Open Tunings

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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.
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Lyrics Are Important As Cold Ice Cream

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It's the picture of Italian ice-cream in a sho...

I was in the car on the way home today when I heard a singer/songwriter on the radio sing these lyrics:

I like ice cream when it’s cold
I like old time radio
It’s funny but it’s true
These things I do

The last two lines I’m not exactly sure of the wording, I was trying to remember them because they got me to thinking about writing lyrics and how we need to pay attention to detail.

I’ve been working on music all summer, but not lyrics. I spent the late spring and early summer working on theme music and tracks for one TV series, and all of August on music for another series. I consider myself lucky to have the opportunity to have my music on television, even if in a small way, and even if it doesn’t amount to much of anything money-wise. The biggest bonus for me was that it got me into writing again. Well, I shouldn’t come to any conclusions, I’ve only started on one song, but hey, for somebody who has had nothing but a dry well to draw water from the last three or four years, it’s something!

And that’s why the above lines struck me today. You should read them again before I go on and see if you can spot the inconsistencies.
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New I Like Songs Post

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There’s a new evaluation of the song “A Team” by Ed Sheeran up at the I Like Songs blog.  If you’ve never heard of Ed Sheeran, there’s a video of him performing the song as well.

Ed Sheeran
Ed Sheeran (Photo credit: Man Alive!)

Here’s an excerpt:

“This is a series of five lines that rhyme;  not perfect rhymes on all occasions, but each two syllables long whether they are one word or two.  And on each of those he uses the same two notes, higher than any other note in the song.  Now my rule of thumb has always been to only repeat something three times or it starts to feel like too much, but in this case that rule appears to go out the window.  It just works.”

Check it out!

IJ

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I Like Songs

Posted on by IJ

Well, I do. I like all kinds of songs, old ones, new ones that I discover through my students…all kinds of ’em. Which is why I started a blog just about the songs I like. You can find it here.

Songwriters Circle
Songwriters Circle (Photo credit: AndyRobertsPhotos)

As a songwriter, I quite often find myself listening to a song with a “critical ear”, which isn’t always a good thing! If the song really appeals to me, however, I notice that this critical ear shuts off. Why is that? It’s because the mind has shut off and the emotions have taken over. I don’t care if there is anything wrong with the song from a critical viewpoint, I just love the song.

When you think about all of the songs you’ve fallen in love with over the years (and yes, it’s like falling in love), you notice that any time you hear them again it almost brings back that initial “rush”, just like seeing an old flame. If you stopped for just a second and listened to it as a songwriter and not just a regular listener, you’d probably notice some flaws in it. There are flaws in just about every song, but when you’re crazy about the song, you push all of that aside, just as you look past the flaws of a person you’re in love with.

So I decided that I’d take a look and listen to all of the songs that I’ve really loved (and the ones I’m learning to love) not so much from a critical viewpoint, although there is some of that, but from a music lover’s perspective. I actually started to write those articles for this blog but realized that I didn’t just want to critique, I wanted to listen and enjoy! And that’s how ILikeSongs was born.

I don’t want to spend all of my time listening to songs with a critical ear any more.  I, like the rest of you, fell in love with a whole bunch of songs before I even knew what songwriting was.    So if you’re interested, join me on my other blog, won’t you? 🙂

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