- No-one would write language like this, but if you don’t understand musical cadences, you might be writing songs like this.

Cadences are the chord changes that come at the end of musical sentences. They occur at the end of pieces and sections, but also at the end of lines as well.

There are two basic jobs they do:-

A cadence can sound final like a full stop/period

or

A cadence can sound like it needs to carry on – like a question mark.

The ‘Classic’ cadences.

At college you learn of four common cadences:

Perfect – Chord V to chord I eg. G to C – this is the classic ending ‘full stop’ cadence.

Imperfect – I to V the opposite of the perfect eg. C to G – the classic way of making your musical sentence sound unfinished.

Plagal – An ending cadence you hear in lots of hymns – Iv to I eg F to C. This also sounds finished.

Interrupted – V to Vi eg. G to Am. This sounds unfinished because after the V chord we expect to hear I. Instead we hear vi – a minor chord that makes it sound as if the music has to continue.

These aren’t the only options however. In the various modes there are plenty of other chord changes that can sound finished, or unfinished.

The basic principle is: move from an ‘unfinished’ chord to a ‘finished’ chord and it sounds final. Do the opposite and it sounds as if the music is going to carry on.

Here are some other cadence possibilites:

In A aeolian G -> Am sounds finished, Am -> F sounds unfinished.

In E phrygian Dm -> F sounds unfinished, F -> Em sounds finished.

How to use this information?

Look at your songs – do you have the right mixture of ‘finished’ and ‘unfinished’ phrases? A good place to have an unfinished cadence for example is just before the chorus – end unfinished and you’ll set up the right energy for the start of the chorus.

Think about where you need moments of tension – that’s where you want an unfinished cadence. Think where you need an ending or a moment of release – that’s where you need to return to the home chord via something like the perfect cadence.

Having played a short notice gig with them a while back, I was more than happy to oblige.

Musically it’s a real change for me – if you’ve heard my music you’ll know I like weird time signatures, lots of layers and several changes in key every song.

In this new band, having a third chord is showing off. As the front man put it, “with this sort of music, any suggestion of cleverness and the audience will walk out”.

As a songwriter this is a great challenge:

a. Because it means we have to find ways of making the songs interesting without being too ‘clever’ – we have to stay simple.
b. It’s collaborative, and very much the front man’s project. I’m used to working as a solo artist, but this is very much someone else’s thing that I’m helping out with.

So how do you make a song interesting if you’re only going to use two chords.

1. Think about groove and layers

One song we have is literally two chords – A and G. How on earth can that be interesting? There are two basic tactics we’ve used. First, we made sure there was a killer basic groove. This is glam rock, the whole idea is to get people dancing. That’ll happen with this if we put it in front of the right audience because of a simple, infectious 4.4 groove.

We’ve combined that with simple layering techniques – the first verse for example is just bass and drums, the chorus big loud guitars and the midle 8 bass and drums, much quieter and in half time.

Choosing a half time groove (Snare on the 3rd beat rather than normal time – 2 and 4) creates an effective contrast, and allows us to crash back into a sudden normal time repeat of the chorus for the outro.

It’s all primary colour, big loud slabs of contrast rather than subtlety, but it works really well.

2. Pace and key between songs

If you’re not being clever within songs you need to make sure that songs next to each other don;t sound too similar. Don’t have everything in A in a row, don;t have everything a mid-paced rocker. Break it up with contrast from song to song. After all, we’re putting together a set, so each song is only part of the live show.

3. Structure FUndamentals

Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Middle Chorus. That’s basically it and straying too far won#t go down well, so we’re making sure each song has a really clearly defined structure.

4. It’s all about the hook

Lots of ‘hey’ or ‘ooh’ based vocal hooks – everyone’s a sucker for a pop hook right? If you haven’t got the subtle interplay of cross rhythms or other muso tricks, a good simple infectious hook will do just as nicely.

They’re arguably harder to write as well, but we’ve been doing well by sticking to the pentatonic scale and question and answer phrasing.

5. Performance

The front man, Paul, is a joy to watch. Even in a rehearsal studio he gives a fantastic performance – everything you need in a song is there in his body language.

I’ll share more about the project as it becomes available.

How do you make things interesting and still retain simplicity and accessibility?

This is a song I wrote a few years ago, but I’ve only just got round to recording properly.

It’s in G minor and the melody is based on the G minor blues scale – in that it has a flat 5th note in it C#, but I decided to use A augmented as the second chord (A C# F), which makes it sound rather different to the blues.

It is about a man who graduallly replaces all body parts with mechanical alternatives.

Here’s the second installment.

What title does this picture inspire?

Here’s number 4, a return to the steampunk themes I wrote about for my first 2 albums. It’s called Mother’s Been Talking To Ghosts Again.

So as an aide to inspiration I thought it might be useful to start the ‘Monday Morning Title Challenge’.

It’s dead simple. Each week I’ll post a picture from Flickr.com that I think is interesting.

I challenge you to come up with a song title that fits the picture.

Here’s the first picture:

I’m releasing a new piece of music every weekend for 52 weeks. I sort of know what I’m doing up until half way through March.

This is a new version of an old song – I’ve redone some of the guitars, bass and drums and remixed it.

Enjoy!

Maybe we’ll surface soon,
Under a winter moon,
Thaw must have left weakness.

Maybe we’ll freeze again
Awaiting the summer rain,
Ice in our veins.

A ship sails on a solid sea,
A perfect place for you and me,
A moondial turns until we move again.

Last sunlight for six months,
Last movement this year.

Last Sunlight Fading,
Ice in our veins.

… and a new facebook page, which you should come a ‘like’.

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.

Getting Started

2 weeks ago at the age of 22 I finally released my debut album. I’ve received kind words, endorsement and even a bit of money as a result and I’m very grateful for all of it. Grateful because 17 months ago I wouldn’t have considered recording a song let alone selling an album.

At the age of 21 years I suffered from the anxiety of being perceived negatively. I hated the idea of people listening to my music and thinking “Wow, that’s terrible”. I couldn’t cope with the idea of putting my heart and soul into the art form I love only to have it stamped on.

So what changed?

The realisation of what this anxiety would lead to – What if I never made music?

This hit me hard.

What was worse?

Producing music and then finding out that somebody thought it rubbish?

Or

Being in love with an art form yet never indulging in it?

Taking the plunge

Realising how detrimental the latter option would have been to my life was an epiphany. It is better to produce something and take the risk.

So I took the plunge. I recorded a simple piece, created using my bass and a looper, uploaded it to a soundcloud account, created a blog to introduce it and waited to see if any of my social media contacts would listen to it.

They did. Only a small amount but enough to talk to me, give me advice on the recording and tell me they enjoyed it.

I’d taken the bait and now knew how fulfilling the process of creating art was. I now knew that I had to take a bigger plunge. I had to create more music, but I had find a creative process that could to take a bit of advice from time to time and that deliver the narrative and writing process behind each song (because if the reader has no way to access the meaning of the art, how are they going to relate to it?).

Summer Music Project

On the 9th July 2010 I released my ‘Summer Music Project’ which took place over a 10 week period. The aim being to write and record a song every single week, then, every 2 weeks, release an update of how the process was going as well as a song from the writing period for people to listen to. I used my Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pages to deliver content from the process. Although my community was limited I still got feedback, I still got conversations over my music and this made me very happy.

The ‘Summer Music Project’ finished on the week of 6th September 2010. With the final song demo finished I was all ready to hit the final recording process, but I hit an unplanned problem. That week I had just restarted University, more specifically my third and final year of Uni. The final year was thrown at me with full force and I knew that it, sadly, took precedence over the finalizing of the album.

However, it was not wasted in vain. Being a music student my year was packed with the teaching of performing and recording music which lead me to gaining experience that would benefit the recording process of my album. It also gave me time to slowly upgrade my gear. The entire of the ‘Summer Music Project’ was recorded using an Acer laptop and ‘Kristal’ software to record, as such the entire process was plagued with issues. By the time my University year ended I had updated to an IMac (which is a superior machine regardless of your opinion) and had with it the brand new version of GarageBand (which again was vastly superior).

In June 2011 I finally got back to work on the album. However, due to my time being taken away from the process, I needed to get back in touch with the songs. I took this time to enable a ‘demoing period’.

Demos and Recording

The ‘demoing period’ was quite important to me, it gave me the opportunity to record rough versions of all the songs on my new hardware. This gave me the opportunity to see where the weaknesses were in the songs, cut out any unnecessary parts and then finalize the sounds and layers. I believe this gave the whole album a dimension of strength that it didn’t have before. This allowed the final record process to go along pretty much without any hitch.

The final part of the process was mixing and mastering – the second biggest part of the album after writing it.

As the creator you want your music to sound as amazing as possible to the best standards as possible. My tips for this mixing and mastering would be:

• Find several albums with sounds you’d like to emulate. Locate that sound and really think “why do I want that sound”and “how was it created?”
• Only ever mix one song a day. Hard I know but it’s worth it. Giving yourself breathing space and a fresh pair of
• ears of each listen to a virtue, it really is.
• Once you think you’ve achieved a sound you are happy with stick that song on your MP3 player and listen to it along
• with your other music at a suitable time. I get into work at least 20 minutes before anyone else and that gave me an opportunity to listen to the track on my own with no distractions.
• Have a time limit. The same as with the writing period. Yes, you need a good amount of time to carry out this process but to much time will lead to boredom with the tunes and you’lleventually lead to missing parts from songs. Give yourself a cut off point for your album

It took me a good 2 months to get a result that I knew I couldn’t improve, but it was worth every second.

Release!

My debut album ‘Baby Steps’ (the name being a representation of the albums creation) was released on the 21st November 2011. Do I think people have listened to these songs and thought “I don’t like this”? Do I think people will listen to the release in the future and think “I don’t like this”?

When these questions arise the only real question worth asked is “Does that even matter?”. As I said at the start of this article – At this point I’ve received kinds words, endorsement and even a bit of money as a result (that’s right, there are humans in the world that enjoy my music so much that they’ve even parted with their hard earned currency to listen to it – Wow). All this is amazing, it really is. Having someone listening to and enjoying your music really is and always will be one of the greatest highlights of my short existence on this planet.

Your personal satisfaction of producing art you love is paramount. Satisfy this and you shall be happy.

- I don’t know about you, but I absolutely empathise with Rhys’s dilemma – put out music that isn’t perfect or let your fear of criticism silence you.

I’ve put out quite a lot of music over the last few years – I’ve had plenty of feedback and sometimes it isn’t 100% positive. That can be really useful, but sometimes it isn’t at all (my first solo album recieved a bad review that said almost nothing about the music). Generally speaking however, you find the fear of criticism is much worse than any actual criticism you recieve.

So – album creation stories, tips or advice? – That’s what the comments are for!