out a rock song.

Who knows?  It might even have a couple of power chords in it… and some screaming.

I’ve been trying to learn a lot of stuff on the electric guitar lately – mainly solos and leads.  I’ve come pretty far in knowing what chords go where, and the different chord progressions, but now I’m trying to take the next step forward.

Once I got my awesome guitar amp, it opened up a whole new world for me.  And one set of headphones later (much to my wife’s delight), and I’ve been practicing more pure rock stuff and getting a little bit better each time.

Last week my teacher showed me the lead for AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long”.  A great rock standard, and the lead in it isn’t too bad.  My amp has an iPod input, so I can hook it right in and play along with the song.  Although the chord changes are a little hard for me now, I’m slowly getting faster and more accurate with them.

The thing I really like are the blues scales, and being able to use them along with some easy riffs to actually sound like I know what I’m doing.  Although it takes a while to get any of these techniques down well so they sound good, I feel like all those years of playing bass in the garages and basements of my youth are finally paying off.

Probably this week I’ll try and run through the lead of “Stairway to Heaven”, and see how much more wanking I can do on it.  And then who knows?  Maybe I’ll grow out my hair, wear tiger-striped spandex, and join a retro hair band…

… or maybe not.

So… I had this gear in my garage.

From my old metal band days, I had a bass practice amp, a bass guitar, and an old Sunn amplifier; stuff I had been carting around for several years (since the late 90’s).  I always told myself that I would use those things again, although everything else told me that I wouldn’t be using it.

A couple of years ago my brother gave me an acoustic-electric guitar, and I started learning how to play it.  My music roots came straight from the garage, and I had never really tried to learn how to play much of anything beyond power chords.  My opinion was, if it didn’t have a mountain of distortion on it, I didn’t want to play it.

But then I got older, and realized that I might actually want to learn how to play an instrument, and play it in such a way that more people would want to hear than would want to turn it off.  Last Father’s Day, my wonderful wife got me guitar lessons once a week, and it really got me going.

I started out with the acoustic, because it was what I had, but I always wanted to get myself an honest-to-goodness guitar amp and actually learn how to play it.  I was getting pretty good at the acoustic, but still wanted to be able to rock out.

It was only a couple of weeks ago when a co-worker of mine approached me with an offer to buy an amp.  It was the exact kind I was looking for, and it was at a really good price, so I just jumped and said I would buy it.  This got me motivated to take another look at all that old gear I had in the garage, because if I was going to pull off buying this amp, I had to do it in a way that wouldn’t impact the family budget.

I put the old gear up on a local free auction site, and within a week, I had successfully sold all the gear at a pretty good price, and had money to spare.  I had actually come out ahead!  It was a little sad to let go of the equipment I had been holding onto for so long, but given the trade-off of what I had gained, I was more than happy to part with it.

This past weekend, my nephew approached me at my great-niece’s birthday party and asked if I still wanted to buy his drumset.  It was a kit he got for Christmas last year, and I gave him an open invitation to buy it if he ever got sick of it.  I still had some cash left over from the great gear sell-off, and so I jumped again and said I would buy it.

Last night, he and my sister brought over the drums and we set them up in the TV room downstairs.  Some of the screws are missing, and the heads are shot (my nephew’s 17-years-old and likes pretty heavy rock; bless his soul), but the shells and hardware are still in great shape.  And, he gave it to me for a great price.

I’m not planning on fitting out the drum kit like it should be for awhile, especially purchasing the two crash cymbals that are conspicuously absent, but I know if I hadn’t jumped on the chance then, it would probably be quite some time before I could get my hands on anything like it at all.

My two-year-old loves the drums, and he was so excited when he woke up from his nap to hear his little brother playing them downstairs when he awoke.  We spent twenty minutes watching him go from drum to drum and cymbal to cymbal playing them all, and throwing his sticks up in the air when he was done (signaling applause, of course).  He cried hard when we finally put them away, but I think he’s old enough to understand that they are still there, and that he will get to play them again, sometime.

Someday those drums will probably become his full time.  But for now, we will enjoy what quiet time we can get.

My wife always say things happen for a reason, and I’m starting to believe her.  Within ten days, I had gone from having a bunch of gear that I’d had for a long time and wasn’t using, to having some gear I could actually use.  This encourages me to play more often, and to work harder to get better.  Who knows, maybe someday I’ll actually be able to write some music people will actually want to hear.

In the meantime, though, I’ve got plenty of toys to experiment with.