Are You A Good Listener?

We’re going to listen with a critical ear to the production and instruments in a recorded song.  Even if you are not a musician, or not familiar with various instruments used in music production, being a good listener and recognizing the role each instrument plays in a song will ALWAYS give you an advantage when you are recording your songs or performing them with other people.

Let’s start with the basics of listening to a recorded song by picking a song by a band or artist that you like.  Try to find a song that has a full band;  quite often the instruments and the players are listed on each cut of a CD.  The more instruments, the better!

One of the most obvious, up front elements of a recorded song is the drum part or percussion.  If the song you’re listening to has drums, it’s important to note that they are what drives the song.  That may seem obvious, but did you know that the drum part is often recorded first?  The reason for this is that the rest of the instruments need to follow the drums, and not the other way around.  So the drums are played at the agreed to tempo and every instrument recorded after has to maintain that same tempo as accurately as possible.

Image via Wikipedia

So let’s discuss the parts of a drum kit first.  The kick or bass drum (4) is the deep, heavy beat;  the big drum that the drummer hits with a foot pedal.  It is often hit less frequently than the other parts.  The snare (5) has a higher pitch and is hit with a drum stick, as are the rest of the drum parts when they are played.  The toms (3) are sonically somewhere between the snare sound and the kick or bass drum.  They are usually played as part of a “fill”, when the drummer comes away from the snare to roll on the toms at the end of phrases or song parts.  Then there are the cymbals.  Crash cymbals (1) are also used for emphasis, sometimes at the beginning or end of a phrase, or emphasizing the chorus.  They often referred to as the “ride” when they keep time during a chorus, for instance, and the hi-hats (6) are similarly used.

When you’re listening to the song you’ve chosen, try to focus only on the drums for the entire track.  Listen to what they do and when they do it.  Do they start at the beginning, or come in a little later in the intro?  What’s the difference in the way they are played in the verses and then the chorus?  If there is a bridge in the song, do they do something different?  Pay attention to when they come in and when they pause and all of the flourishes throughout the song.  When do you hear the toms, if at all?  When do you hear the cymbals?  Listen through a couple of times and make sure you are listening to ONLY the drums.

Now let’s focus on the bass.  The bass guitar is closely associated with the drums and often recorded at the same time or just after the drums are.  The drummer and bassist have a very close relationship and you’ll notice if you’ve ever seen a band play live, the bass player is often looking for signals or exchanging glances with the drummer as they move through the chord changes and fills.  The bass is often the hardest instrument to hear because of its low pitch.  Sometimes it plays very simple lines with long notes, and other times it might be almost rhythmic.  Listen to the song you’ve chosen again, but only to the bass this time.   Sometimes when I’m teaching my guitar students how to play by ear, I put on a song and get them to listen for the bass part, because that often determines what chord is being played by the guitar.  So I know how difficult it is to identify.  Occasionally you might confuse the sound of the bass with the low string of a guitar, but when you can zero in on the bass, listen through the whole song and pay attention to what it does.  It will certainly change notes as the chords change, but does it change patterns at different times?  Can you hear how it matches up sometimes with the rhythm of the kick on the drum kit?  Listen through enough times that you are completely focused in on only the bass.

The recording you are listening to might have piano, or “keys’ as they are often referred to.  They tend to stand out from the stringed instruments, even though they also have “strings”, but quite often they are electric pianos or keyboards with different sounds.  The keyboard might be playing chords, or it might also have little melody parts or fills throughout the song.  Listen to what the keyboard is doing and how it interacts with the rest of the instruments.

Guitars can be a challenge to listen to as well.  There may be acoustic guitar and/or electric, and often there are both and maybe even more than one of each!  Being able to distinguish how many guitars you hear is important and probably the greatest challenge.  Often if there are two or more guitars, they are doing different things, but because they sound similar, it is hard for the ear to separate them at first.  The electric guitar often does a solo or lead part somewhere in the song.  This gives it some distinction because it’s playing notes and melodies, and not chords.

So focus in now on what the guitars (if there are any) are doing in the song.  Is there just one guitar playing chords?  Can you hear the difference between the electric guitar and the acoustic, assuming there are both?  How do they interact with each other?  Note that it is very rare, even if there are two acoustic guitars, for them to be playing the same thing.  If you are a guitar player and you are jamming with others, quite often you’ll all be playing the same chords and progressions, but that rarely happens in recorded music because what would be the point of doing the same thing twice?  So what the guitar players might choose to do is to play in one key on one guitar, and use a capo or barre chords to play somewhere else on the neck with the second guitar.  Paul Simon used to have one guitar tuned normally, and another with the strings tuned an octave higher, so he had a very full acoustic guitar sound in his recordings.

There may be other instruments in the song you’re listening to.  What are they?  Extra percussion?  Strings, like violins, or maybe there are electronic drums or beats, or sounds that you can’t identify right away.  Quite often, recordings will have layers and layers of sounds, and others might be considered quite “sparse” in their instrumentation.

Learning to listen to other instruments and how they work together will be an important tool for you when you are thinking about what you might include in a recording of your own song.  Sometimes when you’re thinking about your song, you might “hear” something that you’d like and being able to identify and articulate what that is will be a big help when you finally get in the studio.

IJ

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