Do bands in do this in general, or do they just practice them enough that it becomes second nature?
I imagine that by the time they play the songs in concert, they’ve practiced thousands of times and it’s all second nature, but I’ve always wondered what happens when your typical rock band sits around to write a song if they just jam and play off each other, make noises with their mouths or if they scribble on paper and pass the notes around.
They way my little punk band has done it is simple. Someone in the band will be dickin around playing something and if it sounds nice, we’ll all build on it. We never write anything down except lyrics, which come last in our songwriting process anyway. If we want to change something, we’ll play it the “new” way and the “old” way and see which one sounds better. None of us can read music and our style is pretty simple anyway.
I’ve been working with an artist over the last year transcribing his 14 CDs for guitar. (Here are the two so far: Why We Fight, Confessions of St. Ace). I’m not sure if he writes the lyrics down or not, but he hasn’t written most of the music down. In fact, some of the songs he now plays in a different way since the recording as we’ve had one discussion about capo positioning and another about tuning.
I occasionally write down some of the things we do if I don’t think I’ll remember them or if I think I’ll forget how we played it, but for the most part I don’t do a lot of transcribing the music. We often write down the lyrics, which I think most people do…Ronnie Van Zant being a notable exception (I read somewhere he used to say if he couldn’t remember it, it wasn’t worth writing down).
A lot of rock musicians don’t write down their songs because they can’t. Many popular musicians never learned to read or write music.
Different groups approach the composition process in different ways. I know that The Who’s Pete Townshend would work on songs at home with his guitar or piano, record a demo version, and play the tape for the rest of the band. This, rather than a written composition, would serve as the blueprint for the song.
Townshend has released several collections of his demos (Scoop, Another Scoop, Scoop 3, and the highlights compilation Scooped), so the curious can compare them with The Who’s finished versions.
The bands I’ve played with and recorded with have never written down any music–even in cases where the players were capable of doing so. At the very most, chord changes might be written down, but that’s it. It’s generally not necessary, and you don’t really need to practice all that much to get the basics of a song down. If you can listen and remember, that’s all you need.
I’m perfectly capable of transcribing music if I need to, but the most I’ve ever done is write out general chord charts or similar “crib sheets” if I need to learn a song within one or two run throughs. Otherwise, it’s not necessary and, from what I can tell, this is the standard procedure for most popular music forms.
Varies from band to band depending on complexity of music (based on my experience of having played in heaps of bands). Your average verse-chorus band isn’t doing anything tricky enough to warrant it, especially if you tape your rehearsals (a good idea) which a lot of bands seem to do.
Just another chiming in with a little experience, I’ve played in three different punk bands, and each time, the only thing written down for posterity was the lyrics.
Each member would return to practice, and even if a song was very new, we’d just nod at each other or say “what about that new one?” and everyone would just remember their part, and everything would fall into place. It often only took once or twice to cement the new song in our minds, and a little polishing would just occur over time, either by suggestion, inspiration, or accident. 
Let me expound on this a little.
There are different systems musicians may use to keep notes on the music. The most common is simply to write down the chord changes. One popular system that country studio musicians use is called the Nashville Number System. It’s a way of writing down the chord changes independent of what key the music is being played in. It’s quite similar to the Roman numeral system that’s used in classical music theory. For example, if the chord progression is 1-6minor-4-5 in the key of C, that translates to C, Aminor, F, G(7). Experience will tell you what sort of chord extensions will be permissable in harmony. For example, for the 1 chord, you could usually add a 9th (D) and a major 7th (or a dominant 7th, Bb, if the harmony of the song dictates), plus perhaps 6ths, or suspended 4ths, etc… You use your ear and the feel of a song as a guide. If it’s a bluesy tune, you know you’ll be able to stick dominant 7ths, ninths, and even augmented elevenths all over the place (though tastefully.)
The main thing for a player to know is the basic harmonic motion of a piece. Most jazz players will work off what’s known as a “lead sheet,” which contains basic chord notation and a melody line. Everything else is expected to be improvised. As long as everyone is locked into the same basic chord progression, the band will sound like it’s playing together.
Whether this information is written down or not is up to the skill of the performer and the time constraints allowed to learn a piece of music. In rock, there generally isn’t THAT much information to remember, so it’s generally not written down.
Every rock musician I’ve played with can speak the common language of chords. Some may not be able to read sheet music, but they’ll understand the basics of chords at the very least. Some may not know exactly that the chord they’re playing is a Cadd9, but at least they’ll know they’re playing some kind of C chord.
A few years back, I heard Paul McCartney talking to Larry King about this very subject. Paul McCartney and John Lennon didn’t know how to read or write music, you see. Paul STILL can’t.
He told Larry King that, when he and John Lennon first started writing songs together, Paul asked John, “Well, what if we write a good song, and we can’t remember it because we’ve never learned to write the notes?” Paul says that John just smirked, “If we can’t remember it, it must not have been that good.”
stpauler are you saying you know John Wesley Harding? That is so awesome. He is so awesome. The *Why We Fight * album is so pertainant to today that it’s scary.
And I’m only repeating what every one else has said, but anyone I’ve known who writes songs usually just writes the lyrics. However, I had very few pitiful attempts at writing a song and I wrote down the chords with the lyrics. I must reiterate… pitiful attempts…
I keep a master set of charts for every song I write. For most songs I do up a master chart with Nashville Number chords and the lyrics. It’s laid out with the structure of the tune, with chorus sections in italics, and all harmony vocals in bold as well. It’s really a reference, so I don’t need the melody or vocal harmonies. It’s more a ‘oh yeah, that’s how we went into the chorus there’ kind of thing, especially with older songs that haven’t been played in a while.
For jazz, I use straight up head charts with standard jazz notation for chord symbols.
For fiddle & mando tunes, it’s usually notated on staff paper, but with Nashville Numbers instead, so capo musicians can use the same chart.
I think you’ll find that while there’s standard techniques that are used - Nashville, real book style jazz notation, tablature, lyric sheets, OLGA style charts - every musician or composer develops their own way of doing things, to a large extent. Different styles of music require different references and different ways of notating them, even in simple chart form.
When accompanying rock music with drums on a tune that was well-sussed out by my friends before I came in, I often made a chart that more or less conformed to accepted standards—basically divided measures with the basic rhythm notated with time slashes thereafter, special fills transcribed in standard notation (otherwise it was just ‘fill’ written after a time slash), a bit of lyric written under any changes to help with place, changes in meter written in the usual manner, etc.
Of course, the other guys cared not a lick for anything written down, the weenies. 
Well, I met him once after a concert in Des Moines and we had a couple drinks and talked about the transcriptions and stuff, but that’s about it. He’s a really nice guy. Otherwise, it’s just been e-mailing the songbooks back and forth. It’s been a fun experience for me learning how he builds his songs and at the same time, training my ear.
I would not have understood the pun in the title of the second album until this week, when I read a newspaper article about his new book.
(For those who aren’t familiar, John Wesley Harding is the stage name of Wesley Stace.)
I understand that Jethro Tull is somewhat anal about writing their music down in some amount of detail. But then I consider them more literate than most rock musicians.
Myself, I’ll write down the parts that I’m likely to forget, or need to work out more mathematically. Sometimes the things I write get pretty complicated. But nothing I write is print-ready for Schirmer. There may be some harmonies scribbled on a scrap of manuscript paper, some chords written on a dirty cocktail napkin, and some song structure notes shaved into the cat. Generally I’m the only one that can decifer any of it.
That’s for my rock stuff. When I scored an opera last year, I was meticulous about everything.
+1
Just have to mention how amazing I think John Wesley Harding is, and how cool it is that you’re getting to work with him, stpauler I’m just getting ready to start his new book Misfortune , but I’ve loved his music since a friend sent me his old tape of one of Wes’s albums probably almost five years ago. His new cd, Adam’s Apple , is quickly becoming one of my favorites.
-Lil
Paul is fond of repeating this anecdote, but he and Lennon would often scribble lyric and chord sheets for their songs, going all the way back to the days when they first started writing together as kids. All they ever really had to memorize was the vocal melody.