The Songwriting Process

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