I had a great morning teaching songwriting to year 8 pupils (12-13 years old) today.

I can’t share recordings with you – for various reasons I have to keep a slight distance between the school work and my personal online life – but I can share with you a couple of thoughts that occured to me:-

Experimentation is vital – the pupils that made the best progress were those who were willing to try things out and not be too precious about their work. There is a cliché in education that the classroom should be a place where pupils are ‘free to fail’ – that they should not be afraid to get things wrong because that fear can stop you trying out no ideas.

The same is true of songwriting – make mistakes, try stuff that might not work because even if a lot fo the time it doesn’t, plenty of times it will.

Originality is learned – even my most creative pupils weren’t writing songs that sounded hugely original. But that’s okay, because they were using ideas that were new to them – within their frame of reference they were being original.

What does that say for all of us? You can only be original within the parameters you know – if all you know is current top 40 pop and the X Factor you’ll write songs that fit within that. If you aim to something more original you’re going to have to expand your horizons as a listener and music fan. Listen to more – find music that’s new to you and work out what makes it new and exciting.

Songwriting is fun – I knew this already of course, but there’s nothing like two hours of songwriting with 30 lively 13 year olds to remind you exactly how much fun this artform is.

Gary Ewer recently linked to an article of his called ‘Five Things to Do When You Don’t Feel Like Writing a Song’ – the post contains some songwriting games you can use to get the creative juices flowing.

Here’s the first:

Take the pressure off to write a full song, and engage in some songwriting “games”: Set the timer for a ridiculously short period of time, like two minutes, and see if you can come up with a verse and chorus (with bonus points if you actually manage a lyric to go with it!) Once you’re done, reset the timer and go at it again. Most of what you’ll write will be… rough. But some of it you’ll find to be useful, so don’t throw anything out.

Which I have foolishly decided to have a go at. So without further ado, I shall get to it.

Equipment used:

Cubase
A microphone
A guitar
Notepad
My voice
a long day and not enough sleep.

Rules: 2 mins thinking/experimenting time.
one take recording.
rambling explanation after each little scratch demo.

Song sketch no.1 – The kinda things they say.

The kinda things they say to you
The kinda of things they do
The way the act as if you’re not exactly there
you’re not exactly whole.

The acts of violence that flash
Behind you’re smiling eyes
The bones that crunch when you let fly.

Speak when you’re spoken
Think when you’re told to think
the kinda they say shall not questioned

Sketch1 by Indiesongwriter.net

no 2.

Well they won’t let me go where I’m needed
And they’ve chained me under the sky
One of these days I’ll break free
I swear that will
Use the powers I have just for me
And they won’t like it when I do

Sketch2 by Indiesongwriter.net

No.3
Hold your head right back
it helps to staunch the flow
that’s what love feels like
Darling don’t you know?
keep your lips tight shut
You know what’s good for you
If I break i keep it if I want it I get
love hurts
love hurts

One day I’ll break free
by doing what he did to me

Sketch3 by Indiesongwriter.net

No.4
Well I needed you
And do still
Oh I needed you when I called
Lit fires to scare them all

And you came, darling
You came when I called
You came to me oh my sweet
Came when

Sketch4 by Indiesongwriter.net

No.5

Season broke
Year turned
Dust grew
silent hand
Never say always

Never say done

Sketch5 by Indiesongwriter.net

Are these great pieces of music? Of course not! each of them represents two minutes sketching. However, I think there’s a little potential in one or two and it’s a great way to get the creative muscles flexing after a period without much songwriting going on.

Have a look at Gary’s post and see if you fancy a go.

One of the most important things you can do as a songwriter is keep track of your unfinished ideas.

Many years ago…

About two years ago I started writing a song. It was a heavy metal song sort of in the phrygian mode with crunchy stoccato riffs and a chorus that I couldn’t sing very well and probably wasn’t very good.

I recorded part of it, but I don’t have a heavy metal band and never finished it.

Ten years previously I half wrote another song. It had slightly embarrasing juvenile lyrics and the verses weren’t up to much but the chorus was good. I needed to use that chorus in a decent song.

For at least 10 years I did nothing with that chorus.

SteamLife!

At about christmas time 2010 I started work on my second solo album, IronBark. I went back to that heavy metal song, made it more rock than heavy metal, replaced electric guitars with acoustic.

But the song still didn’t work because it didn’t have the hooky chorus that I felt it needed.

After several months nudging at it that hooky chorus from ten years ago came back to me – I had to dig through some old cupboards to find the piece of paper I’d written it down on, but even through three house moves I’d kept hold of it.

I changed the key, did some cutting and pasting and made it fit.

Two songs I didn’t know how to finish and thought were dead ends turned into one song that I’m proud of. It’s madcap and silly and the lyrics are absurd, but tis become one of my favourite new songs.

Here it is:

Save Your Ideas

One of the most important things you can do as a songwriter is keep track of unfinished ideas.

A portable recorder, the sound recording function on your phone, pen and paper, the DAW on your computer – all of these are invaluable at capturing the unformed and unfinished. Just because you don’t have space for an idea now, doesn’t mean you won’t in the future.

This song and the others on it are part of the reason this blog is relatively quiet at the moment. Another is that I’ve taken to writing longer form stuff rather than blog posts – be sure to check out my latest free ebook More Than 32 Bars.

Many thanks to @ravenousraven @markusrill @NateHevens and @lostcharisma for getting me thinking…

Should everyone like your songs?

No. Or at least, you shouldn’t be aiming for songs that everyone in the world will enjoy. if it happens by accident, great, but it shouldn’t be a goal.

If all songwriters aimed for songs that everyone loved, Bohemian Rhapsody and Paranoid Android would never have been written and Bob Dylan would have been stopped from making music decades ago.

And the Beatles would never have composed their more interesting albums, Pet Sounds wouldn’t exist, Hip-hop would never have got started, there would be no protest songs no progressive rock…

Art that aims to please everyone has to bland – the musical equivalent of biege. It might sell (Although not for long, the mainstream music market is dying after all) but it won’t last and it won’t excite.

Good art appeals to a niche and challenges the audience. The albums we’ve had to listen to more than once before we get are alwasy the ones that stay with us longer.

So how might you challenge you audience?  What can you do to piss some people off?

1 Take a Stand

Write about something that people will find difficult to deal with – something politcal, something satirical. Lyrics that take a stand on an issue will offend people, no matter what the issue is, but those who agree, or at least admire your guts, will love you for it.

Oh, but do talk about something you really care about – people can smell a fake a mile off.

2. Don’t Spell Everything Out

The song above, Yes, is a great example of lyrics that don’t compromise (Although the Band did over the years mellow considerably). The lyrics also don’t spell everything out. You need to think about what they mean.

Having to think pisses some people off.

3. Suprise

Yes also uses odd time signatures. More challenging rhythms, harmony or timbres (Heavy metal screams anyone?) will piss people off no end. And excite others.

I’m not a fan of hip hop, I really don’t like it. In particular I don’t like it because harmony is almost irrelevent to this kind of music – as long as you’ve got a decent beat underneath it, the only important thing in hip hop is the vocal. Harmonic development? Interesting chords? Any chords at all? A lot of the time you just don’t need them for a good hip hop song.

Great for the hip hop fans, but enough to really annoy me.

Those are just 3 ideas. How else can we piss off listeners?

Can you make music out of the sound of a pen squeaking against a whiteboard? What about from the sounds of stones banging together, metal trays being smashed together, or the loud click of someone’s knuckle joints?

You absolutely can -and by trying it you might learn some new ways to think of your own sognwriting.

Electroacoustic/Acousmatic

When I was a student I studied a few different methods of composition – one of which was electroacoustic (sometimes called acousmatic) music or Musique Concrete. This kind of music has a history as long as recording technology, but the French composer Pierre Scheaffer is often credited with starting it in the early 20th Century with his Five Studies of Noise.

Musique Concrete literally means ‘real music’ – music created from real sounds that might otherwise not be considered music. It involves taking source recordings, the chugging of a steam train perhaps, or the sound of birds singing, and manipulating the recordings in various ways to create music.

My tutor in electroacoustic music was a composer named Alan Stones – Here’s a piece by him:-

That’s not songwriting!

No, depending on your definition of songwriting, the pieces above aren’t songs. But by studying this music, and creating some of my own, I learnt some very important lessons about how to shape music.

Finding ideas – Branching variations

Alan taught us one approach to creating music that I found very useful.

1st you would take a sound source, and original recording, something from an effects library – anything interesting.
Then you would use an audio manipulator to make variations. You could reverse it, time stretch or transpose, cut and paste, apply processes or effects. Each time you came up with a new sound, you’d save it, and then move on.

This would give you a bank of new sounds, based on the one original sound source.

You’d then take those new sounds and repeat the process, creating tens, or perhaps hundreds of variations on those variations, branching out until you had a whole tree of different possible sounds, related to each other but still different and interesting.

These sounds would then form the material with which you would create your piece.

Can that be applied to songwriting?

Absolutely it can. The same process can be applied to any musical or lyrical idea. After all, once you have an idea, it’s relatively simple to create variations. With enough experimentation you should be able to find variations that work. For example, if you have a riff or ostinato repeating – does it have to repeat? Why not have different versions?

More importantly, creating lots of small (or large) variations forces you to really explore your material. You’ve voiced the chords one way – but is that the best way? You’ve put the words in that order – but is being literal and clear the right approach?

Gesture and Texture

We’re used to to thinking of music in terms of harmony, melody, accompaniment. Much electroacoustic material simply can’t be though of in those terms – there might be tones, but they aren’t necessarily going to be tuned notes. There might be foreground and background, but accompaniment and melody aren’t the right terms. Instead we can think of gesture and texture.

Gesture is almost analogious to melody – it’s those sounds that are focused, moving, perhaps in the foreground – almost a solo voice that moves through time.

Texture is more likely to be in the background, perhaps more static – a feeling that stays for a time rather than a moving foreground sound.

Can these ideas be applied to songwriting?

Absolutely. Particularly the idea of texture. Rather than thinking of chords, harmony, rhythm, why not create textures and backdrops to your melodies. Think less about notes and more about timbre and feeling. Make liberal use of effects and studio techniques.

Music as sculpture

The biggest lesson I took from having a go at this kind of music was in putting all those seperate sound together into one piece. With harmony, melody, rhythm and all the ‘normal’ musical ideas out of the window, I found that my main concerns were things like pace and shape. It seemed sensible to leave long pauses of silence, or to worry about whether the gestural material joins together properly. Tiny details seemed incredibly important, and much use was made of the volume and panning automation in Logic.

Thinking of gestural or melodic material as having shape is a very useful metaphor – it makes you think of the highs and lows your music goes through and the overall feeling of the piece.

In Conclusion

Learning about electroacoustic music took me out of my comfort zone. It made me really explore some of the things that can be done with technology, and made music seem more than notes and chords – it’s also about timbre and shape and feeling and texture.

Trying out new things is almost a good thing, and I’d urge any songwriter to explore new kinds of music. Making music from squeaky pens, clanking chains and rustling leaves is great fun and can teach you a lot about how music works.

Here’s something I composed and recorded as a student:

Beats and Crazies by Tom Slatter

Here’s a little story of how I wrote a song about hunting Sky-kraken

Sitting down with my acoustic guitar, I just started playing. I didn’t know what I was going to play except that I wanted to write something new.

Lately my fingers have been finding E lydian rather too easily, so I started with an E major 7 chord and a few twiddlings with the scale – not enough to be called a melody, just a bit of noodling.

I carried on playing, entirely aimlessly…

Alun Vaughun a fantastic solo bass player had recently turned me onto the music of Mike Kineally. His songs use lots of complicated chords, I decided I wanted something harmonically lush – so some 9th chords worked their way into my guitar part. Nothing like Kineally really, but that memory triggered the chords.

A few more moments noodling…

The last big gig I went to was Opeth at the Royal Albert hall – some Opeth-like chords appeared under my fingers – but I remembered Kineally and for some reason that meant I had to play a little melodic run that didn’t sound like Opeth at all.

I had been reading PZ Myers over at science blogs – he likes Cephalopods. This combined with my recent obsession with Steampunk and suddenly the song was about hunting Sky-kraken in an Airship.

Steampunk led to memories of Radiohead’s video for There There, which led to a chorus ripping that off – and now the Kraken was winning because the chorus melody was about the bewitching power of it’s ink and tentacles.

All of this occurred at a far less conscious level than I’m making it appear, and it resulted in this song (which isn’t finished yet, but you get the idea):

The Beast of the Air

Divergent Thinking

Divergent, unrelated solutions to the problem of how to write a song making their way in from the outskirts of my mind, unleashed by the practice of jamming without any structure.

I’ve been writing, reading and thinking about creativity a lot recently. Divergent thinking, the ability to find lots of of unrelated possibilities from different disciplines is very important to creativity. What I was doing when I sat down with no idea other than to play and see what happened was the musical equivalent of the free writing a novelist might do to get the brain working – it’s also similar to brainstorming or mind mapping – letting the brain run and sifting through what turns up.

Divergent thinking has been shown to be a skill that musicians are particularly good at, but I’m aware that I don’t make as much effort at it as I could. Too often I try to structure my composition, rather than making time for exploring possibilities and creating the circumstances in which the mind can find these possibilities.

What can you do to encourage divergent thinking?

• Mind-map – sit down with pen and paper, write down a central idea then surround it with related ideas…
• Free write – Just start writing prose and see what turns up.
• List possiblities – what are all the possible ways of startign a song? What are all the possible chord sequences, or lyrical subjects that you could write about?
• Just play – sit down with your instrument and start playing with no aim except to see what happens. You never know, you might end up with a song about hunting Sky-Kraken too.

A few posts ago I wrote about creativity, and decided the definition of creativity I liked best was Ken Russell’s: ‘The process of having original ideas that have value’

I also listed a few of the characteristics of a creative songwriter (Take a look at the post for more detail):

You’re not afraid to fail
You make unexpected connections
You challenge the listener
You have a wide musical pallette
Your style changes
You’re childish

This post is going to look at how you might use your skills of creativity to find inspiration from a given source. It takes inspiration from a teaching exercise I’ll tell you about below, but also from this blog post about creativity and how limitations can help.

Starry Starry Night

The Vincent Van Gogh picture at the top of the post famously provided inspiration for Don McLean’s ‘Vincent’. It was also used by my head of department at work to challenge us to be creative. We were shown the picture and asked to come up with teaching tasks, for any subject, based on the picture.

There are lots of obvious tasks – in music or art you could use the picture for inspiration as McLean did, painting in the same style, or writing a piece inspired by the scene or painter.

Once we’d exhausted the obvious list we were challenged to go further. Ideas we came up with included:

Music – split the piece into horizontal strips and play it like a graphic score.

- You could plot the stars and other points onto a score and use those points for the contour of a melody or rhythm.

Maths – Draw triangles between the stars and use them to teach about triangle theory

Science – Astronomy of course, but also something about colour perception or synesthesia

PE – the shapes could be used to plot an obstacle course

Food Tech – Design and cook the menu that Van Gogh might have eaten while looking out at that scene

Now to Songwriting

How could we apply this exercise to songwriting? As we sat staring at the picture I found myself doing some very clear and simply things: I systematically went through the possible subjects we teach at our school, attempting to find an activity for each of them. I also turned the picture round to see it from different angles, treating it sometimes as abstract shapes, sometimes making use of it’s possible meanings.

To generalise that to music, rather than subjects we might use different elements of the song and ask, how can we get a melody from the picture? A chord sequence? A structure? A lyric? A rhythm? An arrangement?

As well as the musical ideas I’ve already mentioned, here are some more ideas:

You could have a musical idea to represent different parts of the picture. So a regular, structured back beat or riff could represent the buildings, a swirling melody could represent the swirls of colour in the sky and lush unexpected chords could punctuate that melody as the stars do. If I was to compose that I’d probably produce a loop based piece with different layers appearing to represent the different parts of the picture.

Moving left to right the stars follow this sequence – 1 low, 1 high, I low, 2 high, 3 at the same time, 1 high, pause…. high low high. That could easily be turned into a loop or melodic idea that could be developed.

Chords? Rotate the picture 90 degrees clockwise and take just the top portion – there are five patches of colour, the third and fourth of which are a very similar shade of blue. Perhaps each patch of colour is a different chord, darker shades minor and light shades major, with the two similar sections representing the same chord?

Lyrics? Of course there are all sorts of characters who might be looking out at this scene – Van Gogh might be well known but you could always imagine another character and tell their story. You could describe the scene, or get more creative and take inspiration from the names of the things painted: Building, sky, star, blue, tree, hill, church, spire.

The possibilities are endless, and will be coloured by the attitude you have to music. For me, being as far from a visual thinker as one can get, this was a real challenge but a rewarding one. It forced me to think and to find ideas in places I usually wouldn’t look.

How would you use this picture to inspire you?