There’s no such thing as a conceptual songwriter. As an artist you are free to choose from all sorts of funky media and part of the game is to work outside the box and provoke thought and criticism. Songwriting isn’t like that. Composition is like that, but songwriting isn’t. As a songwriter you’ve signed up to write songs, and the popular song isn’t a very flexible form. It’s not quite as restrictive as being a sonnetwriter, but it’s closer to that than, say, a novelwriter.
There’s nothing to stop you exploding the confines of the form and writing 15-minute one-chord freeform poetry, but that’s not a song. You could argue that it is, but you’d be wrong (the word song refers to a pretty specific musical form, and let’s assume we’re talking about popular song, even late 20th Century popular song to keep things simple).
I don’t want to get into the semantics of whether we use the word ‘song’ just for short vocal forms, or for any piece of music with vocals but I do want to both agree and disagree with Ben.
I agree that no songwriter can avoid the technical aspects. Any long time reader of Songwright will know that I’m all for educated songwriters who understand the craft and know how to create well formed, interesting songs.
Where I disagree is with the apparent implication that songwriters should stick to the limits, confines and conventions of popular song forms and not try to push the boundaries and ‘think outside the box’.
Sorry Ben, that’s wrong. If you’re a songwriter, you’re a composer and if you’re not trying to do things that push the envelope, that do something new and fresh (Not necessarily revolutionary, just new, interesting, exciting) then what’s the point of writing your songs at all?
We are composers, we have a duty not to bore our listeners with conventional derivative songs. The only way to do that is to understand all the conventions and possibilities of the craft and to then try and move beyond them in a way that works.
On Sunday 18th July, I was guest speaker at the London Songwriters Meetup. I spoke about 10 Tips for songwriters, and shared some of my favourite tips with the lovely songwriters in attendance. I also heard some fantastic songs and had a really good time.
It’s more important to write lots of songs that it is to spend ages trying to make one perfect one.
You look at all the good songwriters and you realise they’ve written hundreds of songs. That’s how you get good at it. As Diane Warren,possibly the world’s most successful songwriter says: “My secret? I show up. That’s it.” Six days a week, she writes songs, and has been doing so for 30 years. Her very earliest songs? “They all sucked”. So write often, a song a week is a good start.
“Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius, Robert Weisberg discusses statistical research into the proportion of masterpieces to minor works among great and not-so-great composers.
The researchers concluded that the rate of hits to misses was pretty constant between major and minor composers. The truly great composers produce more masterpieces than the others, mainly because they produced more work overall.”
This is a tip made by a lot of songwriters in 10 Tips for Songwriters, in different guises and the basic point is an obvious one.
If you’re going to be a songwriter, you need to write songs. We’re very good at distracting ourselves from that but actually one of the most important things to do is write songs. Lots of them.
2. ( From Gary Jugert) Know the difference between bourbon and whiskey - A songwriter needs the proper tools.
Constraints are your friend. If the tempo, or the key, or the genre, or the subject matter, or anything else are already decided before you start to write, you have much less messing about to do once you get started. It’s like the difference between trying to find a needle in a haystack and trying to find a needle in a field.
I think there’s a lot to be said for this – creativity thrives with limitations, it’s easier to be imaginitive when some choices have already been made. I’m in favour of limiting yourself in some way.
Now usually I write lyrics at the same time, or after I’ve written the music. So as a challenge to myself last week I wrote a set of lyrics before I had any inkling what the music was going to be and then had the challenge of composing the music to them.
Things to take away from this song – the structure of the song isn’t verse chorus verse chorus, I saw no point in coming back to the verse material later.
The chorus is a blatant steal from the Radiohead song ‘There there’
4. (From Gary Jugert again) Practice your offended face
Sooner or later somebody is going to call you a songwriter, and you’ll need to say, “I’m a composer,” with your offended face.
5. Constantly expand you pallette
Music theory is your friend. If you only use the same three chords then you are limiting yourself. As a guitar player, if you only use standard chord voicings, well to be frank stop it put some effort in. You should know at the very lest all the chords available to you in the major key – which if you include sevenths, sixths and their inversions is roughly 70 different chords.
I remember very distinctly however, a guitar lessons from my old guitar teacher where he showed us how to harmonise the major scale to see which seventh chords you get in that. And that was interesting, but nothing very new. But then he did the same with the harmonic minor scale – and this was the first time I’d ever considered that you could have a minor chord with a major seventh, and the first time I’d ever heard of an augmented chord.
This opened my eyes to all sorts of new harmonic ideas that I’d never used before. I’d heard them in music before but never realised what they were. Since then I’ve always tried to expand my pallette and learn new things, and I sincerely think you’re doing yourself an injustice as a songwriter if you don’t continously learn new things musically.
Here’s a song that uses some of those ideas:
Things to take away :- there’s a couple of different time signatures used rather than just one, and I use some of those harmonic minor scale chords as well.
6. (From Gary Jugert again) One word: Guitar – The other instruments are for losers.
7. Songwriting is not lyric writing
Lyrics are important but they are only one element of a song. Sometimes when I say this, people reply ‘of course, there’s music too’ but there’s more to it than that. A song is not a 50/50 spilt between words and music. Your melody, your use of rhythm, groove and tempo, your choice of chord and scale, the instruments and timbre you use, each of these elements has equal importance to you lyrics.
There are writers out there who claim to write about songwriting, but only talk about lyric. There are songwriters who could talk at length about poetic meter but couldn’t tell you what the dominant chord in D major is.
One of the main reasons I started www.songwright.co.uk was my frustration at the lack of songwriting blogs that addressed songwriting, rather than just lyric writing. Melodies matter, interesting music matters. In fact interesting music is far more important. Lyrics are very often hard to make out at first listen, and even when they can be made out they don’t do much to express the meaning of a song.
What?
Yes, your lyrics are not even the primary conveyors of meaning in your song. Just as tone of voice can dictate whether speech is sarcastic or genuine, you choice of musical ideas will colour what your lyrics mean.
Which brings us to tip 8
8. Consider the meaning of your chord progressions
And while you’re at it, the meaning of the scale you’re using, the meaning of the structure you’ve chosen.
For me every chord you play is layered with meaning depending on context and relationship to what’s around it.
I could go on at length about the meaning of the various modes, but I won’t bore you with that. Instead I’ll make the simple point that this chord progression – V to I – which has been the basis of Western music for a couple of centuries now is hard to justify. Using it makes you sound corny as far as I’m concerned.
You might disagree with that example but the basis of that point is simply this:- everything you use, melody chords, everything means something, and they the listener uses your music also means something and if your song is to be successful you need to consider what those meanings are because they say more to the listener than your words do.
The Lydian mode for me has connotations of dreaminess, happiness but with an edge of strangeness. I made use of it in ‘Something’s Bound to Happen’
9. Steal Ideas
There’s a quote : ‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal’. I’ve heard that attributed to aristotle, D H Lawrence, John Lennon and Igor Stravinsky. And it’s true. I don’t mean plagiarise, I don’t mean steal music, I mean steal ideas. This way of phrasing a melody, that way of changing key, these chords, that rhythm.
I do this all the time, as I mentioned with the Radiohead song I’ve stolen from.
My last example, to illustrate my stealing an idea is from a song Called ‘Where Once They Had Hearts’. The idea I stole is from two sources – one snippet I’d read about Coltrane’s Giant Steps and two the middle eight chord progression from a song by heavy metal band symphony x – the idea of using chords a major third apart in a cycle.
The other idea I stole was from David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’ – the idea of composing a tongue in cheek musical style ballad.
I’ve made a small update to the comments function which should mean you can subscribe to recieve replies to comments you have made. Just the check the box under the comments box.
Hopefully this will help to encourage debate and interaction on the blog.
Why not dip your toe into the comments on my recentposts.
*Tom Slatter is a composer, singer and songwriter who writes, records, plays and teaches in London. He will be coming in to talk to us about his recent project – publishing a songwriting e-book, and how he went about organising it and making the project come to fruition. He will be answering questions regarding the above, as well as questions about live internet gigging, his songwriting methods, and songwriting blogging.
I’ve been thinking lately about creativity. As songwriters we are trying to create new music, to compose something that has never before been heard. What is the best way to do this? Is creativity innate, easy to some, impossible to others?
In the TED lecture linked to above, Ken Robinson argues that education systems around the world are designed to suppress creativity because they were invented to meet the needs of the industrial revolution and so work along manufacturing lines. Identical children are created along linear lines, each the same as the last. Exactly the kind of approach that creativity is not.
What is creativity?
I like Robinson’s definition of creativity – ‘The process of having original ideas that have value’ – but what form does that process take for a succesful songwriter, and how do we judge whether our songs have value?
Probably the second of those is easier to answer. A song is valuable if you find it valuable. Perhaps it makes you feel happy, or relieved. Perhaps it fits a brief you’ve been given, or gets the audience clapping, dancing and singing along. It might express something you couldn’t otherwise say, or perhaps it expresses nothing but in five musical minutes allows you to transcend normal life and loose yourself in music.
Value is subjective. How could it not be? Music that is vital to some is meaningless to others.
There is a danger in the word ‘value’ – that it could be confused with monetary ideas. As Errol over at Elumir.com says, if ‘value’ is defined as a commodity that the masses are willing to pay money for, I don’t think that creative thought needs to have this value.’
Value is whatever you define it as, after all we’re talking about your songs, not someone elses. Whether a new song is creative is therefore in part a subjective thing.
Whether your song is original is less subjective. That chord progression or lyrical idea, that melody or structure might have been used a hundred times, and that is something we can judge, but has it been used in that context? Have these ideas been juxtaposed in exactly this way before?
Often creativity is about showing us a new angle on the familiar, in fact I’d argue creativity often has to build on what has gone before if it is to have value. Twentieth century classical music, for example, saw composers take huge leaps in originality, but some of it’s achievements were so far divorced from what had gone before that they lost all value.
Of course, if I chose a particular example to illustrate that point there would be hundreds of people who would disagree and say ‘no, that piece is creative, it has value to me’.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, says that creativity doesn’t happen in our heads but in the interaction between our imagination and our social context. It’s a matter of experience and response, a matter of relationship to others and a commentary on the significance of our encounters.
Context has a lot to do with whether a piece of music is original. A country musician using a country groove is hardly creative. A reggae band suddenly breaking into a country groove could be the height of creativity, depending on context (Or not. Merely juxtaposing different genres in unexpectedly isn’t necessarily creative. It all depends on how you do it)
The point stands I think, that for original ideas to have value, and therefore be creative, they are going to build on what we know.
And then points out how inaccurate this is and instead quotes opera singer Dan Klein: “Creativity is the ability or process in which someone identifies the rules or traditions of a set paradigm and then goes about interpreting, breaking, or bending them to bring about a new or previously unexplored connection.”
I couldn’t agree more. Creativity depends on rules, context, expectations and how we play with them. Which is good news for us, as it means we needn’t to reinvent the wheel with every single song.
What are the characteristics of a Creative Songwriter?
Some ideas from others:
If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you won’t achieve… Most adults are afraid to be wrong. – Ken Robinson
Gary Ewer, writing on his Essential Secrets of Songwriting Blog recently, says ‘Unpredictability, weirdness, creativity – these are still the qualities I look for in good music. So I find myself ever turning to songwriters and composers that challenge my imagination and take me on journeys that stimulate my mind.
Matt Stevens, looping guitarist extraordinaire, says he consciously worries about being original when composing, and uses specific techniques, for example ‘I focus on using inversions to make it sound more clever than it actually is’.
All children are born artists – Pablo Picasso
There are some specifics to take from those quotes -
You’re not afraid to fail – Creating is risky, and to do it well (or at all) you need a safe place where mistakes don’t matter. This part of the process where you fail might happen well before your song is ever heard by others, or might happen there on stage, heard by you and the audience at the same time. Where you take the risk is up to you, but you have to take it? How do you know if an idea is any good until you’ve heard it?
You make unexpected connections – We don’t just need something new – the new idea has to connect to what we know, but in unexpected, suprising, delightful ways. We’ve all heard the soaring chorus, but not in that part of the song, not in this genre. We’ve used to four line melodies, but why not three or five lines? We know the chords in the key of C, but how can you work an Fsharp major chord into there?
You challenge the listener – You have enough respect for your audience that you don’t just give them what they’ve heard a thousand times before – because that’s not songwriting, it’s fast food. The reason so many of us grow out of the teenage pop songs we used to listen to isn’t because there’s anything inherently wrong with them, but because we’ve heard it all before, and top-forty pop rarely gives us something new. It’s the McDonalds burger of music.
You have a wide musical pallete – Matt Stevens knows his chord voicings. He also knows his time signatures and how to make the most out of limited resources (You should hear what he can do with one guitar and a couple of pedals). If as a songwriter you’re not constantly learning new chords, rhythms, lyrical ideas, melodic possibilities, then you’ll never have a wide enough pallette to write something truly creative.
(This is also why younger songwriters, who haven’t heard or learned enough to have a wide enough pallette, can still be creative in a way – Just because someone else has done it before doesn’t mean they didn’t just come up with it)
Your style changes – the songs you wrote five years ago aren’t the same as the songs you write now, or the songs you’ll write tomorrow. You are never happy to repeat yourself, but instead try to take your songs to new places.
You’re childish – or rather you retain the qualities that children have – a love of the new, an insatiable curiosity, the courage to try things out.
All of these things can be practiced and learned – creativity is a skill, not an innate ability. We can all learn how to create original ideas that have value.
A question for the comments – What can we do to improve our creativity as songwriters?
10 Tips for Songwriters is a collaborative Ebook that I’ve put together with the help of 17 other fantastic composers and songwriters. Here’s an extract from the introduction:
Introduction
At my songwriting blog, www.songwright.co.uk, I often interview songwriters. I find one of the best ways to get yourself inspired and excited
about songwriting is to find out how someone else does it.
That’s what this book is all about.
It was written by 18 successful songwriters who wanted to share their 10
tips for songwriting.
Have they all written commercial hits? Have they had their songs performed by famous singers, or
sold a billion records? No, for the most part they haven’t, but what sort of a way to measure success is that?
These 18 people have all proved themselves successful at writing songs. They wrote them for a myriad of reasons, to express themselves, to earn a living, to impress their friends, for a songwriting community, to practice their craft or simply because they could.
Each of the contributors has their own way of writing songs. There are writers here who start with the lyrics, and others who start with the music. Some are theory experts, others wouldn’t know a bar line from a bass clef. Some know their way around a recording studio, others can just about manage a cd player.
Each one has contributed their 10 tips for writing songs – the 10 things that they think should matter most to songwriters. Some agree on the basics, others have very different priorities. Some you might think are stating the obvious, others might be saying something you’ve never thought of before.
But I know that no two readers will agree on which are the most important tips here.
So, you can read the book all the way through, or you can flip to a random songwriter and find out what they have to say. Either way, it is my hope that you’ll find something interesting or inspiring on each and every page.
I’ve found talking to songwriters one of the most rewarding things I can do for my own songwriting, I hope you do too.
This 46 minute long piece was composed by members of Cafe Noodle and edited by your truly into one huge composition. The brief was to use the title to create a piece in D minor at 75 bpm.
I’m really pleased with the result and am truly blown away by the talented musicians involved.
Spinning the Compass
I’ve started a series of posts talking about the writing of my solo album, and sharing some of the demos I recorded.
The Lydian Mode is one of the three major modes (along with the Mixolydian and the good old major scale Ionian). The Mixolydian is bluesy and rock ‘n’ roll, the Ionian simple and easy, but the Lydian is sweet and dreamy. That dreamy character I think comes from the lack of a dominant seventh chord on the fifth – instead we get a major seventh chord which has less of a pull toward the tonic.
There is also the sharp fourth, which can add an uneasiness to a major chord. Try playing a C chord with an F sharp or an F chord with a B to hear what I mean.
Construction
The lydian mode is almost the same as the ‘normal’ major scale, except that the fourth note is sharpened by one semitone. So in C lydian the notes would be C D E F# G A B C.
You can do the same to any major scale. For example, G lydian is G A B C# D E F# G. D lydian is D E F# G# A B C# D.
To generalise, the intervals in the lydian mode are:
Tone Tone Tone Semitone Tone Tone Semitone.
It might look like a tiny change but having that sharp fourth is what gives the lydian mode its character.
Chords:
The seven chords in this mode are:
IMaj7 II7 iiim7 IVhalf-dim Vmaj7 vimin7 viiMin7
In C Lydian: C Maj7 D7 Em7 F#half-dim Gmaj7 Amin7 BMin7 In G Lydian: G Maj7 A7 Bm7 C#half-dim Dmaj7 Emin7 F#Min7
Chord Progressions?
The Fleetwood Mac song above uses the most common chords in this mode – the tonic followed by the second, both of which are major. In this case E the F#, but you could try G then A, or C the D.
Over at Cafe Noodle, we’re just about to embark on a collaborative composing/songwriting thing:
The Brief:
Compose a piece of music using/inspired by the title ‘Big Calm’.
The piece must be in D minor
-(How exactly you interpret the term ‘In D Minor’ is up to you. If you want to modulate at some point do, but it will probably be necessary to end in a definite D Minor)
The piece must be in 75 BPM (if it has a pulse).
We’re going to join them all together in one ultra long piece of music.
IndieSongwriter.net is a website about songwriting.
It is written by Tom Slatter, a musician and teacher who can also be found at tomslatter.co.uk.
IndieSongwriter, used to be called Songwright.co.uk.
