MikeRobinson

Santa App-Store bought me a copy of Logic Pro X. (And that's ideal for me, because all of my music is created within the computer.) The Easter-bunny Amazon bought me a good pair (Audio-Technica ATH-M40fs) of studio headphones. When, many decades ago, I was first dating my wife-to-be (and wife-still-is ...), she gave me the very good advice that, when setting up any sound system, you should put your money first into speakers, and you should also pay very close attention to how you arrange those speakers in your room. You can buy "cheap" sound gear, and if the speakers are good, the sound will be good. In the same vein, she taught me that when shopping for a camera, you should put your money into lenses (and select a camera system based on its complement of professional-grade lenses). After all, apart from the all-important lenses, a camera's just a box with a hole in it. If the lens is great at gathering and focusing the light, the picture will be as good as you know how to make it.

You also might be hearing the effect of good mastering, as well as the skills of a good mixer. When you hear any professional record, at least three groups of people (or at least, roles) had a big part in what you hear. (And you can "Google" all of these topics endlessly . . .) The recording engineer selected the right microphones, put them in the right place, adjusted all the switches and knobs just right ... to get a "clean, pristine, isolated" recording of each part. The mixer took all those parts and blended them into an initial, balanced recording. As a final step in creating a record (or a CD or what-have-you), a mastering engineer took all the tapes that would make up the album, balanced them with one another, and did whatever other tweaking was necessary to make the compilation sound great "in vinyl." (Or: "in your iPod, on YouTube or SoundCloud, on a CD," etc.) Furthermore, some older recordings that you hear today have been remastered, in an effort to remove defects or limitations of the original recording technologies, and to make them sound more appealing on the equipment of today. Ansel Adams, a famous photographer, once commented that "a picture is captured in the camera, but it's made in the darkroom." To a very big extent, that's true of musical recordings, too. During every one of the steps that I listed, things can be done to manipulate the sound. If the engineer did a great job, it sounds ... "natural." Nothing that was done – and a lot might have been done – draws attention to itself. (As Michael Douglas' character said to a roomful of hopeful chorus-dancers in the movie version of "A Chorus Line": "Don't draw my eye!")

My favorite on this particular topic is a youtube called Pachelbel's Rant – by a kid who played cello at school. ("You know what the cello part is? blah, blah, blah, blah ... repeated fifty-seven times. I counted.") Nevertheless: it's not "the chords," it's what you do with them.

The problem here is that your claim of copyright, made now, might be seen as specious. You need proof. An objective trier-of-fact would listen to your claim, weigh it against the fact that apparently the only individual who could advance a counter-claim is now dead, and be faced with a "He said, and she's dead" conundrum. (Think about it ... how would you rule, given such a case, and why?) "The Orchard," whoever they are, appears to believe that they have the legal right to do what they're doing, to the point of their re-stating their claim when you disputed it. You're going to have to have a decisive and objectively-convincing reason to show, to an objective and impartial trier-of-fact, why that assertion is both unfounded and damagingly so.

I think that you definitely will need to consult a qualified attorney in the UK, and that when you do so, you're likely to be able to get your rights back. It seems from your description that he did not deal with you entirely "in bad faith" ... he did "perform" on the agreement and with some amount of success ... but then he sat on it and for forty years seems to have done nothing since. That's arguably too-long to do nothing with a perhaps still-valuable property. But you, or your attorney, might have to argue that.

I generally feel that the site lacks a cohesive visual focus or message: there seems to be nothing in-common between the several album covers (?) that are depicted, and the title-art (with its fuzzy text) seems to me initially to be a picture of an empty swimming-pool. I suggest that you should think about what you want the "at first glance message" to be. Then, if you do not have a large high-def image to use there, go buy one. Size it down to the dimensions you need. Then, using Gimp or Photoshop, add a razor-sharp text line to it. (Use the "layers" facility.) Save it, then save a copy as a JPG at, let's say, 300dpi resolution, and use that on your site. Literally within two seconds or less from my first arrival on your page, my first glimpse of it, a message of your own devising (and conscious planning) should be passed from you to me. Make it count.

The rule-of-thumb that I have heard is that a chord progression ought to have at least one note in-common with the preceding chord; often two. Jimmy Webb's definitive book, Tunesmith, explores that idea in great depth. You can also consider what I call the "sugar notes" ... 7ths, 9ths, and more ... and variations on chords, such as augmented and diminished. All of these are spices, and, like all spices, often sound best when used sparingly. Think about how you'd like for the movement of the chords to work either with, or against, the corresponding movement (if any) of the melody. Above all, experiment. From any chord that you're on, there are many chords that you could move to, and maybe the best thing is to just try several of them and see which one fits your fancy best. Creativity really is a very deliberate(!) act sometimes ... a matter of choosing, even though the end-result sounds "spontaneous" and maybe "inevitable."

Very definitely. His music had an extremely creative way of using the natural harmonic properties of the pianoforte. You can hear, I think, the other strings in sympathy to the ones that are being struck. While there's a "tremendous number of notes" flying at you, to my ears they form shapes ... short intervals during which many notes sound or resonate at the same time and are best regarded as a lump of sound. (Better put: "a single sound.") I think that was very much his intention. I don't think that this music would sound anywhere near as good if played on an electronic keyboard, or even a lesser piano. You need that fourteen-foot Steinway or Bösendorfer ... (P.S. "Hey, Santa... y'know, my front room's big enough...") ...

To me, the best "rock" was the sort of stuff that Styx and other groups were playing ... very orchestral, actually. And they still are selling-out shows today, so I don't think that it's dead. You can be quite sophisticated in your orchestrations and so-on and you will definitely find a strong market for that. The three-minute bubble-gum pop-goes-the-weasel has never been the extent of a music-listener's cranial capacity, or capacity for taste. Music is heavily influenced by what marketers think that "people" (sic...) want to listen to, although when I listen to what the marketers come up with I don't think they've encountered a real human being in a long time. My feeling is that what's really happening is that "music, in general," is moving off of the radio, even as the market for "broadcast radio" continues to dry up. I think that people are crashingly bored with what gets dished to them by conventional media channels, and they're simply letting their phones/music-boxes do the walking for them. "If you don't want to provide me with what I want to listen to, well, you certainly don't have to be the one to do it ... sorry to have bothered you, and please turn out the light when you go out of business. Meanwhile, your many competitors are more than happy to supply me with what I want to buy. See ya, L00Z3R."

That's "Nashville Country" as it grinds out today, where the number-one instrument that is played is Auto-Tuner.

Tomorrow, yes... sigh ... ...

And don't expect a song to just pop-out like Venus on the half-shell, because that's not how creative writing of any sort actually works; or ever did. "Writing is rewriting." A good song idea probably won't come flowing out in finished-sequence; what does flow out will be a mix of good and not-so-good musical notions. If you can, read Stephen King's book, On Writing. In an appendix, he gives the first and then his final draft of a short story. The first thing you notice about the first draft is that it is "unexceptional." Even from such a seasoned pro. The last draft is much tighter. But, even so, Stephen encourages you in his book to write a completely different version, your own, and even to send it to him. In other exercises, he spells out a typical scene ("divorced woman alone at night, hears a noise on the staircase, smells his after-shave ...") and then challenges you to turn it topsy-turvy. And, lo and behold, it works. You gotta turn-off your schoolkid which says, "C'mon, what's the right answer?" (The same one that told you to keep your mouth shut in class to avoid embarrassment in case you might be "wrong.") There isn't a predefined "right answer." It doesn't exist. It's up to you. You start out with a very abstract pure-creative act, pulling bits of music out of wherever-they-come-from, but then you get into a very different sort of creativity where the stuff you're starting with is there, on the page, and it's not gonna move or disappear. You're clipping things, moving them around, creatively adding new stuff around that structure, and so on. Just as creative but very different.

Harmonies generally form chords. The alto singer often sings one-third down from the main melody. Other harmony lines are for some reason or another much more difficult to pick-out by ear (as you sometimes hear around you in church services when those around you try to do so).

Encountering this for the very first time, as any listener would do: The image is instantly recognizable ... daughters, bubble-gum. The lyric, with the possible forced-rhyme exception of what the parents are doing in the last line, is strong at that point. I will "suspend disbelief" about the premise of the chorus until I've heard the next stanza. But I do expect that stanza, and the first, to reinforce the deferred-promise contained in that chorus. The remainder of it, so far, are "snatches." And what you should be doing at this point is gathering up those precious 'snatches' and then sorting carefully among them as they come. Look at your first-verse; look at the unifying premise of the chorus (which often serves to provide continuity to a song ...). Consider, creatively, how the various "snatches" that you come up with might reinforce or not-reinforce those things. Also: bear in mind that you, as the creator, will be confronted with decisions. There's never going to be any Fairy Godmother that shows up and hands you "the answer." You're going to choose, very deliberately. And once again, no one's going to tell you what to choose and what not to. Don't Stop! You've got something here!! "The creator is the ultimate loner," and when he or she is finished, (s)he finds it utterly impossible to describe the actual process." Fortunately, in the company of other "lonely creators," (s)he doesn't have to. We already know.

I agree with DonnaMarilyn on this one, because if you sit around too much "waiting for the Muse," let's face it ... you'll starve first. If you wait for a song to pop-out in the finished form that you hear every day on the radio, well, I do think that you will be starving while you wait ... for Godot. Because I think know for certain that the song in question never popped into some songwriter's head in that form. Far more likely is that snippets of the song popped into someone's head at different times and in different forms, and that from these various sources, "the finished product that you heard" was devised. A sculptor who waited too much for "inspiration" would be found dead with a chisel in his hands, in front of an untouched marble block full of inspiration.

Keys can be shifted ... e.g. by a computer, or even by a kapo on a guitar. And BTW it's quite informative and useful to do that. For various mumbo-jumbo technical reasons, the keys are not the same. Another thing that you can easily do with a computer ... and it's not the same as a key-change but rather is a mode-change ... is to shift a block of notes up-or-down the staff, so that "C becomes C#" and so-on but the key does not change. When you're putting together a melody or a song, "first, just get it out of your head and onto paper." Once you've accomplished that, you can actually do a lot of rather-amazing things with it, e.g. using your trusty digital computer as your able assistant. In the same way that, say, Photoshop can transform a photograph, the computer can really help to do surprising(!) things to a song. But ... "it all starts with a song." Get the song first. Get "the idea that gets to me." Get it to a place where you can't lose it. Don't judge that process ... just do it. Because that's the one thing that a computer can never do. "Writing is rewriting," and you can never change that. Accept it. Get those first-drafts out of your head and do not destroy or tamper-with those "precious original first-drafts" in any way whatever. It don't matter if you're writing music or text or art: first, the gold must come out of the ground. Only then can it be refined.

Sometimes, I think that the thing which really inspires me is the surprise that happens ... when you've been fooling around with a lyric trying to put a tune to it, or fooling around with a tune trying to put a lyric to it, or more-commonly both at the same time ... and then you're taking some of the ideas that you first came up with and working a little more with them, and ... "all of the sudden, hey!" Now, it might not be an angelic epiphany and in fact it almost-certainly isn't, but you realize that something "better" is there in front of you that wasn't there a minute before. The teacher (probably ...) who said that "writing is rewriting" unfortunately was correct. Inspiration might bring you the germ of an idea but it won't hand you the whole thing on a silver platter. Still, it's inspiring when it hands you anything at all. The difficulty, and I suppose the craft, comes from learning how to develop those snatches of originality into a product.

Maybe we all can "learn a little lesson in reality" from our journalist friends from the past, who hammered away at their typewiters(!) knowing that "the deadline" was 3:00 PM. That was the moment, set in stone by the typesetting technology of that day, when the words that they had written would be sent to the Linotype operators to be fashioned into the printing-plates that would duly manufacture that day's "Final Edition." I very seriously think that "the immutable realities of" those days made better writers of those journalists. But, I think that it also pointed out that, in the very pragmatic world of journalism, you just can't produce a "Pulitzer Prize winning" article every single day. But you can produce "a salary-paying" article every single day! And, from among those articles, a Pulitzer Prize winner just might be discovered ... if you manage to very-consistently produce one every single day. "Fortune favors the well-prepared ..."

I think that this is a great piece, Anthony, and very thought-provoking because it talks about songwriting and lyric-writing as what it is ... storytelling. Every song is poetic writing of some sort, and it somehow invites the listener not only to recognize a character (in just a few well-placed phrases ...) but to be drawn right into his or her story. Thanks for sharing!

"The secret of writing," of any sort at all, really is ..."re-writing." I firmly believe that this is categorically true, no matter what sort of creative writing you are doing: music, prose, a poem, a magazine article, advertising copy, a screenplay, a news story, or what-have-you. "The secret is: there is no secret. Make of it what you will!" Anytime you read a piece of writing, or listen to a song, always remember that you are experiencing the final draft; not the sometimes-grueling process that lead up to it. You are experiencing both the product of "inspiration," and a pure decision-making process. (Furthermore, you're not in the position to be able to know exactly what did finally transpire! It just seems like inevitable, pre-ordained magic. Illusions are like that ...) Keep a faithful record of everything: your initial idea, your subsequent revisions, your rewrites, your brilliant inspirations, your ideas that didn't make the cut (but you kept them, nonetheless), and so on. Don't crumple-up any piece of paper. Keep them all in a loose-leaf notebook, perhaps with a light pencil-mark through them. (Any one of those "discarded" ideas might well appear again, some time in the future.) The "finished" song or lyric that you finally come up with is, after all, merely a "finished song or lyric." (In other words, the time finally came when you said, "FISI = F*** it: Ship it.") Even though in hindsight it might seem to someone else that "the song popped up out of a clamshell, like Venus (i.e perfectly-formed and totally starkers ...)," you, as the creator, will always know how much of a decision it was; and how much of a compromise. (But, hey: you don't have to tell anybody else ... let 'em think it really is magic.)

One thing that I have definitely found to be true, in all forms of creative writing, is that: "writing is rewriting." In other words, "it's the nature of the beast ... plan accordingly." When you listen on the radio (say...) to a "finished" song, well, it certainly sounds like a "finished" composition, and if the composer etc. did their job well, it might even sound "inevitable." Like absolutely nothing else could possibly have been there. Like absolutely nothing else (heh...) could have crossed the composer's or the arranger's minds. But that's simply not how the creative process actually works. When you come to a point of your songwriting where you "simply can't decide which one" of the ideas in your mind "is right" ... strive to capture all of them. (After all, you're probably using a computer and if so you'll never run out of disk space. And if you're not, then you certainly won't run out of paper, either.) The reality of the situation is that most of "the ideas in your head" might well be perfect in different musical situations. (Shania Twain, for example, would routinely produce a "country," a "pop," and a "dance" variation of all of her songs. Each one of them was an appropriate re-mixing of the same base recorded tracks, each one customized to a particular commercial target.) There is a dimension of "creativity" which transcends the creation of any particular musical idea or phrase, which deals at a much higher level with the construction of a salable musical product. The product incorporates a creative blending of all of these musical "raw materials" to meet the expectations of a particular market. When we tune our radios and listen to a "finished" song, then we are of course listening to au fait accompli, and we are also necessarily listening to one version. As consumers, we simply do not know just how many "other" versions there might be! But as fellow creators, we (should) know better "how the trick is done." And here's the best news: "You're officially off-the-hook!" You're "in" on the little secret. You know that there is, and that there always was, "more than one finalist." You also know that there probably will be "more than one 'winner,'" depending on exactly what you decide 'the target' is. You are the creator. Edit: And let the record show that, in some cases, the copyright owner has made (IMHO) dreadful mistakes. Jon Bon Jovi blew away a genre with his original multi-platinum version of Livin' On A Prayer, only to subsequently (perhaps on an extravagant qualuudes trip? produce an IMHO ghastly twelve-string ballad version of the same thing. Such is the power of the copyright-owning songwriter. Same song, yes, but ... "OMG."

I, for one, am very glad to say that I have never listened to "music" like this ... and I never will. "Both Beethoven and PTA meetings now come in spray cans." While I have no problem with someone finding a way to produce a steady supply of "salable product," and a market into which to sell it, the world of music fortunately is endless. You can turn out "squeeze cheeze" by the double-bucketful and find a way to sell every bucket ... but I'm not going to be one to eat it, nor am I going to jump up and down and say about what you've done, "eureka!" Nope. Bzzt. Not gonna happen.

As your gentleman friend correctly pointed out, there are no "rules." Only guidelines as to what other people have found "works well." (Of course, "what works well" is in part based on solid mathematical underpinnings, as J. S. Bach explored in much of his work.) I suggest that you start with your instincts, and certainly those of your esteemed associate, with regard to "what works well," and then you explore various possibilities in what is a very much experimental way. ("Try it on. If it fits, keep it. If not, set it aside. Discard nothing.") Certainly, people like your friend probably have a very "battle hardened" perspective on music-making, that is to say simply in the sense that they had to "get it done." Get product out the door, so to speak, and make it really good. There's something to be said for that, because it helps you to set boundaries upon your indecisiveness. As various writers have said at various times, "the two best things that ever happened to me were a job, and a deadline." A 'creative writer' has forever; a journalist has until three o'clock.

A big thought that comes to my mind right now is that ... when we listen to anything-at-all "on the radio," then we are merely hearing someone's final choices. Certainly not(!) the only ones that could have been made. When you are composing something that is entirely new, and no matter how you go about actually doing it, one thing that really hits you squarely in the face is that there are, in fact, no "right" answers. There is no judging-committee sitting just off stage that's going to ring a celebratory bell if you "get it right," nor a gong if you "get it wrong," or anything else in-between. You are simply going to wind up making a fairly arbitrary choice. But here's what's really cool: you can always change your mind. Try something different. See what (else) works. See what you like best. Especially if you've got a computer involved. How many ways can you think of to re-harmonize a tune like, "Merrily We Roll Along?" Google that sometime. And the more interesting the melody is (e.g. a "pentatonic" scale vs. the 3-2-1-2-3-3-3 of "Merrily"), the more possibilities there are to explore. With no "right" answers! (Fair warning: it's addictive. )

Here's something totally off-the-wall ... "Decisionally Disabled" ... Let me ask you: if you heard that line, versus having read it on a page, would it in fact have "the same impact?" Quite frankly, I am not convinced. "Decisionally Disabled" is, after all, a strictly visual "turn of the phrase." Every single thing about it depends on "prosidy." And (alas..) nothing more. Consider, on the other hand, this extremely striking line from a now-famously successful commercial song: "I might-a been born 'jes plain white trash,' but fanc-y was-a my name!" To my way of thinking, this punch-in-the-nuts lyric, as so masterfully performed by Reba McEntyre, is to be counted among the penultimate example of "an emotion as a song hook." In this memorable lyric by Bobby Gentry, the crux of this song has nothing at all to do either with rhyme or with illiteration: "Well, I can still hear the desperation in my poor Mamma's voice ringin' in my ears..." Her mamma knew that she was knowingly selling her daughter into a life of high-society prostitution ... ... and her daughter, years later, subsequently ... knowingly ... and with her head held defiantly high ... defended her. "Top that!!" "Take that..." (oof!!) "... as a 'song hook!'" Trust me: "just get out there and do this" ... both in terms of Reba's performance and the magnificent work done by the various other actors and actors in this six-minute clip, and you will surely for the rest of your life have nothing more to prove (heh... $$$$!!) to anyone at all. You will make much money. You will have earned it.