Meshuggah - The Violent Sleep of Reason

that's pretty interesting, though.

I think that's awesome.  They don't even need to jam.  Just write it, record it, perform it when everyone's good and ready on their own time.  Awesome.

Yeah nothing wrong with it at all, and it shows a totally different approach, just very different from the usual 'rock' band thing. I guess a lot of top tier bands do this to some degree or another, but just insane with their type of music in particular.

It seems fairly typical of prog bands to work like this.. especially where everything is so tightly composed that nothing really comes out of improvisation. Having said that though, it'd be really interesting to hear what they'd sound like if they just jammed, haha.

edit: and it's also interesting that they seem to program their tracks before they learn how to play them. I've been doing this for my new stuff and am worried that I won't be able to play any of the wacky guitar shit I've been programming..

I've been recording as a part of my songwriting process for... 5 years now.  In that time i'm not sure I've written an entire song by just sitting there playing/singing it as I go.  Probably a few exceptions.  Prior to that I used to always write the entire song by sitting down and playing it, no demoing whatsoever.  I find that by recording the song as I go, I refine the melody a lot more, and incorporate bass/drum grooves or second guitar parts as important features to the main composition.  The results are a lot more interesting in general.  Only downside is that I spend a lot of time trying to refigure out how I played everything.  That especially sucks when I'm trying to show the song to another musician, and I'm just going through various chord voicings trying to figure out the exact one from memory.  Pretty stupid.

still meshuggin'