MikeRobinson

"Capo, just start." Seriously. Take whatever software and hardware and instruments you have and start." You can't go wrong ... unless you don't go. 😀 Spend some time exploring those crayons. What does each crayon actually do, and in what situation might you decide to use it? Grab an existing recording that you know well and shove it into the input side of your DAW/software, then start applying each crayon, one at a time, listening to what it does. Go ahead. Go crazy. Twist 'em all. Listen. Then, spend equal time exploring your song. Put down a guitar. Put down vocals. Now (why not?) start playing with those crayons ... what can you do to that guitar? To those vocals? Listen carefully, then push a button or twist a knob. Listen. To start moving "what's now in your DAW" to "what's in your head," take an existing song that you really like and listen to it critically. What instruments are playing? What "tiny bit of spice" did you just now notice for the very first time? Chord progressions? Counter-melodies? Harmonies? All of the magician's bag of tricks is right there in front of you! If you play that guitar part and compare it to the guitar part that you hear ... now that you know what various "crayons" sound like ... what "crayons" do you think you hear? Listen. Now, your song – believe it or not, they started with guitar and vocals (maybe). They added music, rhythm, and eventually crayons. They had lots of versions, only one of which you hear. They had committee meetings. Maybe they had fights. No matter what, they made artistic and technical decisions. But, at the end of the day, they strove to conceal all that "process" from you, so that all you heard was magic. So, set out to make the next "rough draft" that they were maybe careful to make sure you never heard. Listen. So – try a mix. When you're ready to let other people listen, share it (here). Try another. After enough time has passed you'll be able to go back and "listen critically" to your own work. Do that. "Critique" is simply – "customer feedback concerning a product." Never take it personally. The critique is about a product, which happens to be a song, and which happens to be your most-recent version. Always room for one more. (Or, not. "Who cares what that bozo thinks about my latest product?") Important: As you explore each project, create versions, and keep each and every one of them. ("Aww, I screwed this up, this is junk, this is ... this is ... version (n-1) !!") Disk space is cheap, and external hard-drives (available at any office-supply store these days) are even cheaper. Do .. not .. destroy .. anything. ... Ever. An angel is never going to appear out of a cloud, accompanied by seraphic singing, and proclaim to you that "you did it!" And neither did such an angel appear for the musicians and technicians(!) who produced your very-favorite song. "The art of making art ... is putting it together ... bit by bit, part by part ..."

Well, John, before any of us indulge too deeply into notions of "piracy" or long too deeply for "the good old days," I think that we should all re-remind ourselves of how fundamentally the technology of this industry has changed, both for consumption and for production of the product. I really don't think that anyone stole anything from anybody. And, I think that it was utterly impossible (and nonsensical) to imagine that it would not change exactly as it did. "In the good old days," there were monumental physical restrictions: "AM Ra#%@%$#@%#@dio(whee!crackle!snap!)," "FM" that came much later, vinyl discs, cassettes, and (gawd help us all) 8-track ta(ka-chunk!)pes. The compact disc was a blessing from heaven unless you scratched it. (Which, of course, you did.) On the production side, you had to spend hours in a studio wrestling with 24-track tape while chasing down 60-cycle hums. Eventually you had to create a master that would be used to produce millions of vinyl disks, cassettes, and 8-(ka-chunk!)tracks ... which would be trucked all over God's green earth and, when they didn't sell, probably thrown away. The industry learned, in spite of all this, how to produce "hits," and how to promote the aura of "young musicians, just like you(!)" who lived the good life while producing magic. It took million-dollar gambles to do this and, in (say) the case of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, years of time and miles of tape. During which same time, thousands of other records went absolutely nowhere, taking their young artists' dreams away with them (and leaving many of them greatly in debt to their labels). First, the computer began to transform music production. We all bought our issues of Keyboard Magazine and lusted after Fairlights and Synclaviers which cost a king's ransom. The 80's invented MIDI and primitive music sequencers. We began to make music (or at least, MIDI) using our Amiga's and Original IBM PC's. Then, the Heavens Opened . . . Today, virtually all of the technical barriers have been knocked down. Music is a digital file, and we have a world-wide digital network. Our computers are embarrassingly powerful, as is our software. Anyone can produce great music, and publish it. Anyone can also produce pure crap, and also publish it. And, whether the music is phenomenal or crap, all of it can disappear into the gloom of millions of similar (and, similarly good-or-bad) recordings, never to be seen again. Or, with proper marketing, it can make real money – turning a profit over a much smaller number of units-sold because virtually all of the production costs are now zero.

What HoboSage said about "listening critically" is – well – critical. Just as a photographer, digital or film, needs to understand the technical parameters of film, printing, digital image-capture and publication/projection, you need to know the technical parameters of what your recording needs to achieve when it finally hits the listener's ... (yuck!) earbuds. In both cases, you need to know how to measure them with the tools available in your DAW. Your ears will deceive you. The measuring device will not. At one workshop I attended, the presenter played tunes and showed the oscilloscope-display. Then he showed other displays including "histogram" and what he referred-to as "the Rorschach crawl" which recorded as varying-sized blots the history of the histogram above it. "There are," he said, "two dimensions of interest: horizontal, and vertical." Frequency (and what contributes to what's in those frequencies), and Volume. "That's it." Hmmmm.... One other take-away that I see circled in my notes from that session is that "there are almost no absolute volumes: the relative levels of what's being played together at the same time are the key thing the listener hears.." Hmmmm....

As for me, I'm always interested in a new good book, and I would encourage you to look at the various services which can distribute your book if you publish it e.g. as a PDF, or an ePub, or both. Even Amazon (Kindle, Direct Publishing) does it. They will handle the sales and returns and the mechanics of downloading or installation, and give you most of the profit – if there be any. Plus, they have international reach, a sophisticated online catalog and so on. ("Custom digital printing, one [different] book after another after another," is also an interesting and available option for those who want paper in their hands, and some distributors will make that option available to your readers automatically. Yes, I've seen it: paper books are coming out of the machine, one after another including covers, and they are all different. As the operator of the press said, "and, every one of them has already been sold." It's effin' magic.) (As with all such material, "mind your P's and Q's" concerning registered copyright, and you probably do not need to buy an ISBN.) "Tastefully and effectively promoting the work" remains your responsibility – as is the case with "every electronic thing these days." SongStuff would certainly be one of the important places to promote it, and of course John is the owner/senior ediitor. You did the right thing as your first step. Looking forward to buying and reading it!

I suggest that a reliable strategy, which was used in the earliest days but which is still applicable today, is: "crank 'em out!" Write another song, throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. (But, don't stand around watching it.) Dolly Parton, for example, has her name on more than 800 songs, and she's quite typical. The Beatles wrote 236 original songs, and "covered" 69 more. You get the idea. If any retailer's shelves are sufficiently filled, with a sufficient variety of products available for sale, they really don't lose sleep over which product you decide to buy. They know that "you walked in here wanting to 'buy a song,'" and they're pretty sure that you'll walk out with ... $omething.

BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC all have very-impressive office buildings in Nashville, although I must say that BMI's building is the most prominently positioned as you drive by on the I-24. Personally, "it's a cost of doing business." (It's fully-deductible on your income tax, if you care.) You do need to be represented by a P.R.O. if you're doing music-business in the United States, and, so far as I have been able to determine, they all do their important job equally well. As for me, I think that I'm "brand-name conscious enough" to stick with one of those three "majors." "X% vs. Y%?" I would argue that it really doesn't matter. The important service is that they're out there, tracking everywhere that your song is being used and making sure that you get paid for it. They deduct "some" percentage of that revenue in order to pay themselves, but the reality is that you wouldn't be getting any(!) of that revenue if they weren't out there doing what they do.

The Internet literally puts the "world wide" at your fingertips: there are thousands of web-sites and videos that talk about all aspects of music, music theory, composition, orchestration, you name it. (One excellent music-theory text is cartoons!) You can even get an accredited degree or certificate on-line, e.g. from the Berklee (sic) College of Music. So ... what would you like to do first? (Then next, then next, then next.) Don't wait for someone to tell you to do it and don't worry that you might fail. No one will know that what they're listening to is the product of a burst of creativity that happened at 2:30 in the morning when you're in your underwear. 😉 Just pick a topic of interest to you and run with it. Don't waste time being "stuck on the horns of a dilemma." Jump right on in – the water's fine, and there are life-rings floating around everywhere. When you think that you've got something to show us, you'll always find a receptive audience right here. You're sitting smack dab in the middle of a music-making environment that musicians for hundreds of years never could have imagined – and for which musicians not too many years ago spent $20,000 or more to get a fraction of what's available on your phone(!) today. Yes, "you live in interesting times." Enjoy! (And ... "get to work!")

The way I look at it is this: "While McDonald's® will never run out of customers who fill their now-two-lane drive thru, I will never, ever [again ...] eat there." Yes, you can now buy "A Band in a Box®" – and it is actually a very good piece of software –but if you're lured into thinking that "this is what music is," your powers of imagination need serious expansion. 😁 "Think outside the matchbox!" Fact is, "today, we live amongst an embarrassment of technological riches," doing marvelous things with our phones that could not have been obtained for $20,000 – or, at any price – twenty-or-less years ago. ("I was there ...") Yes, professional musicians in those days did pay that kind of money. The "Fairlight CMI" cost anywhere between £18,000 and £60,000 in 1982. It competed with the "Synclavier," which cost even more. ("A Synclavier could cost anywhere from $25,000 to $200,000 ...") Thumbing through our pages of Keyboard Magazine, we all lusted after them, and dreamed. Little did we know ... But ... we are also "still doing things that would have been very familiar to Mozart." We're still creating music, and we're still doing it "out of thin air." We're still creating pure magic. And this wonderful magic is still very much the product of human minds. (Even when those "human minds" are busy creating innovative computer software, such as "Band in a Box!" Which is a thing that human minds could never do until very recently, even though composers and musicians have been dreaming of it for many centuries.) "May you live in interesting times." Well, here we are!

When a song drifts through my head I grab for my iPhone and punch the "Voice Memos" app. I hum or sing the song as clearly as I can, and speak whatever notes occur to me, before the inspiration vanishes. I've accumulated quite a collection of those things, and I'm gradually trying to work through them. In every case I remember nothing about the original inspiration.

I know that MuseScore encourages a library of contributed scores, which of course are "scores" since they're MusicXML. I also know that there are many, many libraries of (public domain) MIDI.

Thank you for the clarification, M57. Also, I certainly do not intend to create any sort of "versus" comparison between the various products. That sort of nonsense is irrelevant. As is the case in all professional industries, certain products are established standards that you effectively must use, because of issues such as file-compatibility and the simple necessity of being able to produce a guaranteed work-product at the end of the day when that's what all of you, working together, are doing for a living. (And you all just suck-it-up 😉 and write off "license expenses" on your corporate taxes.) Nonetheless – MuseScore fulfilled 100% of my [amateur] purposes and I use it constantly. My assessment is that "it's as 'professional-grade' as I could have hoped for," and I certainly don't say this about every open-source tool that comes along! I also find that the MusicXML format, which is its underlying native file-structure, is easily transportable among other programs (including Logic Pro X, my chosen DAW). So, I guess that I'm a "spoiled MuseScore user!" 😀

Oddly enough, "I feel that she has done much better." The very-first opening bars of the orchestration show that there is someone on the project with "a deep sense of musicality," but at 0:22 all of this – disappears! Suddenly we have a minimal, tired, mechanical trope, carved straight out of "the worst of hip-hop-flip-flop-oops-i-fell-flat-on-my--again." The musicality barely re-emerges about 1:56, but the final performance leaves me utterly cold, because I know that "Taylor Swift can sing." Why did she consent to lend her voice track to ... to ... – – – But, please understand, Omar: "We just dis-a-gree ..." 😀 Please do not feel in any way personally affronted. (After all, what-the-hell do I know, anyhow?)

FYI – one tool that i use very heavily isn't a DAW: it's a music scoring program called MuseScore. (Yes, my music often starts out as sheet music.) When I first discovered MuseScore, I had "money burning a hole in my pocket" and I was prepared to invest in a full-blown version of Sibelius,® Finale,® Notation,® or "what-ev-er pap-pa picked." Well, I started with MuseScore, because it was free, and ... I stopped ... because I did not feel the need to look further. (Yes, I still feel that way.) I had found everything that I was looking for, supported by an extremely active open-source development community, and "it's just a bonus" that I didn't have to spend money to get it. (I have financially supported the project since then, and I'm glad to have done so.)

Dunno, but somehow I remember one other quote: "If you're waiting for angelic choirs to tell you that you're doing the right thing, there's just one word for you: 'Broke.'" Hmmm... there ought to be a song in that ... 😁

It's great fun to listen to a well-produced piece of music when you do not know the language and cannot understand the words that you see on the ground. But, the singing is beautiful, the arrangement is superb, and the images are universal. The videography (and the performances given by the actors, both older and young) is also superb. (Very interesting that the singer reveals herself to be a pianist.) "How do I make a clip like this?" Well, there are so-many facets to it: videography, performance, arrangement, orchestration, performance, and of course, composition. First, sit back and appreciate the beauty of a magnificent piece of work that is, in fact, the combined effort of a great many(!) talented artists and technical professionals. Then, begin to de-construct it. After you've watched it and listened to it enough times to have become a little bit sick of it ... 🤪 ... start to look at it critically from the point-of-view of whatever "facet" most interests you, or is closest to "how you think of your best form of art." As a <<professional-X>>, exactly what(!) <<professional-X>> aspect of this work is what you most want to learn how to copy, and then to make your own? Although I could not understand a single word from "my side of the Atlantic," thank you for sharing this magnificent piece of work with us.

A relative of mine worked as a session-player in Nashville forty years ago, and co-wrote several songs, some of which he never got credit for (sometimes, no one was quite sure who wrote them), and some of which he ($$!) did. He told many interesting tales of how writers were "cranking out songs and throwing them up against the wall, hoping that one of them would stick." It was, at that time, very much a "quantity" game, because you never really knew which songs would make more than enough money to pay for all the rest. For instance, say, Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire was thought to be "nothing special" by many at the time. Who knew? The game at that time, as understood by anyone and everyone, was to constantly produce another single, another album, in hope that deejays out there would decide to play them on the radio. ("Payola" came later, and today, most of the songs that "hit" at least start out as "paid product placements.") You went on the road, touring, to push your latest product before going back to produce another one. Some albums were literally recorded in one day. (Marty Robbins made himself a millionaire from the product of a one-day session.) Even though a star can achieve such stature that he could sell a copy of himself reading a page from the telephone book – as Elton John actually did, set to music that he improvised on-the-spot – usually the number of songs from any "star" that you actually "know" could be counted on the fingers of maybe both hands. But their catalog, of things which they have available for sale, might be vast. One analogy I've heard is: "everybody thinks they want a 'gusher.' But what you really want is a field full of little oil-wells, all of which can be depended on to produce money every year. Maybe they want to buy this one, maybe that one, but regardless, you've got something for them to buy."

Yup ... virtually everyone that you've ever heard about (in Nashville) has an immensely-long "catalog" of songs, most of which you've never heard about ... and in quite a number of cases, that's actually probably a good thing. 🙄

One thing I've noticed almost every musician doing, when they give an interview and start to play something ... they turn on a tape-recorder. (It used to be reel-to-reel. These days, they fiddle with their phone and then set it down on a nearby table.) But they record everything that they do. I suggest that you do the same thing. When you're "just noodling around on the keyboard or the guitar or what-have-you," use your phone's voice recorder to record – and keep – everything. If you find yourself playing something that sounds cool, say things to yourself "on tape" to help you re-create it later. ("That's an Am7!" "That's B to upper G.") Likewise, when "a song comes to your head" in the most-improbable of places, and you're humming it to yourself, grab your phone and capture it. (No, you will not remember it! Hum it, and add spoken comments to further describe what you're hearing in your mind's ear.) Then, when you're sitting at your workstation and wondering what to do this evening, grab one of those recordings and start trying to work it into a song ... recording yourself as you do it. Also – use the "notes" features of your DAW! Write down your thoughts and plans for the project. Then, never delete those notes. Also learn about, and use, the "version" features of your software. Keep everything! (Uhh, it's not exactly like you're gonna 'run out of disk space,' eh? And if you do, that's what external drives are for! They're dirt-cheap now.) (Wanna "throw it away?" Drop it into the "NotSoTrash" folder and then forget that it exists.)

"Music" is actually filled with "mathematics." And, over the centuries, many composers have become captivated with this aspect of it.

So ... where are they? 😀 I wanna hear 'em! Songs are things you should always be working on – getting them out of your head and into your phone's "voice recorder," then out of the recorder and onto paper and onto MIDI, or what-have-you. And, you should painstakingly keep them all, including the drafts and "abandoned" sections. Many songwriters have related how a "junk" song that they'd discarded later proved to have – or, to be – "just the thing" that they needed later. Creativity isn't a deterministic process. But, the more you do it, the better you seem to get at it.

The thing that thrills me is that you ... "yes, you" ... can make magic.

Something else that's fun to do is ... "play it, and record it in Logic." Now, look at it. Maybe you "clammed" a couple notes: go fix them. Now listen again. When you hear a performance, even if it's yours, "suddenly it's not-quite 'yours' anymore." I have never had strong hand-eye coordination, e.g. to "sight read" music as some of my friends can so easily do. But I've found that I can "give an expressive performance" and then go back and clean it up using that "magical musical word-processor." And certainly, being able to look at that performance has pointed out to me some of the mistakes that I more commonly make.

I actually do a lot of composing with a music-scoring application (MuseScore, which is open-source and extremely powerful). I start with a few basic musical ideas – motifs – then try to develop them into a basic song arrangement that initially is just a "lead sheet." Then, there's a lot of pure experimentation: "what if we do this?" Listening to a section and wondering what might make it stronger – a counter-melody, a bass line, a contrasting sound or rhythm. Likewise listening to the entire song, broken down into sections, and re-arranging those sections. Keep everything. You really don't(!) know where you might be going when you start, and you never know when what seemed to be "a dead end" was just waiting to find its proper place. Never listen for "angelic choirs" to announce to you that you have found "the right answer." You might come up with several different developments of the same idea. This is not a deterministic process.

I like to think of myself as "a writer of fiction." I want to find an idea that is both "universal" and "important to me," then I want to write "a work of fiction" about that idea. I like songs that have "story." And I want them to connect with the listener so that the story plays in their life, not mine.

To me, Dr. Who was always an iconic example of early electronic scores.