Happens a lot in my situation, which is cool by me. We have a rule that if at least one person isn't happy and wants to shelve it, it gets shelved. We also are not against taking said songs off of the shelf if one has some sort of idea for change or presents a good reason as to why it should go back into a set list.

I find having the band's therapist contribute lyrics can really make a mediocre song into something special.

Marsupialized wrote:What if a bandmate REALLY loves a track, but you dislike it? Not just regular songs that come and go, this is the person's baby unlike any other. Do you feel like you owe it to them to keep your trap shut and just go along with it because they are so jazzed about it? What if you REALLY hate it?

focus on a way to make it fun for you. It's not a matter of writing the most perfect part or the most well arranged thought, it's a matter of making what you're playing interesting enough and challenging enough to hold your own attention.

listen to the stuff that's being played and react to it. If people are just playing their parts and not focusing on what each other is playing, it'll sound like crap. if you adjust your playing to work towards creating a mood or an emotion based on a part you're not crazy about, you can still make it sound good.

Sometimes it's hard to not hear: "I really don't like that part" as: "I wish you were dead.", but if there's a bit of compromise in the songwriting and the discussion about it, you'll get a more fulfilling result.

We've thrown out quite a bit over the years. If someone's not feeling something, it generally gets talked about and discussed whether something needs to change within the arrangement of the song, or if the person(s) not enjoying it just aren't enjoying what they've come up with for their contribution. We've rarely let full songs get played live before we decide that they're no good, but it's happened on occasion. Sometimes those songs get salvaged for parts, or they disappear completely.

I don't think there's any "right" method. Ultimately, what's important is that everyone in the band is satisfied with the "final" version to where the song can be played confidently and enjoyably once it's played in front of others. If it's not fun, it's not worth doing - and if one person isn't having fun, then it isn't fun.

We haven't scrapped any songs we've recorded for official release, but for the most part it seems like we have a smaller selection of songs that we have rehearsed enough to play live, and if we think of something we haven't played in awhile that we think we might want to play at a future show, we'll rehearse it. It definitely feels like we've "outgrown" some of our older stuff, but I hope we never retire anything completely. I like seeing bands that have been around for years and on a whim decide to play something they haven't performed live in a long time.

Marsupialized wrote:Ok, for anyone in more than one band...how do you decide which band your idea is best for and if rejected by one do you try it with others?

i've been lucky enough to have played w/ (i think) a bunch of really talented people over the years - and in a pretty wide variety of styles. but what's important in that distinction is you have to recognize each player's strengths and weaknesses. invariably, they'll be different than yours (and will often be a source of frustration) in my mind being in that band is really about finding and flattering the individual stengths of the members, and avoiding/downplaying their weaknesses as much as possible. you start making something cool at that intersection of everyone's tastes and abilities - and it never turns out like any one individual's idea in their head as it started out - those songs are generally the most boring anyway.

maybe think about which 'audience' [of your band] is going to be most likely to think that idea is cool? sometimes it's none of them, and then you break out the 4 track and start playing instruments you don't really know how to play just to get the ideas out.

Boombats wrote:Anyone experience this: one bandmate doesn't like the piece you're working on. Instead of making verbal protest, he or she plays their part shittily and apathetically, until nobody's having a good time anymore?

every band i've ever been in. everyone does it from time to time. sometime's the shitty face and playing is more of a reflection of them being pissed about something shitty that happened in their day, or they're pissed silently at themselves for playing shitty, and knowing they're playing shitty - but trying to "be a team player" since they know you get pissed off that your song ideas get killed, but they're worrying about 100 other things. it's not always a direct correlation to your idea. and sometimes they honestly don't know what WOULD make them like it more, other than they don't like it - which could be psychological more than anything else. shitty practices where everyone hates each other and things the parts all suck are part of the game. everyone i've played with i've seen fucking suck balls and be shitty, and other times blow me away with their talent. [myself included] you gotta help create a space for people to excell.

then sometimes you come back later and the ideas great after everyone else is in a good mood and on their game. i think it's more how you move through those shitty practices and come out on the other side than the actual practice.

i'm pretty sure i'm shitty to be in a band with during the writing process, (maybe all the time!) i'm usually kind of the dick in the room. i like to think of it more as bullshit detector... but generally i am thanked after the smoke clears. it's way more fun AFTER the record is done and recorded and all you're doing is touring and playing and there are no more decisions to be made. until you start getting bored... then have to start the whole process over again. rachel frequently tells me i'm insufferable as a musician. hey - i push my bandmates - can't fault me for that. i expect them to push me too!

the writing stage is really hard - probably the hardest part about being in a band. so many opportunities to second guess yourselves.

How about one practice you come up with the song, everyone loves it, rocks out to it and high fives 'fuck yeah! that song rules! our best yet!'
Then you come in next practice and play it.
'Uh, that's not very good at all, is it?'

if someone hates it and someone else feels like it's the best, that sounds like trouble.

I've been in a somewhat similar situation (maybe a little less severe than "favorite thing ever", more like "just thinks it's really good), with almost every band I've ever been in. It usually revolves around how the part has no focus, just kinda wanders around without a point, or how the part is too major/poppy/happy or too diminished/metal/dark kinda stuff.

Something I've noticed is that most of the time, if you just go along with it and do your best to play your best and bite your tongue, and put the angst generated by that into some other appropriate song, it works alright, and usually within a year or two the guy who wrote the song realizes it's crap.

Something I've seen work is this...

Say you're the guy who hates it. Take a recording of the song with you not playing anything. Listen to it a bunch of times in a row, trying to identify interesting aspects of it that you can focus on and embellish, draw attention to, whatever. Then spend a few HOURS by yourself, with the song, recording multiple different kinda parts that you think might work. Put in HOURS of serious effort, legitimately trying your best to make something of it.

So here's what comes of it. Out of the ideas you came up with, maybe the songwriter really digs one, and you've got something to work with. And if he doesn't like any of them, you can say "well, I spent HOURS working hard trying to come up with something, and this is the best I got."

In my experience, the guy who puts in hours on his own trying to come up with a part will generally come up with something that everybody can live with.

And ultimately, I think a band needs to throw songs out. The complication comes in when people can't agree on which songs are the strong ones and which are the weak ones. And at the end of the day, that can be the end of a band, if people have radically different ideas about how the band should sound. It can work great, for different people to push in different directions. Or, it can be an obstacle that is never overcome.

For me, it's usually easy to decide which band is right for which song. But that's because I always have a non-existent band that will someday be real and will be where most of my "too metal" stuff ends up. That's usually the gripe that bandmates have with stuff I write. The exception was my band right before the Chrome Robes, but in that one, I wrote all the songs and brought in a drummer and bassist that liked what I wrote, and all was well.

If I can find the right people, my "too metal" band will be up and running soon enough, maybe even this year.

And yeah, in my mind, if a song got retired because somebody else in the band didn't like it, that just means that a future band I play in already has one song, before the band's even together. People have told me that it's not normal or not right or not cool of me to want to play years-old songs with new bands. I disagree. If you bring in a song you want to play, something you wrote, I don't care if you wrote it this morning or 20 years ago. If it's a good and interesting song, that's that. So if you don't mind that attitude, then songs getting benched or put on the back burner or whatever, it just means they're out for now. I've never been in a band where songs got back-burnered and then were brought back into play. If they're not good enough with the players in the band, they may never be. But with other folks writing better parts... who knows.

My previous band only had one completed song that we played out and eventually did nothing with.

I came up with the initial riff when we were recording our full length in June 2004, and we came back to the song several times over the next year. We played it out a few times in May and June 2005, but were still never happy with it. We moved on to other songs, and broke up before we could have come back to the dead song.

I think eventually we had worked on the song so much (our band was kind of a "stonecutter" as Coach would say), by the time it was "finished" none of us were happy with it. If we were still a band, we'd probably be working on that song to this day.

My old band stopped playing several of our older songs as we went a long. Most of these were songs that were written before I was in the band, when it was just the guitar player and drummer. We'd all out grown them, and known we'd written much better songs since then.

Police Teeth has so far been the most prolific band I've been in, and has only thrown out one song. That was a song called "I Hope You Get Murdered" that J. Burns thought was too reminiscent of his previous band. Neither Coach or I were that bummed though. The only thing I had added was a rip off of the Jesus Lizard's "Gladiator".

as the "leader" of an undemocratic-type band, i throw away songs all the time for arbitrary reasons and am really terrible / negligent about it. i just stop bringing them up at practice, putting em on set lists, etc. my bandmates get really sick of it, especially because i'll often show them a song and then just forget about, so eventually they go "hey, what happened to that song with the blah blah blah. that was really fun" and i go "oh yeah sorry i forgot about that one i don't think we should play it anymore."

the point of all this: don't throw away songs the way i do.

Terrainasaur wrote:as the "leader" of an undemocratic-type band

So they just do whatever you tell them to do?