So people like Beethoven, Bach and other classical composers wrote symphonies. They wrote and blended parts for the first violins, second violins, triangles, donkeys heehawing and whatnot. Sure some of them may have plagiarised bits, or taken credit for parts written by proteges, but most of their output was self-penned genius.
Then you have acts like the Beatles and Queen, who you know wrote their own music. Right from the guitars to the bass-line to the drums to the woa-woa-wo-type random bits that may be sprinkled throughout.
And then we have singer-songwriters today. John Mayer, Chris Martin, Bon Jovi and so on. I’m guessing they sit down, inspiration strikes and they hammer out the melody on their piano/guitar/ukulele.
My question is, the record label and music production industry being what it is today, normally, how are the side-bits written? The beats, the little sound effects that make songs sound so slick, other instrumental backing, all that stuff. Is a large part of it written by committee? Who are the artists today who put out albums that are at least 90% their own work?
That’s hard to say. Musicians are generally gregarious people and the successful ones collaborate a good deal. Even a singer-songwriter like John Ondrasik who does write his own compositions isn’t above bouncing ideas off his sidemen.
There are probably a significant number of cases where this stuff is simply ad-libbed in the studio.
An example would be the repeating keyboard riff on Kim Carnes’ cover of Jackie DeShannon’s “Bette Davis Eyes”. IIRC, DeShannon’s country-western original was recorded with an acoustic guitar and a piano. Carnes’ version received a whole new instrumentation built around a riff that her keyboardist, Val Garay, was noodling around with. Despite the fact that this keyboard riff makes Carnes’ version of the song so haunting and unique, Garay did not receive any songwriting credits on Carnes’ version – the credits remained with Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon.
AIUI, this is typical in the music industry. The Doper musicians can probably add hundreds more examples.
A lot of singer-songwriters have long-standing backup bands that they keep on board precisely because of the sweeteners they add to the music that the writer hadn’t thought of (or couldn’t pull off on their own). Or they’ll put together bands for a series of projects. James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos for instance
Then again, a songwriter may be paired with a producer who says ‘this song needs this’ and then they’ll bring in a string section to make it so. Or maybe they’ll cut something. I think when Alanis Morisette did Jagged Little pill, producer Glen Ballard pretty much kept to first takes and demos as much as possible and didn’t add a lot of frills.
I think Beck and Prince play most of the instruments in their studio albums.
I don’t think anything has changed in popular music over the decades. There’s nothing different about today. The Beatles did not write their own string parts;I asked a question about thata while back. Paul McCartney does not even read music.
I doubt that the Beatles “wrote” much of their music at all. Pop and rock groups generally do not score the parts, they just put it together in the studio. A guy like Paul McCartney sits at the piano and says, “What d’yer think of this, lads?” and they all just kind of jump in. The product is a blend of the styles of the various musicians. Bands like Chicago with more musically literate backgrounds do score everything (except, of course, the improvised solos).