indieshoegazer

Absolutely. I think you have a great attitude about it. It's important to live a well rounded life, especially if you have family and financial obligations. I also sort of draw the line at 2-3 hrs a day songwriting/guitar practice (on average).

I'm guessing there are a fair number of folks like me in this forum - people who work 40 hours a week, but enjoy songwriting and musical activities in their free time. I was just wondering how much time you personally devote to songwriting and general musical activities per week. As for me, I spend probably too much time - averaging about 20 hours a week, which is pretty much all of my free time.

Trying to write songs, focused on alternate tunings. Came up with some stuff that seemed to have potential at the time but lost interest in them later on - probably because I didn't record them right away, I should have. I will record these ideas at least the next time I practice - I probably won't be able to tonight due to having to go to my mom's tonight. There are two to three ideas - fingerpicking in full step down standard on the fifth fret to the chord progression of Atlantic City transposed to a different key, which is fun to play, strumming shoegazerish song inspired by the Dodos Fools in open G tuning, then a vocal melody I came up with to a vamp on a fingerpicking pattern based loosely on That's The Way in open G. Vocal melodies are still hard to come by, the ones I come up with are droney and uninteresting. Need to always have the iPhone around to record ideas while brainstorming for ideas. I also played around with my recording equipment, especially my new condenser mic, by trying to record some covers. Had some problems with gain levels recording fingerpicking songs and singing - I still have to work these problems out. Had problems recording a semi difficult fingerpicking cover while singing - it always takes me so many takes to record anything decent and I don't have much time to record usually. I have to record while the wife and baby are out or when everyone's asleep. It's really inconvenient, I don't know what to do about it. I mean I could set up a room in the basement or something but I'd feel bad about going downstairs to record and leaving the wife with the baby for more than a half hour or so, or renting out a practice space and going away for hours to work on my music. This is a hobby after all. If I was younger and a single guy I'd be able to record all day. I'd probably write different songs too. Anyway, that's my problem. If I want to have a lot of videos on my youtube channel and a good set of songs for an EP this year then I'm going to have to find a way to do it. I shouldn't spend more than an hour recording at a time anyways, if it takes more than an hour then I need to rehearse more.

They give you a copy of EZDrummer lite with the software, which I think allows for greater control of drum patterns, possibly editing - not sure, never used. They say other VST and AU's can appear natively in Songframe. Those patterns are just to have a rhythmic frame to do your composition with anyways - they're meant as a rough guide until you export your song to your DAW, where you can put a real rhythm track on it. The other thing that looks interesting is the Songframe song is exported to the DAW with markers to denote the various 'songbits'. I like how everything - even lyrics - is in one place. I never liked having to keep lyrics and notes in another application or a notebook apart from musical stems.

Those chord progressions aren't sample libraries or loops, they're more like suggestions and can be customized or ignored.

Put into a box? This software allows for free form composition.

What? There's no sample library other than some drum loops.

http://www.tanageraudioworks.com/Products/SongFrame looks interesting, was wondering if anyone has tried it.

Spent the past couple of days visiting with the in laws, gorging myself on food, drinking, watching our babies play together. It was entirely satisfying, but didn't get any songwriting done. Thought about it a lot though. Watched this video with Nellie McKay on All Songs Considered - she's given 3 days to write a song and she writes a really complicated 1920's musical theater pastiche that's really impressive and intimidating http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89287187 . Anyways she's brilliant, just the fluency on the wide variety of instruments, the theoretical knowledge, the comfort around studio technology - it's all intimidating. I'm amazed by anyone who can do this, as I've not proven myself capable yet. Came home, had to clean the house, threw two loads on laundry in, had to put the baby to bed, it's almost 10 o'clock right now and I have to stay up until the clothes are dry and I totally don't want to go to work tomorrow. I'm not sure how I can fit songwriting into my life, it's just too hectic. Been thinking of the partial song that I wrote over the past few days - it's way to poppy and 'teenagey', like something Weezer would write. But maybe I just need to write a whole bunch of really bad songs that aren't what I want to achieve at all just to get the process down, before I start writing songs that I feel proud of. I'm prepared to do that, I guess. There's no time limit but it would be nice to have something to show for all this effort in the next couple years.

Here are some of my thoughts after using Songframe for a couple of weeks. IAC midi driver needs to be configured to use Chirp as a MIDI controller - this is documented, but was an obstacle to getting set up quickly. Interface looks very basic, compared to cool looking DAW interfaces of Logic and Abelton Live - I know it's not a DAW but the 'kiddie' interface makes you less inclined to spend all your time in Songframe. Adobe Air is not a good software platform for developing mac desktop apps - this should have been written in Cocoa. I understand why they're using Adobe Air - you don't have to write two versions, one for mac and one for windows, but it is slow, doesn't look good, and is less responsive to stuff like native os keystrokes. Sometimes the Adobe Air UI 'locks up' - and you can't do stuff like drag a drum loop to a songbit, the only thing that fixes it is restarting the application. There should have the option to delete unused takes. I don't like casio tone of drums, how you're locked into piano based sounds for composing. I haven't installed EZ Drummer, maybe that would help. I can see myself getting bored with these limitations, but maybe the ability to use different AU instruments inside of Songframe would help - I don't own any copies of third party AU's right now so I can't try this out for myself. Ability to zoom a track needs work, it should respond to keystrokes as intuitively as the zoom tool in Logic. i don't like it when chords turn to black rectangles because theyre squeezed into a bar w other chords. Cut and paste from lyric tools to songbits lyrics does not work - cut paste creates a new songbit instead of just pasting the lyric into the songbit. Why's there a fully functional word processing functionality in the Lyrics tool window but not in the Lyrics section of an individual song bit? Should have it in both places. There should be a way to loop multiple songbits at a time, or parts of songbits, like in a DAW, instead of just the whole song or individual songbits.

I took piano lessons as a kid starting around age 6 to like sophomore year in high school. By the time I quit piano lessons I was playing classical pieces at a very high level, but I was also really sick of playing piano. What I always wanted to do was play guitar, but I never got the opportunity because I was so focused on piano. It was only until much later, in 1999, when I decided to learn guitar. I had a roommate at the time that let me play her acoustic and taught me a few basics. I eventually bought myself an electric guitar and amp, and started to take lessons with a Jazz guy. My focus at this time was to improve technically, and I mainly played classic rock and metal cover songs with complicated solos. I quit playing the guitar for about 2 years, I think this was around 2003-2005 - when I was really busy with graduate school. After graduate school, I got back into playing guitar - but I was still mainly playing hard rock covers. About a year ago I started playing a lot more acoustic - I had always been a fan of acoustic players like Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, and I set out to learn the fingerstyle techniques used in my favorite acoustic songs. I think I decided to try to write and record songs about a year ago, after hearing a friend's band's album - I wanted to express myself in my own way. For the last year I think I've been preparing myself for writing and recording. I've been practicing a lot on the guitar, I think I'm finally at a level where I think I can play some cool sounding stuff that doesn't sound too amateurish. I've also been buying gear and teaching myself how to use software like Logic Studio. So 2010 will be the year I write and record my album. I plan to post my progress in this blog, I'm a good guitar player, not great, but good enough. I'm bad at singing, but I think I can work on my voice. I know that I can write great lyrics, I've just always been good at creative writing. I know how to work recording software and equipment. I'm still a decent piano player, although my awesome chops are mostly gone, the best thing I think I took away from my piano experience is all the music theory and the ability to sight read. I'm not sure I can write a good vocal melody, I think I can. I've certainly spent my life listening to music, digesting different styles. We'll see. I actually think the ability to write a good vocal melody is the most important skill of a songwriter - you can always hire session musicians and producers anyways, and there's plenty of songs out there with dumb lyrics. Anyways, that's where I'm at. I'm in Michigan for NYE weekend at my in laws, no guitar with me. So I'm just thinking about songwriting and reading up on using the Songframe software. So far I have the beginnings of a pretty good song if I can finish it. The chord progressions, melodies and lyrics need a little tweaking but I'm starting to get excited about it.