Once you've developed some technical facility on the guitar, the musical side (which entails theory, harmony, chord structure, ear training, sight-reading, composition and being able to hear chord progressions and licks) comes into play a lot more.
With Audioslave, it's all about melody and chord progressions.
The melodies are always the most important part to me. I am pulled more to the groove than the chord progression. After you find the groove, you find the most simple chord progressions and then sit inside that groove.
These characters were like twelve-bar blues or other chord progressions. Given the basic parameters of Batman, different creators could play very different music.
When I was with the Doobies, the style of music was that we all went over the falls with chord progressions, trying to make things as complex and interconnected as possible.
There's a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.
Sometimes, I actually end up doing three or four different versions of one song, and sometimes, those versions can be done very differently. They can be very laid back, downtempo, or sometimes the same song can be quite uptempo. But it is always the same melody and chord progressions.
Then I began to play. Variations on a G major chord, the most wonderful chord known to mankind, infinitely happy. I could live inside a G major chord, with Grace, if she was willing. Everything uncomplicated and good about me could be summed up by that chord.
It's very much a piece of myself when I write a song. I don't mean to say it's very personal, like the lyrics mean something personal to me. When I write a song, that's my taste in music - my taste in chord progressions and melodies.
I tend to hear rhythm and melody, chord-progressions, long before I hear words.
What I love about lyrics is that they don't have to be very complicated. A good sentence over a great chord with a good melody - all you need is that one moment.
I write my songs many times to chord progressions on a piano. Unfortunately, I can't keep playing the piano, so I just record it into the software.
I think there's something that feels so good about a 1-4-5 chord progression. It's a very standard chord progression, and it just feels good to the ears.
I definitely don't see myself as much of a singer, because my upbringing is really based around the guitar, learning chord progressions and that sort of thing. So the singing aspect of what I do has been a secondary adventure.
The guy who shows up on time, who has a good work ethic, network executives and producers know that. It's a very small industry we work in.
All of our songs take these really big creative turns and twists throughout the process, so sometimes songs will start out as a melody or some musical chord progressions.