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Writing clean parts.

idssdi

Sold-out Crowd Surfer
Nov 11, 2019
5,336
6,754
Groningen
11
The beginning of an idea for me is really just playing and see what comes to me and continue from that(that’s basically my songwriting process).
When I want to write clean parts I really just turn off my drive pedals and just play with reverb (or reverb and delay depending on how lazy I am). Tbh pretty much everything I write starts clean and distortion is added later because According to Bruce Springsteen you can recognize a good song by taking everything away and just play acoustic guitar and because it doesn’t need all the bells and whistles to be good. You can figure out afterwards whether you just wrote a a good clean intro or whether you want to add some distortion to it.
 

Calvin Phillips

Music Theory Bragger
Nov 11, 2019
2,588
1,988
That’s like asking how the hell syn came up with the original melody in roman sky. Theres a couple ways I play clean. Sometimes I just pick 3 string arpeggios repeatedly. I add a bit of chorus and delay. And sometimes I throw in the reverb. But honestly it’s all in that original melody. And how you ultimately build off it. Everyone has their own flare there.
 

Ed Seith

Supreme Galactic Overlord
Staff member
Legend+
  • Nov 11, 2019
    3,882
    15
    6,603
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    Marana, AZ USA
    soundcloud.com
    35
    It starts with making chords with your fret hand and picking out individual notes here and there until you find something pleasing. Then change chords and try to use the same pattern. From there, try little embellishments here and there to make it unique and interesting as you play it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
     

    Ezequiel Romanko

    Garage band Groupie
    Nov 11, 2019
    491
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    Argentina
    10
    a really cool trick is also making first the melody and then adding the base line (that would be to things like buried alive intro) and for arpeggios or that kind of stuff you can just jam to chords doing arpeggios until you find something you really like and a good thing would be knowing lot of chords to add more variety to your song and even make it better, also if you’re doing a jam and you find a progression like i don’t know C-G-F-G (I-V-IV-V of Cmaj) you can add notes in betwen the chords to make a voice conduction and that will have a really good impact on the progression and will improve the whole song or part you’re working on, and listen to a lot of music that have clean parts that you like and analyze them in a theorical way to see what’s going on and then try to apply it to your songs or clean parts
     

    Calvin Phillips

    Music Theory Bragger
    Nov 11, 2019
    2,588
    1,988
    The cool thing I realized through the caged system that every chord has arpeggios that go with it through the caged system you can play similar arpeggios but change one note.. and it’s still the same chord. So if you wanted to go higher in chord progression you could move up to the next position and play the caged system arpeggio as oppose to playing the arpeggio of the chord you went up to. And vice versa backwards.