The Songwriting Process

Billy Joe Armstrong, vocalist and guitarist of pop-punk band Green Day, comments on bringing ideas to the band and writing electric guitar parts on an acoustic:

You write all the songs together in the band. Do you start songs on your own and bring them in?

Yeah, sometimes. I’ll come up with the song with the chord changes and the lyrics, and then I bring them into practice, and then we sort of restructure them together. I like to come in with a tune. I’ll just play guitar and sing it for them, and then we start to learn it. And as soon as we start to learn it, we can make changes and come up with a different structure. Move the chorus around, make the verse a little longer. That kind of thing. I definitely like to think of it as a collaboration between the three of us.

Do you always change the songs?

Well, we have a lot of songs. There have been some that I have brought in and nothing really needs to be done. Sometimes I’ll suggest a part that needs to be worked with, and we’ll try some different things. And then they’ll write their bass-lines and drum parts around it. 

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These days do you write on electric guitar? 

No, on acoustic. I have a Silverine Harmony. But it sounds good. I just have it around the house, so I’ve written most of the songs on it. 

Do those songs then shift a lot when you bring them to the band, and play them on electric? 

No, because I always have it in the back of my head about the dynamics of electric guitar and drums and bass. Between me and [bassist] Mike and [drummer] Tre, I always have that dynamic in my head – what am I going to bring to the table that they’re going to be able to play, and which will have our certain energy. I always keep our energy and our music in mind, sort of subconsciously. But I think that’s the beauty of this. That not only can I play these songs with a band at full volume, but also that I can play them on a cheap, acoustic guitar. And it can have the same kind of impact. 

Source: Blue Railroad magazine

Brian Eno, man of many hats and the father of ambient music, comments on his use of “Oblique Strategies” cards to spur inspiration:

INTERVIEWER: I was in a studio once, and we found these cards … this was the most useful thing I’ve ever seen in the studio, and it’s called “Oblique Strategies” … the idea is that when you came to a dead end, you weren’t quite sure what the next thing you should do, you would open the box and pick out one of the cards and follow the strategy. And this is your invention, this whole thing.

So I’m just going to pick out the first card at random [from a deck of such cards] and see what it says:

“Listen to the quiet voice.”

… So is that one of your strategies, to sort of take things away?

ENO: Yeah, exactly. … I noticed when I first started working in studios, when you’re very in the middle of something, you forget the most obvious things. You come out of the studio and you think, “Why didn’t we remember to do this or that?” So these really are just ways of throwing you out of the frame, of breaking the context a little bit, so you’re not a band in a studio focused on one song, but you’re people who are alive and in the world and aware of a lot of other things as well. So it’s a way of breaking the tendency to get the screwdriver out. …

Did you use the cards when making your own record?

I don’t use them so much now because I’ve internalized them, so they’re sort of in my head all the time, really.

Source: Later with Jools Holland (thanks Songwriting Zen)

Avant-garde singer-songwriter Björk comments on using her memory as an editor and gathering lyrical thoughts in diaries:

Take us behind the songwriting process: what comes first?

The melody, always. It’s all about singing the melodies live in my head. They go in circles. I guess I’m quite conservative and romantic about the power of melodies. I try not to record them on my Dictaphone when I first hear them. If I forget all about it and it pops up later on, then I know it’s good enough. I let my subconscious do the editing for me.

When do you start writing lyrics?

Well, my writing really differs. Sometimes a song is about a particular emotion, so I sit down and gather all my thoughts. Sometimes I have to write lots of thoughts down in a diary and edit them until I have the right words. Sometimes the words will come in one go. …

Do you ever get writer’s block?

Well, I do have a poet friend called Sjón who helps me sometimes. Usually I have one song that is the manifesto for the album—on Post it was Isobel, on Volta it’s Wanderlust. When I write these songs I usually fill two or three diaries with words. Sjón will then help me narrow it down to two verses and a chorus. In my head I know what these songs are about and I can write books of words on them, but I can’t put them into a song, so Sjón helps me.

Source: Q Magazine

Wikipedia describes Mozart’s use of sketches and the keyboard in his compositional process:

Mozart often wrote down sketches, ranging in size from small snippets to extensive drafts, for his compositions. … Ulrich Konrad, an expert on the sketches describes a well-worked-out system of sketching that Mozart used, based on examination of the surviving documents. Typically the most “primitive” sketches are in casual handwriting, and give just snippets of music. More advanced sketches cover the most salient musical lines (the melody line, and often the bass), leaving other lines to be filled in later. The so-called “draft score” was one in an advanced enough state for Mozart to consider it complete… However, the draft score did not include all of the notes: it remained to flesh out the internal voices, filling out the harmony. These were added to create the completed score, which appeared in a highly legible hand.

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Mozart evidently needed a keyboard to work out his musical thoughts. … [He] had a prodigious ability to “compose on the spot”; that is, to improvise at the keyboard.  This ability was apparent even in his childhood, as the Benedictine priest Placidus Scharl recalled: “Even in the sixth year of his age he would play the most difficult pieces for the pianoforte, of his own invention. He skimmed the octave which his short little fingers could not span, at fascinating speed and with wonderful accuracy. One had only to give him the first subject which came to mind for a fugue or an invention: he would develop it with strange variations and constantly changing passages as long as one wished; he would improvise fugally on a subject for hours, and this fantasia-playing was his greatest passion.”

Source: Wikipedia

Pop star Madonna comments on her back and forth with Prince while writing “Love Song”:

You and Prince wrote “Love Song” together, which is a wonderful song. Did you and he work together or did he give you a track?

No he didn’t give me a track. We sat down and just started fooling around. We had a lot of fun.

What happened is that he played drums and I played the synthesizer and we came up with the original melody line; I just, off the top of my head, started singing lyrics into the microphone. And then he overdubbed some guitar stuff and made a loop of it and sent it to me, and then I just started adding sections to it and singing parts of it. And then I sent it back to him, and he’d sing a part of it and add another instrument and send it back to me … it was like this sentence that turned into a paragraph that turned into a little miniseries.

Source: Songwriters on Songwriting, Paul Zollo

Joey Vera, bassist of progressive metal outfit Fates Warning, comments on stepping outside his usual songwriting formula for his solo project:

… I wanted to challenge myself to stray away from the habits I have with song arrangements and instrumentation. So, I purposely stayed away from the ABC way of writing and let the music dictate what it wanted rather than being overly concerned with song length for instance. I am especially bored with much of popular music these days, so I want to hear things that are interesting even if it’s not something I’ll ever remember. I made this record as a sort of exercise in reworking the way I work, and an attempt to make something I’d actually listen to. …

… For the most part, I like to write songs pretty quickly and sometimes the skeleton is written in an hour. But because I really tried to challenge my writing techniques, I made myself go back with an editing mind and throw monkey wrenches into to the arrangements just to see what would happen. Sometimes, it sucked but sometimes it was really cool. …

During the struggles, I often will reference other things. Sometimes, it’s other works of art such as paintings or installations with multi media.  I’ll go out to a museum, or go see a band in a club, watch a movie. Anything. I have to admit that when I was in the writing chair in my studio, staring at my guitar as it glows from the computer screen, I’ll whip out a record and analyze a songs arrangement, chord progression etc. For this recording I went to Pink Floyd’s The Wall a lot. Also Animals and Wish You Were Here. … I like to analyze chord progressions, song arrangements and production tricks and you can get great ideas from just about everything.

Source: Joey Vera’s MySpace blog

This page has a long list of Beatles songwriting quotes, mostly from John Lennon. Here are a few of my favorites:

I like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, [Paul McCartney and I] wrote that together and it’s a beautiful melody. We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball. Like in ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, I remember when we got the chord that made the song. We were in Jane Asher’s house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, ‘Oh you-u-u / got that something…’ And Paul hits this chord, and I turn to him and say, ‘That’s it!’ I said, ‘Do that again!’ In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that – both playing into each other’s noses.

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Paul had a lot of training, could play a lot of instruments. He’d say, “Well, why don’t you change that there? You’ve done that note 50 times in the song.” You know, I’ll grab a note and ram it home. Then again, I’d be the one to figure out where to go with a song, a story that Paul would start. In a lot of the songs, my stuff is the “middle eight,” the bridge.

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‘Rain’. That’s me again, with the first backwards tape on record anywhere. I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana… and, as I usually do, I listened to what I’d recorded that day. Somehow it got on backwards and I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on. I ran in the next day and said, ‘I know what to do with it, I know… listen to this!’ So I made them all play it backwards. The fade is me actually singing backwards with the guitars going backwards. (sings) ‘Sharethsmnowthsmeanss!’ That one was the gift of God, of Ja actually, the god of marijuana, right? So Ja gave me that one.

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I was lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play Beethoven’s – Moonlight Sonata, on the piano. Suddenly I said, ‘can you play those chords backwards’. She did, and I wrote ‘ Because ‘, around them. The lyrics are clear, no bullshit, no imagery, no obscure references.

Source: John Lennon: In My Life

Mårten Hagström, guitarist of industrial/experimental metal band Meshuggah, comments on building from riffs and creating demos on the computer:

Sometimes when you come up with stuff, you can hear three riffs in a row: you’re coming up with one thing, and you’re trying to put it down, and in the process of doing it, you’re coming up with what should come next … then you build it, and then all of a sudden you have half a song or maybe even a song … most of the time it’s just like one riff here or there, but the whole process of writing it is kind of making the blueprint …

I sit down and program the drums, record the guitar and record the bass in the computer, so when I present an idea to the other guys it’s presented in band form pretty much the way I want it to be. … we might change out the arrangements over a fill or maybe a choice of cymbal or maybe moving something a little bit but we stick true to the general idea pretty much; it’s not a lot different. On some songs we actually restructure a lot, but it’s rare. …

[The drum machine] is just such a superior tool when you know how to use it … When I have an idea, I hear the drums and everything … so when you put it down it’s like figuring out how to program the drums so they sound the way you want … then you record the guitar, so it’s pretty much a demo, which makes it real easy because you can get so close to what you want to get across … even though it’s not 100 percent, it’s close enough to make an intelligent decision as to whether it’s good or not.

Source: The Metal Forge

Ihsahn, head of legendary symphonic black metal band Emperor and now solo musician, comments on writing in the studio for the band’s final album, Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire & Demise:

I have always been very interested in arranging music. From this perspective, it was very relieving to write the music in the studio and not writing band music: drums and guitar and then adding synths, vocals etc. later as filling. I could record a riff when I came up with it, or I could write a riff to accompany a new synth passage, or vice versa. The arrangements became more complete because of this; I had much more freedom. I could delve into various elements for a mid-section of a song, and then not have to worry about the beginning or ending of the songs until later on. I think this way of working is much more interesting and rewarding. It gives me greater control over the various musical aspects. …

The writing process is also very fragmented; I always work that way. Sometimes it is just a full chaos. This is why it feels so comfortable to have a studio at home. I can document my ideas as I get them, record riffs immediately after they are developed. Later on, I can pick out elements and work more on them or change them afterwards. …

Being able to distribute tracks from the start, rather than writing the basic song first at a rehearsal and then just adding/filling synths, etc. This time I was able to write everything from the beginning at the same time. Letting the guitar lead, the melodies came naturally. Also, this is the first time we worked with seven-string guitars. With the massive platform they provide, there was no need to add that much synth tracks. The guitars filled a larger portion of the spectrum now. …

As I learned and grew as a musician and songwriter, I got a less-is-more attitude. On Anthems… [a previous album] we had the basic songs first, then I sequenced all the synths at home before playing them live in the studio afterwards. When doing this, however, you don’t get the true feeling of the music that actually is there. It drowns in all the fillings. It is no problem filling out with synths and arranging and arranging forever, until you have a complete wall of sound, but how relevant is it to do this? With such a massive fundament as we already have, and the tempo and everything, we have focused more and more on staying true to the essence of the music. Instead of adding layers, we tried to vary the different themes when they reappeared and so on.

Source: Chronicles of Chaos

Brann Dailor, drummer of progressive sludge metal band Mastodon, comments on the role of jamming and the absence of “songs” in the band’s writing process:

It’s a long, arduous process. We’ve got a skeleton for the whole record and these huge chunks of music four of five different segments that don’t have a beginning or end yet… We’re just basically in the middle of the record, adding stuff, giving it a taste then adding a little more ‘pepper’ or ‘salt.’ Once all the ingredients are in there, you have to bake it — which is just playing it over and over again until it feels right. The main goal is to get the songs right so you don’t have to think about the time changes — so you can relax with it and play it how it should be played. There’s a level of difficulty to our stuff and if you’re too wrapped up in trying to remember how many times something goes and the timing for the next riff, you can’t examine the song for being a song. So it takes a while.

Source: Rock Sound magazine, via Blabbermouth.net

Nick Lowe, rock musician and producer, comments on aping the style of his heroes as a young songwriter:

… I hadn’t been writing songs very long and, like everybody else who starts out doing anything creative, you start off plundering your heroes’ style and catalogue. When you’ve exhausted that, you move on to somebody else and do the same thing with them, and the day comes when you’re rewriting your latest hero’s works, and you put in a little bit of the first guy’s thing that you ripped off, a middle eight, or a bridge, and as it goes on you include more and more of these bits and pieces that you’ve ripped off, until, suddenly, you haven’t ripped them off at all. They’ve actually become your style. And then all you need is a good idea. And then you really are in business. I remember having this idea—“What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding”—and almost falling over in astonishment that I hadn’t heard this before, that it really was an original notion.

Source: Vanity Fair

Paul Simon, folk singer-songwriter and partner of Art Garfunkel in Simon and Garfunkel, comments on how he likes to start a song:

“You Can Call Me Al” seems like the perfect example of that combination of the colloquial with enriched language. The chorus is extremely conversational, set against enriched lines like “angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity…”

Right. The song starts out very ordinary, almost like a joke.  Like the structure of a joke cliche: “There’s a rabbi, a minister and a priest”; “Two Jews walk into a bar”; “A man walks down the street.” That’s what I was doing there.

Because how you begin a song is one of the hardest things. The first line of a song is very hard. I always have this image in my mind of a road that goes like this [motions with hands to signify a road that gets wider as it opens out] so that the implication is that the directions are pointing outward. It’s like a baseball diamond; there’s more and more space out here. As opposed to like this.  [Motions an inverted road getting thinner.] Because if it’s like this, at this point in the song, you’re out of options.

So you want to have that first line that has a lot of options, to get you going. And the other things that I try to remember, especially if a song is long, you have plenty of time. You don’t have to kill them, you don’t have to grab them by the throat with the first line.

In fact, you have to wait for the audience–they’re going to sit down, get settled in their seat … their concentration is not even there. You have to be a good host to people’s attention span. They’re not going to come in there and work real hard right away. Too many things are coming: the music is coming, the rhythm is coming, all kinds of information that the brain is sorting out.

So give them easy words and easy thoughts, and let it move along, and let the mind get into the groove of it. Especially if it’s a rhythm tune. And at a certain point, when the brain is loping along easily, then you come up with the first kind of thought or image that’s different. Because it’s entertaining at that point. Otherwise people haven’t settled in yet.

Source: Songwriters on Songwriting, Paul Zollo

John Petrucci, virtuoso guitarist and co-founder of progressive metal band Dream Theater, comments on the role of improvisation in the band’s songwriting process:

Usually [songwriting] stems from some kind of jam or improvisation.  One of the things that we’ve done from the very beginning is that we love to play together and improvise and have these long, extended jams.  And usually when we do that something will come out of it, whether it’s a feel, a melody, a chord progression, or something we can latch on to.  And then once that seed is planted, then the sparks start flying and we just kind of go off — you know, “That’s really cool, let’s move it in this direction, let’s make it go 4 more times,” and then some guy will chime in, “You know what would be cool? There’s this feel on such and such album that I could picture here.”  And there’s such a great chemistry.  And then once it starts to become a little more cohesive, we generally map it out.  We have a big, some sort of display, some sort of board, a grease board or something, and we’ll start writing out the arrangement.  And usually it’s something that’s erasable because we constantly change it.  And we develop it from there.  When we feel like it’s complete and the song is done, there you have it.

Source: Youtube

Tarja Turunen, operatic vocalist and former singer of symphonic metal band Nightwish, comments on her songwriting process:

What do you usually think when you compose your songs?

Every time I sit down in front of my piano, I like to improvise with the instrument. It depends on my mood of that day what kind of melodies and rhythms I am playing around. Sometimes, even before starting to play I already have a quite clear picture of a song I would like to compose, or at least the sound of it. Sometimes a song can be born in few minutes, if the feeling is right, some other times it can take days. I do always the music before the lyrics. The story or an idea for the lyrics appears during the composing process normally, but some other times I already have a strong idea of the story I would like to sing before any music comes to my mind. So as you can see, it really depends a lot of the circumstances. I just let myself flow free with the melodies and harmonies and then see if I can create something interesting. I am the most critical person in judging what sounds good or bad. 

Source: Blabbermouth.net

Wikipedia describes how Metallica’s hit “Enter Sandman” emerged from a single guitar riff:

Metallica’s songwriting method involved lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Jason Newsted submitting tapes of song ideas and concepts to rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, who then used the material in conjunction with their own ideas to write songs in Ulrich’s house in Berkeley, California. “Enter Sandman” evolved from a guitar riff that Hammett wrote. Originally, the riff was just two bars in length, but Ulrich suggested that the first bar should be played three times. The song was quickly finished, but Hetfield did not come up with vocal melodies and lyrics for a long time. The song, in fact, was among the album’s last to have lyrics, and the lyrics featured in the song are not the original; Hetfield felt that “Enter Sandman” sounded “catchy and kind of commercial” and so to contradict the sound, he wrote lyrics about “destroy[ing] the perfect family; a huge horrible secret in a family” that included references to crib death.

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Lars Ulrich described “Enter Sandman” as a “one-riff song”, in which all of its sections derive from the main riff that Kirk Hammett wrote.

Source: Wikipedia

Leonard Cohen, singer-songwriter and poet, comments on hard work and keeping notebooks of ideas:

Do you mean that you’re trying to reach something that is outside your immediate realm of thought?

My immediate realm of thought is bureaucratic and like a traffic jam. My ordinary state of mind is very much like the waiting room at the DMV. Or, as I put it in a quatrain, “The voices in my head, they don’t care what I do, they just want to argue the matter through and through.”

So to penetrate this chattering and this meaningless debate that is occupying most of my attention, I have to come up with something that really speaks to my deepest interest. Otherwise I nod off in some way or another. So to find that song, that urgent song, takes a lot of versions and a lot of work and a lot of sweat.

But why shouldn’t my work be hard?  Almost everybody’s work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I’m not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff, to come up with the payload. …

What does that work consist of?

Just versions. I will drag you upstairs after the vacuuming stops and I will show you version after version after version of some of the tunes on this new album.

You do have whole notebooks of songs?

Whole notebooks. I’m very happy to be able to speak this way to fellow craftsmen. Some people may find it encouraging to see how slow and dismal and painstaking is the process.

For instance, a song like “Closing Time” began as a song in 3/4 time with a really strong, nostalgic, melancholy country feel. Entirely different words. … And I recorded the song and I sang it. And I choked over it. Even though another singer could have done it perfectly well. It’s a perfectly reasonable song. And a good one, I might say. A respectable song. But I choked over it. There wasn’t anything that really addressed my attention. The finishing of it was agreeable because it’s always an agreeable feeling. But when I tried to sing it I realized it came from my boredom and not from my attention. It came from my desire to finish the song and not from the urgency to locate a construction that would engross me.

So I went to work again. Then I filled another notebook from beginning to end with the lyric, or the attempts at the lyric, which eventually made it onto the album. So most of [my songs] have a dismal history, like the one I’ve just accounted.

Source: Songwriters on Songwriting, Paul Zollo

David Gilmour, guitarist and singer of progressive rock band Pink Floyd and, later, solo musician, comments on his process of recording and collecting ideas:

Talking about the songwriting process, are you more 9 -5 these days or do you get inspiration at strange times?

I really am an inspiration person; I just wait to let inspiration strike. Obviously I have written a lot of songs with Pink Floyd and with other people and on my own, where I have set down to try and write a song and sometimes that works quite well. Mostly, I have to say, it is from flashes of inspiration, which is why having a little minidisc recorder is fantastic. It means that in the last ten years, since there have been things of this type available and small enough to carry everywhere and convenient enough to switch on, my output of stuff has grown massively because I don’t forget them.

Before, I’m sure I had as many moments but I just forgot them all! So, in the last twelve years since I actually made the last album I have gathered a 150 pieces of music on minidisc. So, they were the start points of the writing on this album.

Quite a few songs on the album came from those start points. Any other method I’ve used, I used to try and write things down, write the key it was in, the chord I was doing, the rhythm and tempo I was playing. You go back to that with a guitar and you read these notes and it makes no sense at all.

Myself and [producer] Phil Manzanera spent a long time sorting through the 150 pieces of music that 5 had, whittling them down and chucking other ones away. As soon as you get into that process that also fires you up and starts making those same creative processes work.

Source: Pulse & Spirit

Mikael Åkerfeldt, head of diverse progressive metal band Opeth, comments on his process of demoing songs:

I do have an input into pretty much everything because I demo the songs back home; I have a simple Pro Tools rig set up at my house. So I demo all the songs and I finish all the songs and actually have them sequenced in the same order as I want it to be on the album. So we’re listening to the album before we record it really, if you know what I mean.

I record it with like a drum machine and it sounds good but obviously it’s a drum machine. I’m very interested in drums; as far as I’m concerned drumming in Opeth is one of the most important parts; if the drums are nailed, I can just listen to the drum tracks and I know it’s gonna be a good song if you know what I mean. …

… the way I see it, writing songs and arranging [songs] as I do in my home, the way I do it they are so done by the time we enter the studio, that it’s a pre-production that I’ve been so involved in. I think writing songs and having your finger in every pie when it comes to the songwriting, you become a producer if you know what I mean. But when it comes to how to achieve the sounds that we’re looking for, I don’t know shit! I just basically tell our engineer, “We want good guitar sounds” and he’s like, “OK.” We fool around with a few amps and I tell him that’s good-sounding or sometimes I say, “That doesn’t sound good” and he says, “Well, it will sound good later.” So, I really don’t have much of a say when I’m working with engineers. But in the end, I’m always happy.

Source: UltimateGuitar.com

Tom Petty comments on how he prefers to write music and lyrics:

Do you work on songs with your guitar, and work on music and words at the same time?

I try to, yeah. I work mostly with the guitar or piano. I’ve found, especially with this last album, that I really prefer getting the melody and music at the same time as hopefully a chunk of the words. I think this is better–mo’ better–for me than trying to marry the two together at different times. I think I was always happiest with the stuff that I wrote that came alive all in one try. But, you know, honestly, you do anything you can to make it work.

Niklas Sundin, guitarist of melodic death metal band Dark Tranquillity, comments on using old material:

Can you describe how the song “Nothing To No One” evolved in the songwriting process?

That was the last song written for the album. Normally we take our time with the songwriting. But just before we enter the studio, we work with the song really hard. I think a lot of the riffs on that song actually had been floating around for a while, some of them were actually a year or so. We had a chance to use them in lots of songs before. The first riff was written during the Character [album] period.

It’s kind of good working the way we do because we always have a backlog of tons and tons of different riffs. You write something that everyone agrees is good, but it might not be possible to finish it at that time. Then a few years later it might be perfect for something that’s around then. With that song, it gave us a chance to get some more of the old material that we had written. I think that melodic middle and ending part, it was a bit new and written by [guitarist] Martin right before we entered the studio. It’s a mix between new and old, I guess!

You mentioned the band has a backlog of material. Do you usually have those ideas recorded as demos?

They’re just MP3 files. It’s all the separate riffs we write, then we’ll email the song parts. We have probably more than 5,000. Some of them are total crap, of course! But it’s always good to have as much material as possible. On occasion, something that’s weird or really strange actually might work out. We tend to really come up with tons and tons of ideas.

Source: UltimateGuitar.com