Author: David

Creating Emphasis

The meaning of your lyric depends on which word gets the emphasis.  For example, the phrase “I’m going to the store” could mean:

  • I’M going to the store    (not you, me)
  • I’m GOING to the store  (in motion, on the move)
  • I’m going TO the store    (not away from it)
  • I’m going to THE store   (the only one, the most important one)
  • I’m going to the STORE  (not the office)

As a songwriter, you have two ways of creating emphasis: pitch and rhythm.

PITCH

“Pitch” is how high or how low a note is.  There are always exceptions, but as a rule high notes get more emphasis than low notes.  For example, the old nursery song “Row Row Row Your Boat” begins with a low pitch on the word “row” and rises to a higher pitch on the word “boat.”  In this case, “boat” would get the emphasis in the phrase.

RHYTHM

Rhythm is concerned with the beat or the flow of the melody. In general, longer notes get more emphasis than shorter notes, and remember – space counts.  If you sing a note and wait a while before singing the next note, it has the same effect as holding the note out. There are three ways to emphasize a melody note with rhythm:

  1. Start the note at the usual place and hold it longer
  2. Start the note earlier and release it at the usual place
  3. Wait a little longer before singing the next note.

In addition to these two ways of creating emphasis, singers have one more tool: 

TONE

Tone can be changed in a number of ways.  For example,

  • If you’ve been properly singing every line and then you speak a couple of words, the spoken words will stand out and get emphasis.
  • If you’ve sung a line in a normal tone and then sing from the back of your throat for a couple of words, those will stand out.
  • If you “growl” on a few words, those will stand out and get emphasis.

These variations become especially useful when you’re singing a song demo.  Remember that musically your song should be a balance of repetition and surprise.  Too much repetition and the listener is bored.  Too much surprise and the listener is confused. If you’ve sung the chorus the same way twice, it’s time to make a change for the third time.  If you’ve already sung the first verse straight, you have the freedom to give the second verse a little more expression. Take note of where you want to create your emphasis , try each method – pitch, rhythm, and tone, and use what works best.

Songwriting – the big picture

I’ve given a course on songwriting and presented a few talks on aspects of it to various groups. While I haven’t published anything formally, I wanted to use this blog to at least give the main points of my approach. Whenever a songwriter comes in the studio with a song that may need a bit of work, I always use these principles to guide my suggestions on improvement.

  1. The purpose of a song is to convey an emotion to the listener.
    Ask yourself what emotion you want someone to feel after hearing your song. If you get that emotion back from your listener, you have succeeded as a songwriter. I’m not talking about deep, heavy emotions necessarily. It may be that all you want someone to feel is light and carefree. Maybe you want them to be amused. There is a huge range of feeling and emotion between happy and sad, so try to be as specific as you can.
  2. Lyrically, a song should be about one moment in time from an emotional point of view.
    Without getting into a lot of lyric writing technique, this principle alone should keep you on target. This is not to say you can’t change scenes and go from one point in your life to another in one song. It’s that, if you do, each of those scenes should still be about the same moment, even though they occurred at different points in time.
  3. Musically, a song should have a balance of repetition and surprise.
    Too much repetition creates boredom. Too much surprise creates confusion. We need repetition to remember the song after it’s over. We need surprise to create a pleasant excitement for our ears.

Remember, there are no rules in songwriting, only expectations. We are used to hearing things presented in a certain way; however, the three-minute verse-chorus song is not the only way that a song can be done. No matter how you choose to write your song, if you adhere to these three overriding principles, you should be able to keep your listeners’ interest, deliver the emotion you were feeling when you wrote it, and connect.

Errors and Such

I’m going to talk about audio CD’s, even though it’s becoming less and less common to use a mechanical device to play music.

Whenever someone finishes a project with me and needs somthing on disc, they get a data DVD as well as the audio CD master. The data DVD contains all of the files of the session – all tracks, no edits, all starting from the beginning of the project. Also included in separate folders are the WAV mixes and the WAV masters. This is not just so that you can return to the studio at a later time and be able to pull up the project to change a vocal line, although that’s handy. It’s also not just to have the tracks in case you want to take them to another studio on another audio platform, although that’s handy, too. It’s also about avoiding errors.

When you burn an audio CD on your computer, you also burn errors onto the disc. It’s unavoidable. The faster your burn speed, the more errors you introduce onto your audio CD. The only reason we are even able to play an audio CD is because the players have error correction circuitry built into the device. Some are better than others. That’s why your CD will play on your stereo at home but stutters when you put it in your car.

Copying data from a CD or DVD is another thing entirely.  Error correction is built into the process.  So if you take the data DVD I’ve given you, navigate to the Master folder, and copy the mastered WAV files that you find there over to your computer, they will be bit for bit identical to what was on the disc and what was on my computer.  That means when you burn a CD using those WAV files, you are starting with the best quality of data you have available.

If you are selling CD’s that you’re burning from your home computer, this should go a long way towards preventing returns on CD’s that won’t play.

The gist of my “music is free” speech

Anyone who’s recorded with me has heard this. But in case you should need a refresher course, here it is.

In the mind of the public, music is free. There are many reasons to record and publish music that don’t have anything to do with making money, but IMO if you want to make money with music you must package your music with something of value that cannot be reproduced digitally.

There. That’s the gist of it.

The History

Until the late 1960’s the only form of recorded music was the phonograph record. It was not portable. It could not be reproduced by the ordinary listener. Then the cassette tape was invented. At first the sound quality was inferior to the phonograph record so the music industry ignored it. But soon the quality DID improve and the fact that it allowed the user to compile a tape of their favorite music from different sources and carry it around made it more popular than the phonograph in a matter of a few years.

The music industry got legislation passed that allowed an addition of a royalty to the price of blank cassette tape as a form of compensation for the sales lost due to consumer home taping. The money generated from this went into a big pool that was distributed according to the record label/artist’s sales of real product. The more popular labels/artists got more of the pool.

Then the CD came out and we were back in the days of the phonograph. It could not be reproduced by the listener, could hold more music, sounded cleaner, and could last longer. But the invention of the CD burner changed things again. Now the consumer could make digital copies of their favorite music again, just like the cassette days. And just like the cassette days, the labels got legislation passed that allowed an additional royalty to a certain type of blank CD called the “music CD.” (The truth is that except for a header that identifies the disc as a music disc, there was no difference between this type of CDR and a data CDR except that some standalone disc burners would not burn to a data CDR. They were crippled by their manufacturer.)

Today

The internet and the MP3 changed things again. Again we have an inferior format (MP3) that is more widely used than the higher quality CD because of its portability. We think nothing of sending entire songs via email, downloading hundreds of our favorites to our hard drives and MP3 players, listening to customized internet radio, etc. So for the time being, because of the ease of digital copying, the value of recorded music is approaching zero.

On the other hand, people still pay real money for things they need like clothing, food, shelter, gasoline. So it follows that by packaging your music with something of value that cannot be reproduced digitally, you can make some money. What kinds of things am I talking about? Here are a few examples.

  • Your live performance. It exists at a point in time that will never happen exactly the same again. In order to have a memory of the performance, people will buy a physical item like a CD, tee shirt, hat, etc.
  • Trademark your hook If your song has a trademark-able hook, take advantage of it. Example – “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffet spawned an industry of items for him. Not only was the song popular, but in the decades following its publication, there are now Margaritaville restaurants, bar supplies, clothing lines, retirement communities and more. Why? Because the title identified a lifestyle.
  • Niche markets like specialized groups and charitable causes are places where your music can be considered a rallying cry or an anthem for the cause. People will support the cause by purchasing your music outright. But if you can add to that with something physical, it will mean even more. One example is the song, “A Song For My Son” written and published by a mother of the groom because there were no wedding songs with that subject. She packaged the CD with a small booklet that could be signed by friends and family and kept as a keepsake.

These are just a few suggestions. I’m sure that people will not stop making music just because consumers feel they have the right to copy and distribute it without paying for it. I’m sure that at some point there will again be just compensation for creators. But for the time being, in this transitory stage, digital goods bring attention, and real goods bring real money.

Buzzsonic

If you have never heard of this site, I can understand. Just know that it is a HUGE resource for some great information.

Click here for the main blog page. The curated blog page is a list of over 250 posts going back over 10 years. Some of the topics may be dated, but many are still relevant even today.

Production and Copyright – Don’t Give It Away

I have talked to many of my clients about the line between music production and cowriting. You probably all know my views on this, but I wanted to put my rant into a blog as a reference. Hopefully this will help someone from making a bad mistake.

A lot of my clients have songs in their head and they don’t play an instrument.  They sing the melody to me, I record the raw version, and we go to work from there.  Their melody implies a rhythm. We talk about the tempo and the beat and I show them some examples. They decide what it was that was closest to what they were hearing in their head.

Their melody also implies harmony – chords. I’ll try some simple ideas suggested by the melody and again, they will tell me what is closest to what they were hearing. I see my part in this as a sort of musical detective – trying to uncover the rest of the music that wasn’t heard in the raw recording. I am NOT acting as a cowriter, but as an interpreter of sorts.

Sometimes I’ll hear something that the writer didn’t hear. I’ll play that, too, and if they like it better we’ll use it instead. Now, that is treading on the line, IMO. But they didn’t come into the studio looking for a cowriter and I don’t look at what I’ve contributed as earning me a part of the song even if it makes a drastic difference in the way the final product is perceived by listeners.

Some producers think differently. Afraid that they’ll miss out on a piece of the pie or some recognition, they feel that any contribution they make that isn’t specifically spelled out is cause for them to be a part writer in the song. I feel this is wrong, but at the same time there is nothing stopping the uninformed or timid writer from making a bad decision at this point and giving up part of their copyright.

No matter how the law may be written to protect your rights, if you enter into an agreement that is not to your advantage, you must live with the consequences. Case in point – when my song “Taking Our Own Sweet Time” was recorded by the Kinleys back in the 90’s, the record label sent me a form that stated I would agree to being paid a sub-statutory rate on my royalties. The choice for me was whether to sign an agreement that earned me less money than what I was entitled to, or not sign and be excluded from the album. I signed. I got paid. I’m OK with it, but I still don’t like being another victim of record label leverage.

So, understand your rights. But also be aware of your situation and what kind of leverage you may have. You may be able to negotiate and keep more of what’s yours in the first place.

How Not To Destroy Your Audio

Everything is geared nowadays for communicating over the internet and mobile devices. The most common format for music is the MP3 file (although it has officially been abandoned by its creators). It is still universally used and is great for sending in an email and it sounds pretty good. But there are some things that you should be aware of.

Audio is similar to pictures and video in that it uses small bits of data to trick us into thinking we are experiencing the real thing.

  • Movies are nothing more than still images that are projected one after the other at about 30 images per second, which fool our lazy eyes into thinking we are seeing motion. Dogs, however, are not fooled.
  • Digital images are nothing more than colored pixels crammed tightly together so that it fools our eyes into thinking we are seeing continuous colors.
  • By the same token, digital CD quality audio is slices of time that are sent at 44,100 slices per second and fools our ears into thinking we are hearing continuous sound.

When we are creating in the studio, I am recording, mixing, and mastering with this kind of large data. One minute of a stereo CD quality WAV file is around 10 megabytes in size. A three minute song would take up 30 MB – much too large to send in an email. Here is where the MP3 comes in.

The MP3 convertor uses psychoacoustic tricks to remove over half of the information in a WAV file. The size of a music quality MP3 file is about 1 megabyte for each minute of music, which means a 3-minute song will only take up 3 megs of space. You have compressed it to just 10 percent of the original size, or, another way to look at it is that  you’ve lost 90 percent of your original content.

Still, it sounds OK, right? Right. Until you forget that it’s an MP3 and decide to burn an audio CD from it. So now the little 3 meg file gets expanded to 30 megs again, because that’s the CD format. It’s lost 90 percent of the information, yet gets blown up 9 times as large. Imagine taking a picture on your cellphone and blowing it up the size of a billboard. The big jagged blocks you would see are comparable to the badly defined audio that is now on your CD.

Now your friend gets the CD and puts it in their computer, and iTunes or WMP rips it back to an MP3. Only this time, the MP3 convertor is converting crappy jagged block audio data, and out comes a crappy MP3. You start to hear litle gurgling sounds and wonder where your high end went..

The lesson is to always create CDs from uncompressed WAV or AIF files for the best quality. You can change the settings in iTunes or WMP to rip your audio CDs as WAV or AIF or, if you need to save space, choose a lossless compression scheme (Apple Lossless, WMA lossless, or FLAC).

Create a separate folder for your MP3 files that you want to add to your player or send over the net, so that they don’t get confused with your best quality, uncompressed files. Or just don’t use lossy compression schemes like MP3 at all if you can help it.