Masquerading as a Musician

I almost always have some song bouncing around in my head; usually it's something I just heard on the radio.  But every so often I get a certain drum beat stuck in my head with no song to back it up.  I don't know if it's a fragment of something I've heard before or just inspiration, but one day I decided to do something about it - I opened up my copy of Guitar Pro and wrote it down.  It took me a little while to transfer the beat from my head to musical notation, but eventually I got it figured out.  What follows is the result (click for a larger image):

Then one day about a week or two later I was screwing around in Guitar Hero and remembered that they had a song creation mode that they call GHTunes.  So I decided to try and transfer this drum beat that I wrote to a custom song in GHTunes.  After some tinkering I got it how I wanted it, then decided that wasn't enough.  So I laid down a bass track to go with it (which was surprisingly simple).  I thought about doing a rhythm guitar track, but given how the song sounded so far, I thought it would be best to skip that.  Then came the challenging part - the lead guitar track.  I am not a guitar player.  I have a general sense of what I think sounds good in regards to lead guitar, but trying to write something new was a completely different story.  

Basically here's how the process went:

1) Write an intro

2) Write a main riff

3) Write a bridge

4) Spend two hours tweaking the intro so that it sounded right, even though it's like 10 seconds long

5) Decide that the bridge and the main riff should be switched

6) Decide that the intro sucked and that the bridge would be the new intro

7) Decide that I actually liked the intro and rewrite it from scratch

8) Spend two more hours tweaking the intro AGAIN

9) Accept the fact that I don't know how to write guitar parts and move on

To elaborate on steps 4 and 8, I basically spent 5 minutes writing a simple version then 2 hours doing things like "move this note up one step (like from D to E)" and see how it sounds" and "move this note forward by one eighth-triplet of a measure and see if that sounds better".  It was actually pretty interesting trying to get it to sound how I wanted it to sound.

At this point the track was about a minute long, so I copied the main riff a few times and added an outro (which in my case is the same as the intro, but at the end) and called it good.  I would venture to say I spent at least 4x as much time on the lead guitar part as on both the bass and drum parts combined.  The result is here:

Link to YouTube

If you can't see the video for whatever reason (boss walking by, slow connection, etc), here is a link to an audio-only version of the song (and don't forget to put headphones on if you're at work!).  The lead guitar sounds terrible in that version, but I think you can get the essence of the song.

I have since started two more songs that are soundly in the "rock" genre rather than whatever the hell this one is, and I will post them when I finish them.  So that's how I have been spending my time the last few days - attempting to write some songs.  Please let me know what you think of the first one, I'd love to hear your comments.