Hello All.
Over the past ten years I have written a few songs every now and again, but for the last few I end up writing a loosly related library of riffs instead of threading together a coherent musical thought. Anyone have some mental tricks or techniques for actual composition as opposed to riffing in the context of death metal?

This is an excellent question, and more bands should put effort into tying everything together to create a narrative based structure. First of all, don't turn your back on the riff, as it is the staple of good metal. Here's a conceptual goal for composing metal: instead of making a riff salad where somewhat random things are strewn together, try to make a riff maze--All the lines that make up a maze are connected.

Here are a few concrete methods to try employing. In my opinion, the best way to achieve these is with a dual guitar approach:

a) Take a good riff, and find the "melody" that it's suggesting, or some voicings that stem from said melody. You can even just take a small segment. Once you've done this, take that stripped down idea, and try introducing some new chords beneath it. Start with power chords. You might be surprised at how many different things work. Now you've got two riffs that are directly related to each other.

b) Move a riff up an octave, and maybe get rid of the tremelo picking or whatever so it's just ringing out. When the notes are higher like this, it makes room for a new tonal center. Now you can write a second guitar part to go underneath, entirely changing the original riff's characteristic.

c) Take a rhythmic phrase from a riff, and make a new riff using just that.

d) Cut a riff in half, and change the drum beat that accompanies it. Or do the same thing, but extend the riff to be twice as long instead.

e) Combine towoexisting riffs, one played on each guitar, and tweak the notes until they synergize in a harmonious way. It's helpful if you have some kind of tablature playback software (like GuitarPro) so you can hear how everything interacts.

The key to all of this is just to use a few central ideas, and milk them for all they got in the coolest ways you can conjure up. Throughout the song, try to make it start in one emotional place, and move the listener to another emotional place, kind of like a journey. If you're open to this idea, I'd be willing to hear some things you've made and give you my thoughts, for whatever it's worth. I hope you make some riff-as-fuck metal.

I had the same problem when I started composing, what worked for me was to just start slow and don't make anything overly complex at the beginning.

The first song I made was just 3 different riffs, where one riff repeated for all the verses and solos, another for the choruses and a variation of the verse for the intro/outro.

My advice would be to keep everything in the same tonal center at the start and not worry too much about key changes for now. You can make a song that is 70% one riff and make that work, and if everything sound too "samey" you can keep the same harmony of the riff but just change the Rhythm (this is specially useful when making a transition to a verse for example, where you need to open up space for the main melody).

Also another thing that helped me was: instead of trying to record the finished arrangement, sit down with only the guitar and try to compose an entire arrangement from intro to outro, when you have all the parts sorta figured out, only then you record a rough sketch. This was specially useful because it takes your mind out of the recording and forces you to focus only in the composing matter. Once you get the hang of it, recording and composing at the same time gets way easier.

I've been writing my first solo album for way too long. It is influenced by Gorguts and Deathspell Omega, and over the past couple years I've only now completed the first 5 minutes. That's a completely different struggle, though.

Just recently I contributed my first song to my more straightforward death metal band, and it was extremely satisfying to finish. I pretty much wrote all the riffs (there's like 3) in a couple weeks, and then made a little note with an idea of how to string them together. I'm gonna try to break it down.

intro that is string scraping with bass behind it (4 times, the same pattern comes back at the very end as a breakdown)
"meat riff" that is a little exploration of some kind of harmonic minor tremolo riff (3 times)
"chorus riff" that uses the notes from meat riff in a less frenetic, more melodic arrangement (only once, because you really want to hear this riff)
"verse riff" 2 times with blast beats, 1 time with slow black metal hihat/kick+snare (this riff builds up heavily in the way it was composed)
bridge-kind-of riff played twice, this is the part where the blasts just let themselves go behind an epic/mean sounding tremolo riff reminiscent of previous riffs, this is the last new riff of the song
back to "chorus riff" twice, because this is where it all comes back around
longform solo over 2 times each of "chorus" and "verse" riff
breakdown that is reprise of beginning pattern

So this song started out as meat riff, chorus riff, and verse riff. Meat riff wasn't a good starting point for the song, so I tried to come up with some sort of build-up/marching snare/bassline as a little exposition. I couldn't find a way to connect the two really, so I just have a natural harmonic for a short bar which does well enough as a transition and kind of rips you from one dimension into another when it kicks in.

Chorus riff, I came up with that in about 5 seconds because all it is is the first few notes of meat riff, just held out on longer tremolo pickings.
It was a natural progression into verse riff, which is a minor/chromatic riff similar to one in Phobophile. The chromatic/minor characteristics those two riffs share is very similar, so it perfectly works out because verse riff has more to it than chorus riff, but they still retain the same idea/feel.
From there, I just repeat chorus riff 4 times, last two times with a solo over it, and the rest of the solo is over 2 repetitions of verse riff.
Solo ends on a huuuuge whammy bar squeal into a "siq breakdown"

I thought I had so much more of the song to write, and I was really beating myself up trying to come up with more little bridge riffs and another full riff or something, but once I programmed it all into guitar pro and timed it it was already 5 minutes long. Overthinking is the bane of me, and when I showed it to the rest of the guys they were more than stoked.

I'm not sure this is any help to you lol, if anything it was help for me by actually explaining to myself how I did it and how things connect and play off each other.

[quote="SuspirianSuspicion"][/quote]
You've got some great ideas here, I actually utilized a couple of them in my aforementioned song. Gonna have to tuck this post away for later....

Thanks everyone for the reply! I do have some completed songs I wrote years ago, however I generally don't really thinks and write. Hopefully I will put these to the test soon!