tips

Recording Tips

Posted on by IJ

Introduction

 

Not every songwriter is meant to be a performer, a producer, or an engineer. Many of you would probably go the route of having your songs demoed in a reputable studio, and avoid the frustration of the do-it-yourselfer. Me, I’m just a masochist I guess 🙂

I started out in 1985 with a 4-track recorder, one of the first ones out there designed by Tascam. I had no idea what I was doing, so my husband took the place of engineer, while I just did the playing and singing. Not a good thing for a marriage 🙂 Eventually, I got frustrated with how “slow” he was, and I realized I was just going to have to learn to do it myself! I armed myself with knowledge AND I saved my marriage at the same time.

However, it took a lot of trail and error, mostly error, in order to understand the whole process of getting a song to sound good on tape. Even saying the word “tape” shows you how long I’ve been at it! In the beginning, I had no understanding of the very basics, so my education came from trusting my ear as to what sounded “right”, and though I do know a lot more now, I still tend to fall on that same rule in the present. I trust what sounds right to me. If you ask the question, you will get PLENTY of opinions as to how to set up your studio, which equipment to buy, blah de blah de blah. You’ll get SO MUCH that you will have no idea where to start and who to trust. This series of tips is really designed for an absolute beginner, so the rest of you audio hounds take your know-it-all somewhere else :-)!! Continue reading “Recording Tips”

Ralph Murphy’s Law

Posted on by IJ

Songwriting veteran, Ralph Murphy, recently gave a few eager songwriters some writing tips at his recent talk during ASCAP’s Expo in Hollywood. Here they are:

    • The importance of writing for women: “Women physically buy 50% of all records made — and make men buy the other 50%,” joked Murphy.
    • Seeking feedback from unbiased listeners: “Your friends and family are your worst critics because they love everything you do. Forget you even have a family.”
    • The power of pronouns: “You” is a trigger word that really pulls in the audience and makes the song relatable to them.” Murphy cited Zac Brown Band’s “Keep Me In Mind,” for example. “The first line is: ‘How come all the pretty girls like you are taken baby?'” Murphy highlighted the strategic use of ‘you’ and ‘pretty.’ “It isn’t rocket science you know!”
    • Ease of singing: “All the first songs you grew up loving as a child were easy to sing.”
    • Don’t leave things unexplained: “If you start out a song with ‘Driving through Oklahoma,’ you better address why you are in Oklahoma. Don’t say you have a loaded gun in the car and then never tell the listener what you do with it.”
    • Rhyme scheme as a tool: “Don’t change your chord till you change your thought. Avoid contrived rhymes.”
    • Expectations: Establish the premise of the song early on and fulfill the listener’s expectations. Make the song believable and write for the singer. Don’t write a song about children, for example if the artist you are pitching it to doesn’t have kids. It won’t be believable when they sing it.”
    • Before heading out to do a signing of his “Murphy’s Law of Songwriting” book, Murphy bestowed his “best bets for going forward” upon the crowd, divulging the recipes that would give his students the best chance of selling a hit:
    • Pop song: 100 bpm or more featuring a woman as the artist; an 8 second intro; use the pronoun ‘you’ within 20 seconds of the start of the song; hit the bridge middle 8 between 2 minutes and 2 minutes 30 seconds; average 7 repetitions of the title; create some expectations and fill that expectation in the title.
    • Country: 100bpm or less for a male artist; 14-second intro; uses the pronoun ‘you’ within the first 20 seconds of the intro; has a bridge middle 8 between 2 minutes and 2 minutes 30 seconds; has 7 repetitions of title; creates an expectation, fulfills it in 60 seconds.

Certainly some things to think about, even if you don’t believe in “rules”!

IJ

Enhanced by Zemanta

Happy 2013! Tips From Others

Posted on by IJ

I was flipping through my most recent copy of SOCAN’s Words and Music and found some interesting songwriting tips from Matt Mays, a Canadian songwriter who finds himself on the road quite a bit.  Check out his website.

Here is his list of tips:

1. “One thing that has really helped me is to be moving – whether it’s on a train, boat, or car, or even walking around my apartment while I’m writing, instead of sitting in one spot.”

2. “Try writing lyrics on newspaper.  It rather distracts you because there are other words underneath.  That means yours don’t seem so final.  The words underneath may spark something else too.”

3. “Always change the key up.  Learn the song in other keys, and that helps keep you from getting bored.”

4. “Change instruments.  I’ll go to a ukulele, or piano, or try open tuning.”

5. “There is one tip from John Lennon:  never leave a song until it’s done.  You may never get that spark, that excitement, back.  If you get an idea, finish the song, even if you have to miss your best friend’s funeral.  Finishing that song is more important than anything else.”

Some excellent tips here…some of which I’ve encouraged myself, but some new ideas too.  The newspaper idea is a good one, I’ll have to try that some day!

On a more personal note, I have come back to my old way of writing;  on paper and without any technology (i.e. a computer) around.  This was my “old” way of writing and it seems to be working again.  Also, I’ve moved around the house to write in different places;  not quite the idea of being on a moving train or boat as Matt suggests above.  But changes places seems to have helped me too!

Best wishes to all of my blog followers for the New Year!

IJ

Open Tunings

Posted on by IJ

I recently began to coach a local songwriter on a weekly basis, and he has inadvertently re-introduced me to open tunings on the guitar. He writes some interesting songs, and part of what makes them interesting is his penchant for all kinds of alternate tunings that cause lots of broken strings, but plenty of fascinating compositions! Obviously, this post will apply more to those of you who write on guitar :-).

Joni Mitchell
My favourite open-tuning artist Joni Mitchell

If you’ve never heard of open or alternate tunings, I’ll give you a bit of a run down first. Most of you know that when a guitar is in “standard” tuning, the notes from the 6th string down are E, A, D, G, B and E. The first tuning I will explain is “alternate standard”, which, in most cases, means tuning each string down 1/2 a step or more. The first time I came across this was with the band Nirvana, although I’m sure there were those who did it earlier than they did. Nirvana’s guitars were almost always tuned down 1/2 step, making their songs sound deeper. They were a pain to figure out unless you had your guitar in this alternate standard tuning. This has become a common tuning for a number of bands, mostly in the rock, metal or alternative genre.

Open tunings are a retuning of a guitar to a chord. One of the more common open tunings is to a D chord, where the strings are tuned as followed: 6th becomes D, 5th stays as A, 4th stays as D, 3rd is tuned down to F#, 2nd string is tuned down to A and the first string is tuned down to D. Listing them together, they are D,A,D,F#,A,D. If you look up a D chord, these are those notes contained within that chord.
Continue reading “Open Tunings”

Cool Chords

Posted on by IJ

This is geared mostly towards guitar players, but could still apply in some respects to those of you who write with a keyboard.  Are your chord choices and your chord progressions getting boring?  You might find yourself always turning to the same chords when you’re sitting down to write…and let’s face it, you can probably only sing in certain keys so those chords work for you.

However, they’re not very inspiring after awhile, are they?

Maybe you need to introduce yourself to some new sounding chords, chords that have different extensions (more about that in a minute), but still work for your voice.  There are many, many chords out there, but most of the time we stick to the common chords.  It’s not that common chords are bad, but they are what we know.  I get an awful lot of visitors to one of my articles entitled “Chord Keys” because people aren’t sure what chords sound good together.  In fact, they often use the search terms “what chords sound good together” to find that article!
So if you aren’t sure about chord keys, that’s a good primer.  However, beyond that, why not teach yourself some less common chords.  Chord “extensions” are simply added harmonic notes that change the sound of a chord.  For instance, a basic G chord changed to a Gadd5, gives it a fuller, more majestic (for lack of a better word) sound.  A Gadd5 is fretted like this:

 Gadd5
 -----------
 | | | | | |
 |_|_|_|_|_|
 | 1 | | | |
 |_|_|_|_|_|
 2 | | | 3 4
 |_|_|_|_|_|

Continue reading “Cool Chords”