Songwriter

Be Careful Out There

Posted on by IJ

I was recently contacted by a songwriter who had himself contacted an online Nashville-based company after he saw an ad for them on a music website.  When I checked it out, I saw that this company’s website was pretty straight-forward:  “We find songs for…” and then it proceeded to list a whole bunch of big name country artists.  So they were either a song publisher or song plugging company.  Below the long list of artists, there were three buttons.  The first button was supposed to be a FAQ, but the questions represented weren’t anything like “who we are and what we do”.  No, instead they included questions like “Do my words need to be perfect when I send them to you?” ,  “How long should my song be?” and “Do I need to copyright my songs before I send them to you?”.  All of their answers to these questions raised red flags for me.

The first question was “Do my words need to be perfect when I send them to you?”…any legitimate song publisher or songplugger WANTS A “PERFECT” SONG to pitch.  They don’t want to listen through a bunch of mediocre songs…which is why it is so hard to get that publishing deal in the first place.  Most song publishers listen to about the first :10 or :15 seconds of a song before they decide to turn it off or not.  But what did this company’s website say?  “No.  All songs start with a good idea and that’s all we need.”  Right away, this should tell you that they are taking anything that gets sent their way.  Why?  I’ll get to that in a minute.

Second question:  “How long should my song be?”  Now, that’s a rather odd question to put in a FAQ, but nevertheless, they have an answer for that one too!  Their answer is:  “A commercial song…usually has about 24 lines, but may vary.”  This reminds me of an old scam artist/self-proclaimed “hit” writer that I came across a number of years ago on the web.  He actually had it calculated down to the number of syllables in a line!  If you have this many syllables, your song could be a hit!  But all you have to do is check out a bunch of hit songs from anywhere, anytime, to see that numbers of lines and syllables is NOT the most important aspect of being a “hit”, nor is a certain number of them a prerequisite.  Another red flag.

Third question:  “Do I need to copyright my songs before I send them to you?”  Their answer?  No.  That was the biggest red flag for me.  Now, practically speaking, a lot of pro writers do not copyright their songs until they get picked up by an artist.  But they know who they’re dealing with, and they already have a name for themselves.  They are not you, the first time songwriter trying to get your songs to a publisher.  Technically, a copyright ‘exists’ when you finish writing a song.  You always put the copyright symbol on anything you send out.  And if you are really hot on that song, you register a legal copyright first before sending it anywhere.  No question.

Okay, let’s get back to that Nashville company website.  Remember I told you that I’d explain why they would take anything that is sent to them?  Well, this will tell you. The next button says “Read what songwriters are saying about [us].”  I read all of the quotes and every one of them was about the recording of the songwriter’s song.  For example:   “Thank you for making a great recording of my song. You are special people who make a difference.”  None of the quotes had anything to do with getting a song placed, pitching it to artists or getting on the radio, or anything else.  All they want is for you to pay them money to record your song.

When the songwriter who contacted me sent me a copy of the contract, my suspicions were confirmed.  This was all about paying money to get a song recorded.  And not only that, but you get a bonus of $30,000 when you get a number 1 hit!  Wow, so now, let me see…somehow getting a recording of your song done by them, which you pay them for, could be a number 1 hit??  How might that happen?   That’s the other ‘service’ they provide…they’ll send your song to a bunch of radio stations on a compilation CD!  That’s how it will become a hit.  It’s just that you have to pay for being on the compilation CD too.  Oh well, chump change compared to that $30,000 you’re going to make, right?  They’re going to send it out to hundreds of radio stations!  But here’s the twist:  most radio stations pay absolutely no attention to these compilation CDs.  The only CDs they will listen to come from legitimate and big name record labels.  I know…I worked at a radio station.  The CD your song is on gets filed under “G” for garbage.

The ‘contract’ that was sent to this songwriter was, in fact, a glorified invoice.  Please pay us $500+ dollars.  Oh, and your song could be a hit.

Don’t feel stupid if this has happened to you or if it does in the future.  It has happened to many, many songwriters over the years.  Heck, I still get an annual post card from a “big time” producer, gushing about my song (and he always gets the title wrong) and how he can make it a big hit for me down in Nashville.  I’ve received a post card every year for about ten years, and that’s not exaggerating.   I probably sent the song out there to a few places years ago and that’s how he got my address.  I laugh, but then I wonder how many others he does this to every year, and how many of them fall for it just because they really believe in their songs and want it to be true.

These guys are nothing but scam artists pulling at your heartstrings.

If you have any questions about any publishers or song pluggers, send them to me.  I am not a lawyer so if you get a big, long contract with a bunch of legalize in it, I won’t be able to decipher it much more than you will.  However, if it’s anything like the contract this songwriter sent me to look at, I can tell you right away if it’s a scam or not!

In the meantime, be careful out there.

IJ

PS…I occasionally receive emails from so-called song pluggers or people who want to collaborate and who claim they have written hits for certain artists, etc.   I usually research them first to see if they are legitimate by simply searching for their names in the ASCAP and BMI databases (or check with the PRO from whatever country they reside in).  If I can’t find their names registered anywhere, I’ll simply reply to their email and ask them what name they register their songs under.  If they are legitimate, they’ll tell you, if they don’t answer back, you’ve learned that either they are scammers or that they are not willing to share their info, which makes them highly suspicious.  As I always say, arm yourself with knowledge! ~ IJ

Songwriting Without An Instrument

Posted on by IJ

Recently someone commented on one of my blogs that they would like to know how to write a song without an instrument.  You would think that because there is music involved, it would be next to impossible to write a song without any musical “ability”. If you are overwhelmed with the idea of learning an instrument, the fact is that many of us assume that we are supposed to become some kind of virtuoso on it which, as a guitar teacher, I can tell you is not true! Most guitar teachers can tell you that.

The Cmaj chord in guitar, with bass in G
Image via Wikipedia

Even if we are not singers, we can all hum.  And if you’ve been around music all of your life, as most of us have, you’ve probably found yourself humming along or singing along with your favourite songs.  If you already have some lyrics written, free yourself from your musical inhibitions by “singing” them in some sort of way that gives you a feel for the meter (rhythm) of them.  Don’t worry whether or not it is GOOD, just do it!  See if you can’t find some kind of melody that matches the meter and then just keep experimenting.  You might find that you “hear” certain melodies with certain lines and not with others.  That could mean that you just haven’t found it yet, or it could mean that the lines with no melodies just aren’t working.  So keep working at it, change the lines or mess around with another melody…just keep trying.  The more you liberate yourself from feeling like you CAN’T do it, the less inhibited you will become.

If you are overwhelmed with the idea of learning an instrument, the fact is that many of us assume that we are supposed to become some kind of virtuoso on it which, as a guitar teacher, I can tell you is not true!  Most people learn an adequate number of chords within a few weeks or months, for instance, to be able to play a good selection of songs that they like.  The fact is that many songs are rather simple in their chord progressions (a chord progression is a series of chords), and so they can be learned fairly easily.  So you can probably learn enough chords in a couple of months to start trying to match them to your lyrics.


 

As a songwriter, you don’t have to be a master of an instrument to adequately come up with some chords to your song.  So what I am advocating first is that you could pick up a guitar or sit at a piano and fool around with it by ear so that you can familiarize yourself with finding little melodies on it.  It doesn’t have to be a massive undertaking, just a simple way of getting to know the instrument so that you can feel comfortable with it.  Then if you feel ready, you can find some resources to show you how to play some simple chords, and then take it from there.

Your other option is to find someone who CAN play, and who can help you find chords and melodies.  This might take some doing, but then again, there could be someone in your own backyard or circle of friends who already plays and might be willing to experiment with your lyrics.  You can either give the lyrics entirely up to them, or you can sit with them and try to come up with some ideas together.

A third option would be to invest in some kind of software like Band-In-A-Box which is a clever computer software program that you can create backing tracks (music) to your melodies or lyrics with little effort.  You can play with chords without knowing which chords go together, and you can pick styles and instruments, again, without knowing much about them, and still come up with a decent sounding “band” to sing your songs along with.

I was at a songwriting retreat once where one of the participants in my little group didn’t play an instrument at all.  Somehow she had found someone to come up with chords to her melodies, so when it was her turn to perform one of her songs, she just gave the chords to someone who could play guitar and she sang along with him.  I admired her for her dedication to songwriting even though she had never learned an instrument.  And you don’t have to be limited either!

Now I know that some of you out there reading this blog might have suggestions of your own, so if you do, please add them below!  Comments and replies always welcome :-).

IJ

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Nothing To Write About?

Posted on by IJ



In another article called Songwriting Topics I went through a myriad of things you can do to inspire yourself in terms of what to write about (what?  you don’t have anything to write about? :-)), and most of them were the obvious such as using your own life experiences or those of others.

Cliffs of Moher – Edge of the World
Image by janusz l via Flickr

But what if you are bone dry in terms of ideas?  Where else can you get them?

I’ll focus on a few places on the web that might help you get some ideas.  In fact, you might learn to get really creative about being creative!  The web is an excellent way to get ideas if you know how to use it and what’s out there.


Interestingly enough, as I’m writing this blog I’m looking at something called Zemanta.  Zemanta is essentially a media and article/information gallery that you can use as a plugin in Firefox or in a WordPress blog like I have.   You can try it out on the demo page on their website.  Type anything in the text box and Zemanta will come up with images, articles, links and tags relating to whatever you’ve typed.  It’s a pretty clever little tool.

Which brings me to another idea.  Pictures can be really inspirational sometimes, especially photographs.  If you go to a website like Photography.com, you can browse through hundreds of stock photos;  pick a subject like flowers or landscapes and see what you can come up with.  I often peruse a website called BOOOOOOOM! which has photography, but also art and sometimes even videos, all in blog form.  It’s a very cool site to look through even if you’re not looking for something to write about :-).

Okay, but what if you’re looking for musical inspiration?  Aside from listening to other songs, where else can you get some musical ideas?

A few months back I found a really neat little site called Jam Studio where you can literally create a whole music bed right on the site.  It leads you through entering some chords and picking some instruments, including drums, bass, guitar and piano and even a “feel” or genre like country or rock.  Then voila!  You can create a whole song in any key and come up with all kinds of ideas!  Try it out.

And last, but not least, I wrote an article for the Muse’s Muse awhile back where I featured an NPR series called “Project Song“.  The whole idea is that an artist or band is given a set of photos and words to choose from, and is given two days in a studio to come up with a song representing them.  It is a very interesting premise and on the Project Song website you can watch a video showing how songwriter Nellie McKay came up with her song “Cavendish” using the tools at hand.

You might do the same for yourself…take a random photo from one of the websites I recommended and go to a dictionary and pick out a word or two and see what you can come up with!

In fact, I’m thinking of coming up with a songwriting challenge to do exactly that.  Keep your eye on this blog in the coming weeks…!

IJ

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What Fred Taught Me

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I started writing songs when I was about 12, but it wasn’t until I was almost 20 that I took my first songwriting workshop. It was an 8 week course, facilitated by a fellow named Fred Booker. Fred was a real character and a great teacher, who was born in Chicagoand ended up living in Canada for reasons I never quite figured out. He would teach songwriting classes at Douglas College in Vancouver, but he also traveled and performed constantly, applying for arts grants to record and tour. So he pretty much made his living from music, not an easy thing to do at any time!

Fred Booker
Fred Booker

His style of writing was very blues-influenced with a smidgen of folk, totally character-driven and very entertaining. In the course he talked about exploring the guitar and doing different things with it without getting too much into theory, which was just what I needed and something I still remember. Sometimes he would sit in front of the class, clasping his head in his hands, looking for the right words to make his point, and then he’d deliver this compelling and passionate monologue on some aspect of songwriting that would mesmerize me. Yes! I knew EXACTLY what he meant! And there was a word for the technique, and others did the same thing too! Fred’s course introduced me to the lingo that described what I had always done instinctually, without labels or any thought to what I was actually doing. I knew what a verse and a chorus were, but what I didn’t have names for were things like “tension” and “contrast” and “dynamics”. I was so thrilled to listen to someone speak in my language and put words to my efforts.



At the risk of sounding like a prima donna, I was one of the stronger songwriters in that class. I was not very good when I think of it now, but most of my classmates were less experienced than I was. I was also the biggest chicken. When it came to introducing a new song to the class, which we each had to do at least once over the 8 week period, I was tortured with nerves, and on the night of the very last class where we each had to perform a song, I didn’t show up. What a coward, eh? 🙂 And here I am many years later, writing articles about songwriting for newer inductees, thinking about what Fred taught me and realizing how important it was for me to understand the mechanics of writing, not just the inspiration behind it. Being inspired is one thing; just letting it all spill out in one big blob of emotion and getting it out of your system.

But the craft is something entirely different…sometimes I think the crafting of a song is where true inspiration kicks in, because you have to mull it over and over and find some way of tying everything together, which takes so much time and patience…and ultimately talent! What Fred taught me was to THINK about what I was saying, to push my musical and lyrical boundaries and most importantly to enjoy the process. He made me think of myself as a songwriter, not just a person who happens to write songs.

What’s the difference? I think your attitude about yourself and your purpose changes when you take your craft more seriously…I don’t mean that you become an arrogant snit; in fact there is something humbling in the recognition that you can do something that really affects people. Not everyone hits the point in their songwriting where they want to take it outside the bedroom (or wherever they write!) into the rest of the world. Some never desire more from it than a way to entertain themselves, and so it should be. But some of us feel that nagging or yearning for others to hear what we’ve created.And even though I was a coward at the time, I realized the importance of making my message clear, and I took that new understanding and still carry it with me.

Fred came to see me perform at a place called the Soft Rock Café in a Vancouver neighbourhood called Kitsilano months after that last class . He came up to me afterwards and commented on one particular song where I had done some of that exploration of the guitar neck that he had spoken about. I knew he had been listening with a critical ear the whole evening, and it made me nervous, so I was very pleased to get a positive response. Not long after that, when I joined a band along with another fellow who had also taken Fred’s class, Fred came to visit us one night and we enthusiastically discussed songwriting for hours. It was a heady time. And then I lost touch with him.

Recently, I tried to find some trace of him, using the internet of course 🙂 I found a link to a book of poetry where one of the contributors was a guy named Fred Booker, but not much else. I still have his album “On The Road”, autographed, of course, and my guess is that Fred is probably still out there creating something, whether it’s a song or a poem, still thinking about the process and maybe even still teaching, who knows? I never had the chance to thank him for all that he gave me, so I’ll do it now. Thank you, Fred! What a great teacher you are!

[PS…this was an old article written perhaps five or six years ago that I recently decided to dust off and re-post. Just for fun I thought I’d look for Fred again too, and to my surprise I found him!  He had recently written a book called “Adventures in Debt Collection” and was still living in the Vancouver area.  I also found a picture of him, posted above.  As I researched more into his book, however, much to my sorrow I discovered that Fred passed away in 2008 at the age of 69.  I’m very sorry I never had the chance to thank him for his enthusiasm and inspiration.  I found him and lost him again in the same day…there must be a song in that…IJ]

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The Use of Contrast in Songwriting

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Contrast, as defined in the dictionary, is: To set in opposition in order to show or emphasize differences. Black and white are two contrasting “shades” (they’re not colours!) and can be used as a visual way to describe contrast in songwriting.

Black and White "Model" Cupcakes
Image by clevercupcakes via Flickr


When you’re first writing a song (and I ALWAYS emphasize this!), you are not thinking about technique or creating dynamics, tension or contrast…you are simply expressing something in its raw form. Many songwriters never get beyond this raw state, never develop their writing or learn to polish their songs, and the lack of contrast is often a result. If absolutely everything in a room was white, how boring would that be? This is what songwriters who are just starting out don’t necessarily recognize in their own songwriting.


So what exactly IS contrast in songwriting? Well, it can be achieved in different ways. If your song has verses and a chorus, contrast may be created between those song parts. For example, the verses might have a melody in a lower range, and the chorus in a higher range. Another way to achieve contrast would be a different chord progression in the chorus as compared to the verse. It can be a subtle as starting the chorus with a different chord than the verses start with. Contrast doesn’t have to be “in your face”, it simply creates a feeling of freshness between the parts of a song. A bridge can be a really effective contrast. You’ve set your listener up, starting them off with a verse and chorus, another verse and chorus, and now you want to give them a breather, so you create a bridge.

So, melody and chord progressions can be used to create contrast, what about lyrics?  The most subtle lyrical contrast would be in terms of the subject by changing the point of view or creating a different idea (but not too different!) between two parts of a song.  A very simple example would be where the verses are in the first and second person (I, me, my and you), and the chorus being in the third person (she, he, they).

But a broader and more effective contrast would be to actually change the form of the song by changing the rhyme scheme or the length of lines and the meter.  You see this happening most of the time between a verse and a chorus;  the verse has its own rhyme scheme and meter and the chorus changes to another set.

Contrast can also be created in the production of the song where the instrumentation changes between different parts.  This has less to do with the songwriting, but if your song is missing some contrast or the contrast is not strong enough, adding or changing instruments in the production and recording phase can enhance the parts so they stand out a little more separately from each other.  What often happens with drums in a chorus, for instance, is that the rhythm stays more or less the same, but cymbals (or what they call a “ride”) are added.  Drums also accent a coming change when they do small fills just beforehand.

Drums are only one example of the use of contrast in production, other instruments like strings can also be effective in signifying a different part of a song.  But for the most part, you want to be able to create contrast in the writing itself so you don’t have to rely on production to do it for you.

Contrast is something that be the difference between your audience being continuously drawn into a song and putting them to sleep! Listen to one of your favourite songs and see if you can spot what they do to create contrast. And then listen to one of your own songs to determine if you are creating enough contrast to keep it interesting!

IJ

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