Songwriting Without An Instrument

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.

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

I Read The News Today, Oh Boy

 

If you look at the handwritten lyrics for John Lennon‘s song “A Day In The Life”, there’s one thing that strikes me right away. Not many corrections!

The lyrics, which are scribbled in black felt pen and blue ballpoint pen on two sides of a single piece of paper, are being auctioned at Sotheby’s in June. The photo on the left looks like the earlier draft of the two sides.

According to the CBC website: “Signed by Lennon and including crossed out words, corrections and a few annotations in red ink, the paper once belonged to Mal Evans, the Beatles’ road manager.

“An unnamed collector purchased the lyrics at a Sotheby’s auction in London in 1992 and attempted to sell the page in a sealed-bid auction at Bonhams in New York in 2006. However, it failed to sell at that time.”

Now I don’t know if this first page was the first draft or the 10th, so that might impact on how little Lennon edited it.

When I’m writing lyrics, I quite often have several drafts. One reason is practical: it gets too messy the more I edit or change words and lines. The other reason is that I like to have something to go back to if I feel like I’m off course. Sometimes you realize your first version of something was the best.

One line that Lennon changes on the first page is from “And all the people turned away” to “A crowd of people stood and stared”. It is referring to the previous lines “He blew his mind out in a car, he hadn’t noticed that the lights had changed”. Changing the subsequent line to “a crowd of people stood and stared” is an interesting move because it more accurately reflects what human beings do when we see an accident. Lennon’s first attempt with people turning away implies some kind of indifference, but that’s not really the normal human reaction. He may have at first thought that it had more of an emotional impact, implying that no one cared, and then decided that standing and staring was actually an even colder reaction.

The other change is to the verse at the bottom of the page. He was referring to a newspaper article about potholes in the line “Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire” when he went off in another direction in describing the size of the holes and how “although the holes were rather small, they had to count them all”. At first his line was “they had to count them all, they counted every one”, but then he changed his mind and came up with something that sounds like a one-liner: “they had to count them all, now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall”. This leads to a different melodic line as well. It’s hard to say if he had the melody in his head as he was coming up with that line change, but it was definitely a brilliant twist on the pattern of the rest of the verses.

On the other side of the paper, the lyrics are re-written with the new lines included. However, one line is changed from “And though the people turned away” to “A crowd of people turned away”. This reflects his earlier line change on the first side. He couldn’t refer to “the people” turning away in the earlier line in the same way anymore. He also took out the word “just” from “just having read the book” probably deciding it was unnecessary. The only other edit is a word change from “very” to “rather” in the line “and though the holes were rather small”. Rather tends to roll off the tongue better, and though it’s a small and almost imperceptible difference when it comes to the big picture, paying attention to little details is a sign of a dedicated writer.

It’s difficult to get inside another writer’s head and know what their thought process is, of course, but a person can almost imagine what he MIGHT have been thinking as he wrote his subsequent drafts and

changed things around. There’s an interesting discussion of A Day In The Life on the Guardian website, mostly around the question “What were the four thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire?” One writer, referring to how the 4000 holes relate to Albert Hall, says:

“Although the answers above offer an explanation for the origin of the 4,000 holes, none explains how this relates to the Albert Hall. I believe this to be the significant missing piece of this mystery into the workings of Lennon’s mind. Another popular cult belief is that a “hole” refers to a unit of decaying flesh as discussed in the “Tibetan Book of the Dead.” At the time, Lennon was influenced by Eastern Misticism and The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The reference, so the cult belief goes, is that Lennon was poking fun at the wealthy folk who attended concerts at the Albert Hall (referring to them as “decaying flesh”).”

They could be right 🙂 The fact is that none of us really knows what was going on in Lennon’s head, but it’s a lot of fun trying to “Imagine”.

IJ

When It’s Time To Record Your Song

There are a number of things to consider when you decide that your song is ready to be recorded.  As a songwriter, you want the best representation of your song;  a recording that makes it stand out without creating too many distractions or losing focus.

Image by baldguitars via Flickr

Before you make the decision to record a song, make sure it is in its final draft! I know it sounds obvious, but some songwriters are too quick to rush into a studio because they’re all excited about a new song. Does it stand up to the test of time? Have others who can give you some valuable feedback listened to it yet? If you’re a performer, have you performed it in front of an audience? Don’t rush the recording part!

If you have your own recording setup, you’ll recognize some of the terms I’m going to use in this article.  However, I’ll explain or define them as I go for those of you who are new to the idea of recording. First of all, I wrote an article quite awhile ago on the recording process for beginners, but that has more to do with the technical aspect of recording.  If you are just about to go into the studio to record a demo, for example, you might want to think about what you want before you get there.

1. Intro Too Long – I can’t even count how many songs I’ve heard recorded by songwriters in their studios or as a demo that take FOREVER to get to the first verse!  Don’t make the mistake of creating an intro that’s so long it’ll make the publisher hit the eject button!  In fact, if you can manage to, don’t have one at all!

2. Do you need an instrumental break? –  If you are pitching a song, a wailing guitar solo is unnecessary and may actually detract from the song itself.  If you are a band, then by all means, put in the wailing guitar solo.  Think about who is going to hear this recording and what will be important to them.

3. Out of Tune – this is something I mention in the recording article too…you’d think it would be obvious, but make sure that your instruments are in tune before you record!  AutoTune (a handy little software device that corrects pitch) can do some magic, but often it can distort the sound of the instrument (including your vocal!), so don’t rely on that.

4.  Leave A Little Room for Arrangements – As a solo performing songwriter, my instrument ended up being the whole band.  Over the years I got better at playing my guitar so that it became the percussion (if necessary), the bass, and everything else I needed to fill the musical “space” when I was performing.  But when I would go into the studio, I’d have to learn to play it less or simplify it so there was room for the other instruments!  You may not be recording your instrument at all because maybe you prefer to leave it to more professional musicians.  But if if ARE, you have to think of your instrument differently when you get into the studio.  Let the bass player do the bass runs, let the drummer drive the rhythm, and unless you are an amazing instrumentalist and it is truly a part of your “sound”, let your instrument be present without being too dominant.  You might consider spending some time with the other musicians ahead of time, if possible, to work out how everything is going to go together.

5.  Keep It Tight – another problem I often hear in demos is when instruments and drums are too loose.  You don’t want to over-quantize (another handy little software device that adjusts the timing of especially midi instruments), because then it won’t feel “real”, but you do want to find the pocket.  I love that word, “pocket”.  I heard Quincy Jones use it in reference to having all of the instruments hit the right note at the right time with just the right velocity (volume) and feel.  Not easy to do, but worth the effort!  One note to think about:  let the drummer drive the rhythm.  When people are recording instruments especially, they try to anticipate the beat of the drummer, and often play just the slightest bit too soon.  Then the song feels off kilter and too loose.  Practice with a metronome or a click track.  Just Google “metronome” and you can find them online.  When you’re working with one, let the click pull your rhythm…it takes a little work but it will improve your timing immensely.

6. K.I.S.S. – when in doubt, less is more.  Don’t try to stuff too many instruments and bits and pieces in there…it’s about the SONG.

7. Lyrics Up Front – It’s about the SONG.  Don’t bury the lead vocal in behind a whomping bass and crashing cymbals and wailing guitar.  You want them to hear the lyrics, right?

8. When You Invite Friends To Play – of course, we all like the idea of having people we know play on our recordings.  But recording isn’t like jamming, it can be very repetitive in terms of getting just the right sound and licks, fills, etc., and then repeating that until everything fits just right.  It can start to feel a little mechanical after awhile.  I once had a guitar player (not a friend, by the way!) come in to do some lead work on a recording.  He had several guitars, lots of effects and certainly had some talent.  But he could not repeat something he had done before or even remember what he had done!  He really was only good at jamming.  In the end I managed to catch a few bits that I could use, but it wasn’t very helpful in terms of adding some real texture to the recording.

Most of these apply, more or less, to a situation where you are singing and/or playing on the recording.  However, some of you are not singers and would rather have someone else do the demo.  There are plenty of demo services around, even online, where you can send a rough recording of the song and have them do it.  It’s important to educate yourself enough so that you can ask for what you want.  If you “hear” things, like instruments playing in particular parts, or you want a certain sound or feel (soft, energetic, etc.) then you have to communicate that to the people recording your demo. You might be too intimidated by the process and just want to give it over without any input, however you might not get what you expect in the end.  Whoever is doing your demo will, and should, ask you lots of questions first in order to establish what will be needed.  Here are some other tips:

1.  Ask – for a demo or sampling of their recordings before you hire them, so you can assess whether or not they can do what you want.  Make sure they are comfortable in the genre your song is in.

2. Trust Your Gut –  If you’re not comfortable with the person you’re communicating with, then go elsewhere.  It’s important to feel that you can say what you want, even if you don’t exactly know how to say it!

3. Educate Yourself – as I said before, the more you know about the process, the more confidently you can ask for what you want.  If you don’t understand something, ask.  There are lots of places on the internet  where you can research what happens in a studio and the terminology that is used.

4. Everything Up Front – most studios will offer you a package deal, one price that covers everything that you want included.  If you want some changes after the fact, you’ll have to negotiate that, but don’t let them nickel and dime you.  Be sure that it’s clear what you are going to get for your money before you proceed with anything.

It’s exciting to hear your song recorded properly for the first time. If you take the time to consider everything I’ve mentioned above, there won’t be any unpleasant surprises and you’re ready for the next step…putting it “out there” for the rest of the world to hear :-).

IJ