Guitar

Music Terminology

Posted on by IJ
Guitar Sheet Music
Image by *persiflage via Flickr

© I.Woloshen

If you don’t play an instrument, or only play by ear…OR you’re new to this whole songwriting thing…here are a few terms you may hear and what they mean. These are just a few musical terms, for songwriting terms, see below.

  • Bar – A piece of music or a song is broken down into sections called bars. If you’ve ever looked at sheet music, the bars are defined by dark vertical lines (hence the term “bars”) and between each bar is a set number of notes. You’ve probably heard the term “4 beats to the bar”. Bars help to define how long chords or notes are played (i.e. two bars of G).
  • Time Signature – This defines how many beats there are to a bar, and the value of each one. 3/4 time is recognizable as a waltz-type feel (ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three). The most common time is 4/4…in fact, it’s even CALLED Common Time!
  • Lead Sheet – This is a very basic kind of sheet music. Most lead sheets have only the bars written out and the chords within the bars and some simple notes. This is often used when you go into the record, and is used by each musician to follow along. Lead sheets don’t necessarily have lyrics written on them, although some do.
  • Sharp/Flat – You’ve probably heard the reference to singing “flat”…this means that you’re singing just a little lower than the note should be. Singing sharp means it’s a little too high. I won’t go into the theory of sharps and flats, but it helps to be able to identify which is which!
  • Octave – a standard scale has 7 notes (not including all of the sharps and flats) before it reaches the same note higher up…think of Doe Re Mi Fa So La Ti Doe…both “Doe” ‘s are the same note, but the second one is an OCTAVE higher than the first.
  • Vocal – the voice! There are “lead” vocals which is basically the singer singing the melody, and there are background vocals, singing harmony, etc.
  • Lead or instrumental – Sometimes in a song there is a section where an instrument plays for a few bars before the vocal starts again…this is called a lead or an instrumental section.
  • Fills – These are little bits of music that are often played by a lead instrument to “fill” in a space on a recording or performance. When you ask a guitar player to play some fills, he/she will usually weave some notes in and around the melody or vocal, just to add a little flavour.
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Performance Tips

Posted on by IJ
Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest
Image by bfest4 via Flickr, Joe Cocker

© I.Woloshen

I was in Grade 5 when I first performed in front of a big audience…in the school gymnasium at Christmas for parents, teachers and students. I was picked in an audition to perform half of the Christmas song “Good King Wenceslas“. I’m not sure why the teacher had two of us share the song…I was ready to do the whole thing myself! It was a definite highlight of my childhood…the first time I heard that applause, I was hooked! It wasn’t until I was older that I began to deal with things like performance anxiety (more of that later), or consider the idea of how I was presenting my material. These days, I’m very conscious of the connection I make with an audience, and the way the songs come across.

I have performed at many open mics over the years, and I find them to be the most difficult performances! There is no time to warm up…sometimes a song or two is what you need to get comfortable with where you are, but then it’s over! If it’s an open mic that I haven’t performed at before, that makes it worse! So many things can affect the performance…the people there, the sound system, if there is one, the room itself, and the other performances ahead of you. Over time, I’ve managed to make a mental list for myself of the things I have to remember when I’m playing, and the things I watch for in others:

1. EYE CONTACT – When I watch a performer with his/her head bowed down staring at the guitar or the floor, I feel disconnected from them. Not only that, but their nervous behaviour distracts me, makes me feel sorry for them, and I don’t listen to the song! Some performers say that they can better focus on the song if they keep their eyes closed the whole time…but what about the people you’re playing to? A performance is literally an exchange of energy between the performer and the audience…if you cut the audience off, they have nothing to return to you! If you find it difficult to look at someone, there are two things you can do. You can either look for the person who is most obviously enjoying your performance and feed off of them, or you can make a person up! Just look out there as if you were looking at someone who was smiling at you, and smile back! I do this all the time, especially if I’m in a situation where there isn’t much of an audience, or I’m in a room where no one is really listening.

I’ve sung at two funeral services…just less than 20 years apart. I was 20 years old at the first service. I had trouble looking at the family who was sitting in the front row, so I stared blankly at a window at the back of the church. I felt my performance was disastrous and underwhelming…my nervousness was more prominent than my song! The second one, I made a conscious decision to look straight at the audience, right into their eyes, and connect the song with each one of them. I was given so many smiles, mixed with tears of course, but it was a beautiful, and ultimately uplifting, experience!

2. ENUNCIATION – You may be a “music” person, not as concerned with getting your lyrics across, but you’d be surprised to know just how many people LOVE lyrics! When the mouth is dry and the brain muddy with terror, even the most wonderful lyrics can be reduced to an unintelligible mumble. Before you even GET to that open mic, practice EXAGGERATING your lyrics when you sing them. Hit every consonant hard, open your mouth WIDE. At first, it’ll feel pretty silly, but it will keep you conscious of getting your message across. When you want someone to hear what you’re saying when you are speaking to them, you make your voice a little louder, look straight at them and enunciate. Think of the same thing when you’re singing.

3. DYNAMICS – If you’re a guitar player, you’re likely to pound away at the strings when you’re nervous, completely dominating your vocal. Practice doing this: when you’re playing the parts of the song when you’re not singing, let yourself pound. When you ARE singing, pull the guitar way back, soften it up, make it weave around your lyrics. Not only will it help your lyrics stand out…it will create quite a dramatic effect to your performance! Try it out!

4. EMOTE – If you’re singing a happy song, remember what your kindergarten teacher said the first time you sang in front of your parents at a school event. SMILE!! If the song is more somber, don’t smile! Nothing more confusing than dark lyrics and a grin. They’ll think you’re on a weekend pass… Performing is very much like acting. You certainly need to “be yourself”, but you are also emoting and re-creating the topic of the song to your audience every time you perform it. Listen to the words as you’re singing them, and try to remember where they came from when you wrote that song!

5. ENERGY – I was told once by my music teacher that I moved too much when I sang. She told me it was distracting. Most of it was, of course, nervous energy. If you move around like Joe Cocker, you’re likely to distract from your song (unless you ARE Joe Cocker, in which case you can do whatever you like :-). But, having said that, music is a full body experience! Sitting or standing with your body as stiff as a board translates into negative vibes for your audience. Move around a little and that will help you relax and also release some of that nervous energy. As Gino Vannelli said: You gotta move 🙂

6. BANTER – If there is a little story behind your song, tell it. Practice ahead of time just so you get the story straight! Two don’ts: Don’t tell the whole story, let the song say most of it. And don’t go on and on, umming and ahhing and losing your focus. But a little chatter between songs gives the audience a chance to connect with you on another level. It endears you to them beyond the songs. One of my most successful banters is when I talk about the nature of the bald eagle before I sing my song “Eagles Eyes”. People love to hear some of the facts behind this amazing creature. It relates to, but doesn’t give away the topic of the song. And almost every time I do that, someone will come up to me after and mention it!

7. GRACIOUSNESS – When you receive applause it is the greatest gift, so stay for a moment and soak it in! I remember a telethon I did once, where right after my two songs, I turned to run off stage. The host at the time was a VJ at MuchMusic here in Canada. She got a hold of me and made me hang around a bit…she asked me a few questions on air, and said “They’re applauding you! Enjoy it!” I’m sure it was my own nervousness that inspired the desire to turn and run…but what I was also doing was, in fact, snubbing the audience by not acknowledging their applause. I don’t “milk it” now, but I do allow myself and the audience a chance to enjoy those few moments! What else do we do it for?

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Putting Music with Lyrics

Posted on by IJ

Here’s an email I recently received:

“Dear Irene,

I play guitar (lefty), just started, and i find it sometimes abit hard to get songs i like (like, by famous people, from the radio, whatever) abit hard to play, because i can’t get the exact tune. So i wanted to start writing my own songs. So i sat down to write some, and i couldn’t. i mean, i wrote a couple, but i can’t seem to accompany my voice (which isn’t very good) with my guitar. i like chords more than notes, so i just go through all the chords i know, just the main ones, and try to fit it together. Anyway, the whole point of me writing, is to say thankyou, you’ve helped me quite abit. But could you please put abit more about putting music with lyrics.”

I began writing songs for the same reason you did…I couldn’t play my favourite radio hits! In fact, over the years I’ve met many songwriters who started for the same reason.

When I was in Grade 12, I was given the opportunity to write some music to several poems in the play “Through The Looking Glass”. The idea was that I would play and sing them during the performance with the cast…I was put up in a loft at the back of the stage with a sound system. But the first REAL challenge was writing the music. I had always come from a “music first” place in my songwriting, and never before had tried it the other way around, so when I first sat down with all of these strange poems, I had no idea where to start. After succeeding with one of them, the others came more easily. Here’s what I learned, and what I use to this day…maybe some of it will help you:

1. A song lyric should have a built in rhythm, or “meter”….which means when you read it out loud, you can sense a beat to the words. This will help you to establish the time signature…4/4 is most common, four beats to the bar. Simply speaking, the strum pattern on your guitar should reflect this time signature.

2. Before you even establish the chords, you need to find a melody that matches the lyrics. Don’t go near any instruments until you’ve tried just singing the lyrics accapella (without accompaniment) and found a melody. This takes practice! Look at the structure of the verses…how many lines are there? Are the lines the same length of syllables, or are they different? If you’ve got an even number of lines, say 4 or 6, try singing one melody for the first line, and then another for the second…repeat the first melody for the 3rd line and the second melody for the 4th…see how that feels. Keep it simple. When you get to the chorus, that should be a different melody. Try singing it higher up…the chorus is a kind of climax, if you will, so it needs to be more dramatic in some way. Raising the melody at the chorus is one way of achieving that. If there is a bridge…sing that differently too. Essentially, each part of the song has its own mini-melody, but they all fit together. Creating a great melody is not achieved instantly! Well, not in most cases anyway 🙂

3. Let’s assume you’ve found a melody…now what are the chords? There are several ways you can go about this, most of them take time! First of all, you can randomly look for a chord that “fits” what you’re singing. Knowing a little bit about chords will take you a long way. Is it a sad song? Should the chords be minor chords, or is it upbeat? Do you hear chords around it already in your head when you sing the melody? If you play guitar and have a capo, use that as a means of getting into a key that suits your voice and the melody…you don’t have to play barre chords or fancy progressions, just use the capo up the neck until you find something that’s close. Get yourself a chord book and find out what chords are in a key…which chords go together, in other words. Try out some of the other chords in the key you decide on.

4. When should a chord change? This is where your “ear” really comes in handy. When you listen to a song on the radio, can you hear when the chord changes? If you can, you’re already half way there. Start out simply, by playing one chord all the way through the first verse, let’s call it “Chord 1″…when you hear that the melody doesn’t “fit” that chord, that’s where you should change chords! Okay, so now you need to find “Chord 2″…look in your chord book at all of the chords associated with and in the same key as “Chord 1″…and try them each out. Most likely, one of them will fit. So now we have “Chord 1” and “Chord 2”. Maybe your verse looks like this:

Chord 1
La, la, da da da, la, la, la

Chord 2
La, da da, la, da da

Is the rest of the verse repeating these phrases? Or are they different somehow? If they are the same, use the same two chords again. If they’re not, try another “associated” chord, or a chord in the same key. Now maybe you’re getting a feel to your song. Use the same process for the chorus, if you have a chorus, and the bridge, if there is one.

That is a beginner’s approach to writing melodies/chords to lyrics…remember to keep it simple! And when it gets “boring”, make a change! No one can write those melodies for you, it is something you learn to develop in yourself over time and with much patience (and sometimes none 🙂 Good luck!

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Tools Of The Trade

Posted on by IJ

© I.Woloshen

I remember the first time I began to put together my little basement office. I had all of the major pieces…the desk the chair, the computer…but I was missing the little things. So it was with great delight that I made my list and ran off to the local Office Depot to find paper clips and pens and post-its to add to my collection of office supplies. I kept all the receipts for tax time and placed everything in neat little places, easily retrievable.

Nowadays, my office is a disaster area. I could care less about having an “In Tray”, there are piles of correspondence, lyric sheets, magazines, cheques and bills everywhere. Okay, so I’m not perfect.

There are some things that I can’t do without, however…I need them near me at all times, especially my songwriting “tools”!

1. First and foremost…lots of paper and pens! I keep a big red 3-ring binder with a thick supply of new lined paper in it…when I get in the lyric-writing mode, I don’t have to go far to find it, and a constant supply of pens too. I keep everything I write, which means for boxes of sheets of paper. I have some of the song lyrics I wrote when I was 15 years old! When the binder gets too full, I pull out the used papers, stick them all in a box, and refill the binder with more paper. I have at least 5 pens in various places, all within reach in case of a sudden brilliant idea :-), and usually a box of them in my desk somewhere.

2. I also keep a Hook Book, although I didn’t call it that until some other songwriters I know referred to it that way. A hook book is a small pad, essentially, that I carry with me whenever I’m away from home. Those ferry rides between Vancouver Island and the mainland are places when a line will just hit me. A must have!

3. I have a micro-cassette recorder that has saved a song more times that I care to remember. I’ve been lazy enough to assume that I’m going to remember something and two minutes later it’s gone! That recorder has tons of bits and pieces of music on it. I remember running off to the bathroom at work once, humming something into it. I’ve also gotten up in the middle of the night a few times, running downstairs to hum something into it. Once a few months back, I had to come up with a theme for a TV show and I was stuck! I decided to go for a walk and took the recorder with me, and sure enough, within a few blocks I had an idea. Just a quick glance around to see if anyone was looking…then I hummed it into the recorder and finished my walk with a smile on my face!

4. Probably the tool I’ve had the longest, as soon as I figured out how to use one, was a thesaurus. Undeniably, many songs would never have been finished without it. Sometimes I just have an essence of a thought or feeling I want to express and by looking up different words that come close to it, I will usually either find what I’m looking for, or get another idea as I’m searching. Even when I’m not stuck on anything in particular, I’ll look through it sometimes and get ideas…

5. Which brings me to the dictionary…nothing is more depressing than to figure out you’ve used a word the wrong way! Or, heaven forbid, sent a lyric sheet out with something and misspelled a word! Of course, if you’ve been using a word processor, there’s always spell check these days. But again, the process of just looking through a dictionary can bring you to places you’ve never thought of going, lyrically, before.

6. I don’t buy a lot of CD’s, but I do tend to listen over and over to the ones I do buy. If I’m enthralled with an artist or a song, I’ll obsess on it! And when I’m stuck for creative ideas, especially musically, my listening repertoire will always inspire.

7. Guitars…I have three of them, and a bass. Sometimes just changing guitars, going from acoustic to electric, or to my little Yamaha classical, will turn a song around for me. I will play my songs differently on different guitars! When it comes to arranging a song for recording, this can come in really handy! I want more guitars. Waahhh!!!

8. The Internet…so why the heck would I call that a tool? I can’t tell you how much the people I’ve met and the websites and newsgroups I’ve visited have inspired and encouraged me as a songwriter. The internet literally brought me out of the closet…you’d think that the opposite would have happened, but not for me! My website has attracted many songwriters over the last 4 years and because of it, my songs have had more exposure than I could ever imagine! BUT…the major boost for me has come from other writers. When you are flat up against a wall creatively speaking, chatting with another songwriter can ease it away. Someone who knows what you’re going through can help you get past anything that might be in your way. Your best friend can only stare at you helplessly, but another songwriter…that’s another story!

Okay, so there’s my small list. You might wonder why I don’t list songwriting books…I have only one! Songwriting books make me THINK too much. And for me, thinking can be a total disaster when I’m trying to write! Think about it :-)…then again, maybe you shouldn’t.

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Step By Step

Posted on by IJ

© I.Woloshen

This is a more recent song lyric that was born from one line that hit me in the car (don’t worry, I wasn’t hurt 🙂 )on the way home from dropping the kids off at school.

I thought it might be an interesting thing to take you through the process I went through in creating this lyric. I have mentioned before that usually my songs come from a “music first” place, but in the last couple of years, I’ve noticed a tendency to come up with a line and melody at once.

I saw a man that I’ve seen many times, walking down the street. I don’t know him personally, but when I look at him, he reminds me of someone…

“There is a man who looks like Truman Capote“

That was the line…now I had no idea where the song was going to go, I had only that line! What on earth was this song going to be about? Some people start with a central idea or theme…these days, I tend to write the first line and then try to build a song from there.

So I recorded it into my trusty micro-cassette recorder, and left it for awhile. Later, I pulled it out, along with my guitar, and started playing around with it. The melody had come at the same time, so I picked a chord and a key and let the words kind of come out as I was creating the melody.

Okay. There is a man who looks like Truman Capote…I thought I’d give a bit of a description next:

There is a man who looks like Truman Capote
He wears a slanted smile and a wide-brimmed hat
A little pigeon-toed, a lot eccentric
He gets a kick out of what he’s smiling at
And as I pass him on the street I wonder
What it is he’d have to say…

But what’s the song about? At this point, I remembered something my Dad talked about once…how he always remembered the “characters” that were around when he was a kid: characters who had idiosynchracies or looked or spoke a little strangely whom he never forgot.

This made me think about another older woman who we buy pumpkins from every year…she has an old house and some property and it’s become our tradition to always buy our hallowe’en pumpkins from her:

There is a woman, must be in her nineties
She sells her pumpkins every Hallowe’en
She’s all bent over with the weight of something
But every year, her crop’s the best I’ve seen
And as she prices out the one I’ve chosen
I wonder what she’d have to say

Now it seemed was the right time for a chorus…as it turns out, I wrote a melody and a different chord progression, but no lyrics! I just hummed a melody. Now, that’s not very conventional…but somehow or other, it works. If it feels good, do it 🙂

So did I just want to write about characters? I could probably think of others, but at this point, I decided to take a different direction:

A friend of mine who rides the bus on weekdays
With sixty travelers she’ll never know
She looks at every one and writes their story
To entertain herself when the ride is slow
If she saw Truman and the Pumpkin Lady
She’d know just what they had to say….

All of these people are real people…there really is a friend who does this…I always thought it was an interesting way to pass the time on a bus! It just goes to show that little bits and pieces of ideas and thoughts can stay with you and come in handy in your songwriting sometimes. And it gave me the title of the song…again, not very conventional, because there’s no lyrical chorus, which is where the title is more commonly found. So I decided at this point to call the song “Truman and the Pumpkin Lady”. Kind of unusual :-). Now I needed to finish the song…how do I tie all of these thoughts together? This is what I came up with:

And as we reach our final earthly hours
Looking back at what our lives have been
It will appear as though a giant weaving
Of every person, place, and time we’ve seen
And maybe someone will pass by and wonder
What it is we’d have to say…

Then I finished with humming that chorus again…a kind of wistful exit to a wistful lyric. One point I’d like to make is that I wrote it all in the present tense…this is intentional. If I had written it in past tense, it would have had less impact. There is an immediacy to the present tense that works very well with this type of lyric.

Of course, the verses didn’t come out all that easily and just as I’ve shown them here…they went through two or three drafts first. And is the song finished? I dunno!! But that’s the story of how it got this far.

***Update*** I finally broke down and wrote lyrics to the chorus…in fact I changed the chorus melody altogether. Why? Because I felt it was missing a summation, outside of the repetition of the line at the end of each verse. Here it is:

Don’t be unkind
Live a simple life
Laugh at yourself sometimes
Look at me now
You’ll be here someday
So love a little bit along the way

When I was in my teens I bought my step-grandmother a little wall plaque, that said “Live, Laugh and Love”. She thought it represented exactly what she believed. So there you go.

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