john

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!

Hey there Floris! It’s nice to meet you. Welcome to the Songstuff Music Community. You’re a Songstuffer now

Hocus pocus! Oh to have a crystal ball. I guess the biggest things I would like to see is more stability in the industry for earnings mechanisms for songwriters and artists, however I expect what has been happening so far will continue… that is the assault on musicians and music related income. So, realistically, what is already possible for songwriters will become more established and a broader range of effective tools will be available. I think it will take a period of success to convince the largely cynical artistic community to get off their ass. Being fair, some very much are getting their feet dirty, which is great to see. I don’t see it being a tsunami any time soon, but it will continue to evolve. Putting on my Songstuff hat for a moment, I look forward to Songstuff playing a more active roll in educating and enabling. Things continue to evolve for the site too. I believe there is an artist based need for EPs/albums that is not served well by the “all songs being available on a single song basis”. Back in the day (here we go again!) artists had radio/single mixes, extended plays/ 12” singles, and album mixes… and they would be different enough to justify buying multiple versions of a song. For that to work artists need to be able to offer albums, and empowered to offer bundle offers to fans, where artists really can challenge what is offered to fans. Ok, they can already do a lot of this, but a lot of artists and labels will need to decide to offer single songs and collections where songs that are not singles are not available outside the collection. At some point we have to act in our own best interest! As for bundles, yes you can do these on your own websites, but then you have the nightmare of sales tax to contend with. Do-able but takes effort. Other than that, I’d like to see collection agencies better integrated with independent music, so that indies can more easily earn from traditional music industry income streams. Lastly, Spotify have just announced that they plan to stop payouts on any track that has less than 1000 plays in a year (while they still get ad income from those plays). YouTube effectively does similar by only allowing monetization when you have more than so many followers and so many plays. They too of course get the income from ads on those plays. I don’t think Spotify even has provision for a roll-over. Point is, for indies album tracks rarely go anywhere on Spotify. Truthful 99% of indies get zero out of putting almost all of their tracks on Spotify. Better to do something more fruitful with them. Of course the truth is also painful. To do well, realistically, you need a great marketing campaign to go along with great songs. Fail on either and you might as well drive blindly through unknown country roads with your windows down and your music turned up, for all the good it does you. Common strategies used by indies: Exposure model Build it and they will come (Aka my music is good enough to be discovered on it’s own) Hope and pray They don’t have the budget to crack the exposure model. Only way it works is with innovative marketing and upwards of 2 years hard work with as much budget as you can muster. Build it and they will come is a snowball’s chance in hell. It’s arrogant and lazy. Putting it all on the music is not a strategy. Hope is not a strategy either. There are a few ways besides the above that can work, but they take learning, patience and hard work. I’d like to see more artists prepared to work. Too many older artists are ignorant or misinformed or lazy or unrealistic or completely consumed by cynicism. Perhaps a combination of these. I used to think it was worth investing in changing their minds using knowledge, but people don’t like being told. People like to discover. So, if I could wave a wand and fix something, it would be to get artists to use realistic, achievable strategies now, instead of waiting to see younger artists blaze a trail. Cheers John

Somethings I like the way they were, some the way they are, most on how I think they could be. In the past much was limited by who you knew and how much money you had. That still plays an important role, particularly in mainstream music, but I think, the modern age only highlights the reality that musicians always were challenged in getting their music in front of listeners. It is much more obvious now. While the scale is ever increasing, we now have far greater spread of knowledge, incredible reach, tools and better access to detailed metrics than ever before. For a creative, detail oriented mind, tools just amplify what we can do applying our knowledge. Make sense?

Hey, Good stuff, welcome to SOngstuff! looking forward to hearing some more

The landscape has changed. radio still has a useful place, just much less useful than it once was. YouTube is the platform for discovery. Channel hosts and Reactioners are the new music champions and as such they can convey your music to millions. Ask Ren Gill about his new number one album in the UK, almost entirely made possible via reaction channels on YouTube. Unsigned. No management company… although I believe he does have some kind of relationship with an independent label towards the end of that campaign. My point is, there are new mechanisms to achieve the same ends. Everything is always moving. We shouldn’t be afraid of change. Change will happen, and you either roll with it or you don’t, but be aware, when you don’t roll with it, you might as well try to hold back the tide. Better to find out how the new shit works, and do that.

It just underlines the need to learn the basics of music marketing and a sustainable artist model. It’s not about getting famous, but just getting your music heard. Back in the day, you had to learn to get people to your gigs in order to even book at places that already had a reasonable audience more than once. They all wanted to know you could pull in more of a crowd. More to the point, if you didn’t learn the basics of that, you could be playing to a more or less empty room in a lot of venues. Many bands didn’t learn that, or thought that they should be treated like rock stars already. For years now the rule is: If you want to make music, and you want people to actually hear it, you need to do much more than just “make it available”. If you aren’t prepared to do more, you have to accept that it is unlikely to be heard. Simple.

Hey I plan a few stand alone singles, minimum of 2, followed by 2 EPs in preparation for a full album next year. I still love the album format! Recording starts towards the end of next week. Over the next week I am finishing a production of a song for Mahesh and doing a remix of the same Songs are all written, although I always leave the door open for any songs I write along the way. Cheers John

Why don’t you try doing covers of pre-cleared songs? Use a site like wearethehits.com. Register there, select a song from their million+ catalogue, record a video and upload and earn. You will run into issues everywhere if you are using samples taken from recordings without consent. Although YouTube have rules to protect their site, they also protect sites like Songstuff (who embed their content) and the person posting. Companies still sue private individuals for infringement, especially if they have assets (car, house etc). Add to that, even if you are not sued, your music can be removed from the internet very easily. Point is, why have all the hassle of creating recordings that are infringing song or recording copyrights? It isn’t worth the hassle.

I don’t know him but not everyone who runs or establishes a business completely lacks compassion, or and interest in connecting with others. True, there are plenty that are focused on money alone, but not all. I always thought Derek Sivers was quite human, and has always been quite responsive to communications. Maybe he has changed? I haven’t heard anything to indicate that.

Hi I recently bought the upgrade for Revoice Pro 4 to 5 hoping for something near what the tool promised. Unfortunately it seems a bit buggy. The saved session state gets a bit muddled, the interface is a bit clunky, it isn’t intuitive and now…. I can’t use it to do its core function without crashing. It’s damn frustrating. Honestly, for some types of music, like pop, it can potentially save a lot of time creating closely synced, flawless harmonies. Hopefully there is a quick fix. I’ve contacted their support and with any luck, I will hear back soon. Does anyone have a more positive experience? A similar experience? Right now I am just disappointed Cheers John

Hi Greg This post explains it all. Basically, the previous board didn’t really show the songs off very well. It was just like any other board, so we changed it. We told members in the community newsletter and within several posts on the boards themselves. Members with songs in the old Showcase didn’t have to meet any standard in terms of image or text etc. which didn’t make for a very appealing showcase. All members can submit older songs to be included in the new area, just follow the guidelines and submit what is requested. Cheers John

Hey Gang All my very best wishes to you and yours for 2024! whatever your 2023, I hope your 2024 is your best year yet. Any interesting New Year resolutions? Cheers John

Hey Gang What are your plans for your music in 2024? An album? An EP or two? Singles? Videos? Build a career? Play some gigs? Go on tour? Lay it on me. Cheers John

I wouldn’t post anything sub par there. In other words no tracks in progress, no demos. Not if you are serious about building a following. Mostly I see this being done by people feeling under pressure to post without having a clear idea of what to post. Often they feel they must be posting music, and out of desperation post tracks in progress. Weirdly they simultaneously don’t promote their back catalog. At all! It’s ok to post works in progress and demos here, simply because most end listeners don’t hang out on songwriter and recording sites. You don’t really compromise your music here, where as on X etc you are brandishing your material in the face of end listeners. There’s actually a long list of reasons, but I don’t have time today to go into them all! Lol

You can lose detail on going high to low bit depths and sample rates, because the detail is there to be lost. You cannot add detail going low to high bit depths and sample rates, because the detail does not exist. You might be able to approximate pseudo detail, but not the actual signal detail. At a minimum if it overly affects track and effect numbers, record at 48kHz, because of it’s prevalence in video and film.

Your topic wasn’t in the right place so I moved it here and hopefully you will get a response.

Awesome! Videos too, or just audio?