OOO

 

Since the advent of the PC and what was once called "word processing", we've been able to edit indefinitely and non-linearly. I realize that's how I'm working on music as well. When I start a new piece it might begin with just me playing a guitar or playing a bass part which evolves over time, sometimes over a much longer period, into something inconceivable from the seed ideas.

My June piece, Radio Angel began with singing "Silent Satellite" against a few chords on an acoustic guitar. As I was doing the synth parts there was a synth patch "Radio Angel" which I thought was actually a better title. Silent satellite is still in the lyrics so I thought that was a good solution. As I got deeper into tracking the piece it began to gather more meaning. Very often while I'm in the middle of recording all the other parts, I may stumble on a new acoustic guitar part. I've gotten into the habit of having the "camera" armed and ready to take a "snapshot" of something passing by and capture it immediately, then resume what I was doing. The organ part at the beginning was informed by the title change but remained within the "silent satellite" idea/metaphor. The acoustic guitar part at the end was a "new original" as a spin-off and I made it a kind of etude. And I've added the new acoustic guitar spin-off which was a new original and a Video 45 as well.

When you're in a creative flow you can do things out-of-order, and create new "nodes" for new seed ideas (or "seed from the fruit" as Rick Rubin calls it), or loop back to the beginning to modify the seed idea for a sense of closure. The example I always cite are the sculptures of Tony Smith, a minimalist sculptor from the 1960s whose works are based on shape primitives (hexagons, octagons, and so on). He had an interesting way of working where he would go back almost to the beginning of the project and complete it by making the preliminary drawings, which in music has historically been notating it on manuscript paper. The common notion is that the artist starts with a sketch and it evolves linearly from that point to where it was actually fabricated and installed, but in Tony Smith's case, for the work to be completely resolved, it needed the "original" sketch. That's how I work as well: a piece will evolve and get elaborately produced, then once it's finished I'll realize I never wrote the chords down, or it never had a good acoustic guitar part standing on its own as the "original".

You can do things out of order. We think that things should proceed linearly (and they should from an engineering perspective) but in other things, you can rearrange the sequence until it has the ultimate shape you want, then make the drawing as if it was the seed idea. It's the "GMO" of creativity.
 

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To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just redo it, redo it, redo it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.--Kevin Kelly

(But it's also interesting that Rod Serling never did rewrites. It could have been that spontaneous ideas were immediately incorporated).

 

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PS:

This relates re: culinary metaphor from the The Land That Doesn’t Need Ozempic article. What you want is to graze around in a small region at first then extend out, perhaps leaving some breadcrumbs: "I would mostly eat them sequentially—start the  soup, finish the soup; start the salad, finish the salad; start the  pasta, finish the pasta. “In Japan, this is regarded as really weird,”  he said. “It’s a rude way of eating.” A meal like this should be eaten  in a triangle shape. “First, drink the soup a little bit, then go to the  side dish—one bite. Then try the rice, for one bite. Then the  mackerel—again, a single mouthful. Then go back and have another taste  of the soup,” he said. “This is also the key to keep you healthy ...  Keeping the balance, so you don’t eat too much.”  

I noticed this as well in the Big Chef videos where they would have tea and sweets before the meal. When I was growing up, my mother would serve the salad last as the "dessert".