It generally takes me a few months to finish a song. It's mostly just due to lack of time. And also because, since I'm a software engineer and I spend most of the day every day running my brain at 110% of reactor capacity, there's not much left sometimes at the end of the day. And I also am not just interested in putting out songs, I'm interested in mastering the process. So I won't just recording something and edit and align and automate and all that. I'll just come back to it over the course of some number of nights until I name a real performance.

Sometimes I get lucky, but that ego gratification usually doesn't last long. I was bragging to my friends that I laid down bass, guitar and drums for a two minute intro the other night, with the guitar being one take, the bass being a a few takes and the drums being one take, and no real time spend even struggling with tones. Then of course that caught up with me and it took me 80 takes to get the next guitar part down.

I find that I struggle the most at the very start and the very end of the process. At the start it's just to find some idea that I don't feel is completely worn out. I know my pop/rock music history well so that can be difficult. At the end, it's because as the song comes more together, there's less and less space to put something else in. I often struggle to find those little bits that just fill in some of the time and frequency corners nicely.

To fight the problem at the start I'll often just lay down some synth or guitar part, almost on the fly. Just come up with something to create a structure to get started. Then once I get a couple parts down, just throw away that guide track. It then often sounds like something completely different and far less obvious than the simple original part. Though, in many cases my original synth parts have become important parts of the song. Two my recent songs were done that way. Since I know the keyboard less than the guitar, I can often do something that's just as 'obvious' but it seems less so to me on the keyboard.