john

Thanks Lisa! I’m glad to hear that you are back actively writing! How about your singing? As always your support makes a huge difference both to the site and for me personally. I am sure that is true for Mahesh and Peggy too! Jason must have been pleased that he was instantly understood! Lol

Oh please be silly. It’s a too serious story for a silly thread, but I’ll post the short form lol. The site is indeed much quieter right now, but it won’t stay that way. We know exactly why it is quiet and exactly what to do to fix it. Some may have heard it many times, but much has changed behind the scenes… the staff and I could be better at communicating our progress. I posted an update here: Songstuff 2024 I can explain some of the reasons the site is quieter, but some I would prefer to keep to PM if you are interested. On Achazia, and a number of other members, I think she is far less musically active full stop. Time passes. New interests etc.

Hi Gang It’s been a while since I posted any updates on our progress. Staff have been so busy! In order to safeguard the long term future for Songstuff and ensure it is around serving your needs for as long as possible we have decided to introduce some basic products. As mentioned the staff have been very busy (you have no idea). Some of the primary reasons have been a reshuffle of our goals, or more correctly how we need to deliver them to members. This reshuffling has meant for a prolonged period the staff have been reworking the site, and putting some products in place that will help us to cover costs for the site as is, and hopefully help fund improvements. Obviously, while re-working the site we were far less active in encouraging community activity. While we have been creating products, we still intend on offering free content to site users and extra to free members. We plan on adding a basic, affordable paid subscriber to our existing free members too. Until now the site has several times stopped growing because of the size of my wallet choking that growth. By introducing products (courses, subscribers and ads) we plan to address the funding gap. Using courses and a bunch of other free and paid offerings, we will attract new members. That increased activity will help attract back at least some of the members whose activity has fallen away. This is just one of many ways we intend to get the boards active again. So: Community Activity We have a whole bunch of things queued, ready to re-engage the forums, and reach out to new potential members. We know it’s been quiet. We know why. We know how to turn it around. You can help the site, by helping yourself. Things you can do to help: Be here, regularly. Be active, posting new topics and replies. Share songstuff with your musical friends. Help us to make this more like the resource you want it to be… mostly by behaving like it is already the way you want it to be. Do you have suggestions for how we can improve the community? The staff are always interested in what you have to say. Courses Singing We have a few vocal courses in development. These will be courses delivered mainly by video, but with a number of downloads etc. Songwriting I have a songwriting course for lyricists in development. It is part written. I plan to add another for composers. Music Marketing I have 4 large music marketing courses planned for 2024 and a few smaller courses. Much of the preparatory work on these courses is done with the first course hopefully being ready in 5 or so weeks. Subjects include growing your fanbase, release strategies, an evergreen artist approach, creating an effective marketing plan, an overall artist game plan for those wanting to move towards being a pro or semi-pro artist, social media, advertising, setting up with PROs and other professional bodies to collect monies earned, merch development, tour planning and promotion and a whole lot more. Recording and Production I hope to add some courses on recording and production, performance, plus label and publishing courses and tools. Advertising We have put Ad packages in place Community Subscription We have designed and are not far from launching a paid community subscription package (to sit alongside our current free membership) Related Activities: Record Label and Music Publisher Separately, the staff have set up a record label and music publisher for our own music. This also acts as a direct method for informing us about the music market place, what is working and what is not, in different genres and much more. It is also helping with developing industry links and engagement. The experience is also helping us to develop some unique processes and tools to help us to make these useful and viable as potential assets for independents. The label and publishing business is registered in Texas, USA New Ideas We have far too many ideas. There are so many great ones that we seriously don’t have the time to implement. However: We also have some unique ideas for both artists and writers. I know we can help both writers and artists to greatly improve what they do with their music. SSUK and IMS Developing SSUK and IMS as outlets for members music, other independent artists etc has temporarily been paused while we get our first courses and subscription launched. We plan to return to this mid 2024. Meanwhile there will be some activity on playlist building. Recruitment We hope to recruit some community staff, some interns as well as label staff. This will all help us get free and paid info, tools and services in front of you and help us to grow this community while safe guarding it’s future. We are nothing if not ambitious! Cheers John PS Please tell us your thinking! While it’s good to know about what we do wrong, and issues with the site, it’s even better to know what you think we can do to fix any problems and make Songstuff better than it already is. Just reply below and tell us what you think!

Hmmm. Can you define “silly”? We should have a clear idea in case it comes along. That said, if we are caught having a serious discussion about what silly is, and then silly comes along, it might move along by default, immediately marking this discussion as too serious. That kinda means that when asked to define what is silly, you can only offer silly answers. So, can you define silly?

So if this thread should have been silly but isn’t (aka a not silly thread), and then there’s the serious thread, which definitely isn’t silly, if in a whimsical mood I wanted to be silly I need to start a new “This is the silly thread”?

Use EQ to roll off some bass content and / or to cut EQ holes in instruments with overlapping frequencies (use side chain triggered from the bass drum) that helps the bass drum cut through the mix. I’ve seen the latter used on pads, organs etc, bass guitars, FX returns and even an entire mix minus the kick drum. Using stereo slap back delay in preference to reverb also helps reduce overall frequency soup washing out any clarity in your mix. It means you can add mild reverb too help pull the mix together while leaving more effect ambience to the slap back without paying the murky consequences!

You say open mic, but don’t mention a requirement for vocals… so just before I launch into suggestions, is there a need for vocals? More than one mic?

I knew I could rely on you! Lol

As @Glammerocity said, a good amp will see you a long way. Good guitars can be a game changer as far as playability is concerned, but a good amp trumps the guitar when it comes to the sound. Apart from that, I recommend the following equation: Gi = Gn +1 Where: Gi is the Ideal Number Of Guitars and Gn is the Number Of Guitars You Have Now

NT1’s are great microphones. Pretty versatile. I have an original NT2 which I love. Röde microphones are pretty good across the board. Do you use your NT1 for vocals too?

Me too. I’ve tried most things. I still prefer self-made beats. Mostly using midi triggers with some great samples. I’d love to get a midi drum kit, but I just don’t have the space. A real kit even less so. I do a lot of hand percussion with real drums. I’ve used midi libraries/audio loops for evaluation and rough demos of the quick and dirty kind. For beginners with beat creation virtual drummers and the kits that go with them are pretty useful beyond 4/4, with midi and audio loops being great for 4/4. The best 4/4 are audio+midi loops, because they have instrument one shots so if you like an audio loop but want to alter it, you can pretty easily, just by starting with the midi version of the loop with the one shot samples. For some music I love using environmental sounds to create my own loops. My secret pet fav is incorporating body noises. Everything from beat boxing, eating, playing parts of your body with your hands (if you do it with someone else’s body it is called assault!), moans, groans and other body noises. It’s a fun experiment!

I find pre-made loops (midi packs or audio) are pretty good for 4/4, but if you work in any other time signatures they really fall over. Virtual drummers tend to be much better here.

Hi I hate to tell you, but you’ve posted this to the wrong board. Members don’t tend to look for new music posts in this board, and when they find music, often they ignore it. This specific board is for introducing yourself. If you just want plays, feel free to drop a link in the musician’s lounge (though from experience, members tend to want more of a post and back story, not just a link). If you are wanting critique, please post it to the song critique board (though you are expected to post critiques of the music of other members. Inexperience is not an excuse and members have a very good awareness of how you interact with the critique boards. Additionally, you can expect to learn more by posting critique than getting your own work critiqued). Cheers John

Many reasons. I have a drive to create. Art. Music. Food. Dance (When I still could). Engineering (software and hardware). When I can’t create, it’s like a painful inch I can’t scratch. I start creating with whatever comes to hand… or voice. Beyond creating, my primary drives would be connection and being understood. Music allows for the possibility of a deep, meaningful connection. Being understood is part of that connection. I don’t mean people agreeing with me, or judging me. I literally mean being understood. I talk about quite a few subjects close to my heart, my personal experience (along with others that are fiction built upon seeds of fact and experience). Fictional songs are an exploration as much as anything else. Lastly, I write songs because I see something that I think needs said, and/or I have something to say.

I found my practice chanter yesterday. I think I’ll start practicing again It’s been a while. The least I can do if I get a set of pipes is to be able to play tunes well. That way my neighbours at least stand a chance of being entertained. I used to play all the time, back when I had a set of highland pipes and played in a pipe band, but that was a long time ago.

I gave up. It has some promise but it’s pretty clunky. The algorithm doesn’t automatically sync to the source track as well as say, melodyne editor. I found the working session became stuck, and the default session didn’t stick properly. It crashes quite a lot (once it starts crashing). Every time it crashed I was left with gigs of wave files and their proprietary files dumped in hidden temp folders, add to that after a 5 hour session and regular saves, it crashed to a level that crashed Studio one, only to discover it hadn’t saved my work at all. I gave up after it became obvious my work arounds to get it sort of working, took longer than the actual time it was working! Well, working-ish! If they address the core issues I’ll give it another go but not until I read about the many issues being fixed.

Hi and welcome to Songstuff, Breaking Echoes! What are your musical plans for 2024?

Hey percisbetter, welcome to Songstuff!

I like to think the violin and bagpipes were invented by the same instrument designer. The brief for the violin being “invent an instrument that is difficult to play and while people learn it is deeply painful for anyone within earshot”. The brief for the bagpipes was “invent a musical instrument that is very hard to play, is difficult to learn and for many it is deeply painful to hear even at great distances. As a bonus, go with the visual aesthetic that it looks like the player is caught mid-wrestle while being assaulted by the instrument”

Oh and I often try to get the title, or a draft title soon after getting the emotion. The words develop from topics suggested by the emotion and title. It all just helps you get workable fresh ideas that enable more reliable writing, a faster writing process, less frustration, and more completed songs.

I like to get the emotion, even the emotional journey. Once I have the emotion everything else just flows from there. The words and music are unified by the emotion. The emotional integrity is important for me. As for writing for specific genres, funnily enough I often express things with ambiguity to broaden how people connect with it. I do a lot to enable songs to be fairly portable genre wise, and certainly write enough where the emphasis during edit is on finding a broader genre identity that it’s perfectly ok to have some that genre is much more integral to the piece. For example, some songs are fairly tightly bound to genre. It doesn’t mean they can’t be adapted, just that there may be some limitations. If your melody focuses on a blues pentatonic scale and your lyrics are 12 bar blues in structure, you may well find overcoming these aspects not straight forward. Similarly, topics and language can similarly brand a song with a genre identity. Goth and death metal lyrics don’t really do brightly coloured flowers, skipping and feeling bright and optimistic. Ok, cyber goth does have it’s brighter elements but you get the point. More to the point, if all my songs are to avoid genre specific elements, you miss out on a lot of interesting things that happen because of genre, or at least your songs contain watered-down ideas. Going beyond writing for specific genres, try writing a song or two for specific artists other than you. It’s another way of using constraint to focus your writing. I find that by varying approach it keeps my writing fresh. The same is true by varying target audience, varying restraints…. Variety breeds a very fertile base for writing. When I encounter songwriters in a rut, or writers struggling to write or finish songs, often their approach is predictable, stale and yields fairly uninspiring songs. By keeping yourself on your toes, it feeds creativity.

I like a bouzouki, but on balance I tend to prefer the tone of an octave mandola. I wonder if I could persuade someone to provide one of each to perform a comparison? Maybe an Irish instrument maker, I’m only over in Scotland! Maybe not. Lol I’ll keep my fingers crossed about a set of uilleann pipes, small highland A pipes and a set of Scottish border pipes for a similar comparison too! (Snowball’s chance in hell!) I have a mandolin, and I played the violin for many years (same tuning). I really should put an octave mandola or zouk on my buy list.

It took a long long time to build up!

I have to admit I am very similar. I use a pen and paper + my phone for recording vocal melody ideas through to interesting riffs. I will add that I also heavily use the notes app on my iPhone. I want to also start photographing my notes and scribbles and use AI or OCR to decipher and record my paper notes. I have no problem with ideas. If anything I have way too many to turn them all into songs. Similarly I have no problems with coming up with topics, perspectives and voices when I need to. I’ve played with ideas generators but find the suggestions to be too contrived and struggling to be relevant. I think they could be fun for challenges for challenge sake, but I don’t think I have turned any into a song I have actually added to my song tally. They are more like ideas to explore for fun and learning. Which is ok. I don’t think I expected them to be anything more. Where I start largely depends on the song I want to write. Pop songs usually start with an emotion, then support it with a basic beat and quickly move into melody supported by a bass line (especially if it is a funky piece!). Electronica can start from a nice synth sound, a sequence, a rhythm or a melody. Rock I start with riffs, melody and phrase ideas. Folk I start with a vocal rhythm quickly followed by words and melody. Modern acoustic is similar except I often start with an emotion and idea, before getting a vocal rhythm, words and melody. Piano or guitar heavy pieces i usually start from emotion and let y that guide all that I do. I usually centre around an emotion or emotional journey very quickly no matter where I start. The emotion helps me stay connected, it helps me retain the integrity of the piece (as I see it). It helps me weave the melodies, feel the rhythm, write words that mean something to me. I think it helps me make my songs feel authentic even if they are fictitious. More and more I enjoy writing as I record. It helps keep a song fresh. I have found it easiest to do this with electronica and chill out music, but it is beginning to feature across the board for me. It helps me to keep songs feeling fresh, raw, unfiltered, at least to my ear!