Q & A – Putting Music To Lyrics

© I.Woloshen

Here’s an email I 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! 

IJ

How Do Songs Get On The Radio?

 

©I.Woloshen

I worked in a small radio station here in Victoria back in the 90’s.  The format was “oldies”, which, at the time, meant songs from the 50’s to the 70’s.  These days 80’s and even some 90’s songs are considered oldies.  Which makes me feel — REALLY oldie :-).

Members of my family have been in radio on the lower mainland in the Vancouver area for decades, in everything from talk to news to adult contemporary and pop formats.  As happens often enough these days, a radio station can change its colours many times over the years.  In a city where there is stiff competition, having a hot, new format with a popular playlist is what everyone is after.

Here in Canada, disc jockeys or “jocks” are obligated to provide a certain percentage of Canadian content.  This regulation was created years ago when our radio waves were pretty much overwhelmed with American music.  Not that this was a bad thing, but in a country with one tenth of the population of our neighbours, the opportunity for Canadian artists and bands to get radio airplay was pretty slim, so the regulation helped in the beginning.  Many radio jocks now argue that the rule is antiquated and that Canadian bands and artists are now big enough and good enough to fight for those positions without the rule.

For commercial stations these days, especially those owned by big conglomerates like Clear Channel, they don’t have much say in what goes on their playlists.  Most, if not all, of the songs you hear are from the “big five” record labels from well-established or hot new artists the labels are pushing.  And let’s face it, a lot of kids especially want to hear the artists they know and love.  But what many don’t realize is how “unlocal” their radio stations really are.   Sometimes there isn’t even a “live” jock, it’s all pre-recorded by one person somewhere and sent to all of the other stations that the company owns.  So trying to get your band or your song on a local radio station is harder than it ever was.

However, many local stations will have a show devoted to local bands and artists.  And college or university stations, which are not commercial, are free to play pretty much whatever they want, whenever they want.  In fact, many bands and artists these days often “break” on a college station and build on their audience that way.

As an artist these days you have a lot more access to information about your local commercial and college stations, and that’s where you need to begin.  Most of them have websites, and many of those list their shows, artists and other information about them that can come in handy.  If you research carefully, you will find the name of the programming director.  These are the people who decide what plays and what doesn’t.  As I said earlier, they may be restricted somewhat these days by people on high regarding the music they play, but if there is some kind of show featuring local artists, that’s your in.

Here are some tips you might consider:

• Research is very important;  the most obvious point is to make sure their format fits your songs.  Don’t send your rock songs into a country station!
• Write a good cover letter, not too long, introducing yourself and your music and package it nicely with your CD or demo
• Be professional but you can be creative too in the package you send them, in order to get their attention
• If you must, do a follow up phone call, but DON’T HARASS the program director or the station!  That’s a sure way to get black-listed
• Do not give up, sometimes it’s all about patience and having your name heard a few times by the people who count

As I mentioned in the beginning, I worked at an oldies station back in the 90’s, but it never ceased to amaze me how many CDs ended up in the garbage because whoever was sending it had not paid any attention to the fact that we played Elvis, not Enya.  Even the big record labels sent CDs of recent releases!  Not very efficient or practical on their part…my guess is that they just sent these out to absolutely every station with no thought to whether or not the station would actually play it.

I’ve heard my songs on the radio a few times.  It’s a pretty exciting thing, and with a little patience and persistence I know you will experience the same thrill one day 

IJ

Be Bold

Yesterday I was in the car listening to a radio show all about advertising…boring you might assume, but it was actually quite interesting. That’s because a lot of what advertising people are doing, the ones who are writing and producing commercials, is continuously trying to find new ways to say the same old things. How do you advertise a car in a way that no one has done before?

The most interesting thing I heard was an interview with a top notch ad guy in the US. He said that in the beginning, his success could be attributed to his LACK of knowledge. He didn’t know what he “couldn’t” do. Beyond that, he said, once you start to learn the rules and play by them, you start to become like everybody else. And once you become like everybody else, you stop standing out.

I found this particularly interesting because it creates quite a dichotomy when you are using the rules to try to come up with something new and fresh. How can you be new and fresh if you are simply following old patterns or methods? And when you have people like me telling you how to write a song, isn’t that the same as learning the “rules”? Maybe you should stop reading my tips right now :)

And, if, for instance, you are hearing from publishers or record people “We want the next ________”, meaning that they want you to be a new version of someone famous who has made them a lot of money…how does that make you new and fresh? You are going to come up against this again and again if you are trying to pitch your songs or try and make your band the next big thing. You don’t want to sound like anyone else, but a lot of people will push you in that direction.

I have always been an advocate of learning the rules, and then more or less learning how to break them. But now I wonder if rules don’t just get in the creative mind’s way, period. The mind is a pretty powerful thing. You know yourself, that if you let yourself second guess every word or every note, it ruins everything! So when you are first sitting down to write something, throw all the “rules” out the window…don’t even let yourself think about them.

Beyond that, let’s look at a couple of songs and artists that more or less break the “rules” and succeed. The first one I’ll mention comes to mind because a guitar student of mine recently asked me to figure it out for her to play. It’s a song called “Something Pretty” by Patrick Park. You can hear the whole song on his website in the media section, and it was introduced to a larger audience through the television show “The OC”. What’s really interesting about this song is that it starts out sounding pretty darn traditional country. But then you realize that his singing style isn’t really “country” , and musically the song takes some very nontraditional twists and turns, for instance, suddenly modulating to another key and back again, and having a very long instrumental section after the chorus. You’d rarely find that done in a popular contemporary country song today. Today’s country, especially country/pop, is very, very formula. And Patrick’s lyrical style is a kind of a self put-down, which is more of what you would find in rock or alternative (whatever alternative is these days!) songs. And for days after I worked it out, I had it spinning around and around in my head…it has a haunting quality that sticks with you.

Sometimes what makes a stand out, obviously, is the artist. Fiest’s “1,2,3,4” is just plain quirky. Her voice is different, the production is definitely not typical…lots of banjos and trumpets. Now when is the last time you heard that in a pop song? And someone like Amy Winehouse with her ballsy, vocal style, makes R&B sound new again, the way Norah Jones made jazz and country new and appealing to a pop audience a couple of years back. It seems these days that television commercials are breaking artists more commonly than radio. That in itself, is an interesting turn of events.

Occasionally, well-established artists go out on a limb and break their own rules. The first to famously do that in the folk/rock world was Bob Dylan. There was a huge backlash when he suddenly started playing electric guitar in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival. They called him a sell-out, a traitor, even…they yelled “get rid of that electric guitar!” He was shaken from that experience, when all he was trying to do was to re-invent himself and move in a fresh direction. Another, less negatively received re-invention was Johnny Cash with that unbelievably powerful version of a Nine Inch Nails song and video “Hurt”. Who’d a thunk it…Johnny Cash and NIN? But it was a huge hit for him. The combination of that raw, seasoned voice and those equally raw and emotional lyrics, was profound.

So is the answer to re-invent yourself? Perhaps. One thing my husband likes to say to the kids is “Be bold.” And occasionally they take the bull by the horns and do something they never thought they could. I think that’s how you have to approach your songwriting (and performing, if that’s relevant to you)…I think you have to throw something completely different into the mix, and see what you come up with. If you’re looking to do something different, then pick a style you haven’t written before (even if you hate it!), or pick up an instrument you’ve never played. Use words that are not common to you. If you record your own songs, find the strangest loop you can possibly find, and write something to it. Find a trumpet player and ask him or her to invent a part for a song that doesn’t sound like it is meant for a trumpet :-). You see what I mean?

Be bold.

IJ