[Terminology, What's It Called When You..]

I think it's just called "a change in time-signature."

And here's the thing that I didn't "get" for a long, long time in music classes: changing the time-signature doesn't change the tempo of the song ... rather, it reflects a change in the way that the ear parses-out the notes into "measures," and how many notes and what kind of notes those measures are perceived to contain.

As far as I know, the reason why your ear perceives a difference is that the pattern of down-beats has changed. These are the notes ("one two three four" ... "one two three four five six") that you consciously or unconsciously emphasize slightly as you sing or play the phrases. When that happens, your ear starts looking for the new regular pattern ... the new time-signature.

Changes in signature are sometimes accompanied by changes in tempo (beats-per-minute), and if that occurs you'll see markings like "Accel.(erndo)" or "Rit.(ardo)" in the same area.

[Melody]

I've been reading a book, Hearing and Writing Music: Professional Training for Today's Musician, by Ron Gorow (ISBN: 0-9629496-7-1), and lately I've been reading and re-reading (not really grokking it yet...) his chapter 6 on "Hearing Phrases," particularly his topic, "Tonality as a Tool" (p. 132 in my 2nd edition).

His argument is that: "When we look at abstract art, the mind creates relationships (this and all bold-faced emphasis is the author's) of shapes and colors, and a sense of orientation with earth, with gravity. When we hear tones, even random tones, the mind perceives tonal relationships. Even when music is deliberately atonal, we will try to form tonal relationships." He then proceeds: "We need not be analytical; we simply use tonality as a tool of perception when it is evident. For our purpose, tonality is temporary and fluid, having little relevance to previous or subsequent phrases." He asserts that this tonal structure provides "a template, a map of tonality, which may be used in the perception of a phrase." He calls it "a subjective tool," and says that "each person may interpret the influence of tonality a little differently."

Getting more specific, he points out that "Each tone, however remote, maintains an intervallic relationship with preceding tones. We may identify several consecutive tones as a tonal group, then proceed to the next perceived tonal group."

This, to me, seriously jars what I have traditionally thought about the relationship between "melody" and "accompaniment." The melody here is being presented as a sequence of intervals, forming perceived groups in relationship to other nearby notes and also in relationship to other nearby perceived-groups. Each group is perceived to have some tonal center, although different listeners may perceive different ones.

"Sequences are patterns of modulation which are usually governed by diatonic, chromatic or symmetrical organization. If the intervals of a sequence are altered to accommodate the prevailing scale, mode or harmony, we refer to it as diatonic. If the intervals are absolute, the sequence is chromatic. Sequences are an effective compositional device; everyone recognizes them, even if subconsciously." "Any phrase you will encounter will have a certain amount of familiarity."

I keep reading stuff like this over and over (full disclosure: I'm a professional computer-geek... I sorta get-off sometimes on cerebral things like this...) because it almost seems to me like a guidepost in the dark. He seems to be pointing to a way of looking at things in which "the melody" and "the accompaniment" are designed and working together, not as "first one thing and then the other." He also seems to be suggesting a way of looking at a series of notes, not just as "a series of notes," but as "a series of leaps, or intervals" between successive notes ... usually taking place in scales and modes that also have an established structure of intervals.

"May I leave the room, please? My brain is full."

[What Have You Learnt From X Factor / American Idol Etc?]

I think that all of these shows are more-or-less facing the same problem of dilution. You can sell your own work directly now, for better or for worse. These shows want to be "star-makers," and of course that is the pitch they make to advertisers, but over many years they have had only a handful of successes. People don't spend nearly as much time in front of the tee-vee than they once did. A video that "goes viral" on a social networking site can have far more market penetration in much less time (although it doesn't last as long).

Even though the myth was always that "one day this unknown person with a guitar walked into a bar and Fame Happened," the reality was that what "happened" required a huge amount of promotion and artist-management with, actually, no guarantee at all of success. Many a star went through the gristmill and never sold enough copies of their product to pay the mill's (always inflated) expenses. In that strategy you either won big or you lost big but my point is that it was always big, because it always had to be. Today you can "succeed small." You are now presented with a world-wide distribution mechanism wherein the cost-of-goods-sold is next to nothing. You can make money today the way a jukebox used to: literally, a nickel at a time. The positive cash-flow might be smaller than you'd need to afford that mansion on the hill surrounded by 125 acres of land and white board fences, but it's positive cash-flow nonetheless.

[What Do You Start With?]

It bears considering that often whatever you start with, is not what you finish with. Professional (prose...) writers emphasize that "writing is rewriting," and I think that's true. Whatever it is that you "start with," it's pretty unlikely that you'll stare at it in wonder and say, "there it is ..."

So, be easy on yourself, and pragmatic: don't harbor that expectation.

It's much more likely that you'll have a pile of rock with a glint of color here and there. Grab a bucket, 'cuz the work is just now beginning. ("10% inspiration and 90% perspiration...")

If you now sort-through and polish what you have, while keeping your ears open for other musical thoughts to add to the mix, discarding nothing permanently, a finished product just might pop up that ... you think is very good and that you do not entirely recognize.

(In the process, you might have come up with other ideas that, even though they don't seem to fit here, now, might well find a place in something else someday.)

I'm not nearly good enough at this crazy thing to really know what I'm doing, but I can say that after whacking on a musical mechanism for way too long, and getting my face soaked with too much oil, and really getting rather pissed at the song (frankly...) because nothing seems to be panning out ... ... suddenly ... ... "there it is." Oh, it might not turn heads downtown (I do live in Nashville, and around here hope does spring eternal ...), but, by gawd, it's good to me.

[Musings On The Computer As A Composition Tool]

I enjoyed this post. I am trying to be careful to keep everything -- in sets -- notation variants, Aria instrument & mix settings, and in some cases accompaniment ideas all saved to the new variant name. I 'lost' the original notation to some songs to a harddrive crash and only have the mp3 available, so that drives my thinking on how much to save.

I agree I have sometimes been surprised coming back to a tune after a bit how much I enjoyed it. When writing & editing I see that it is easy to 'zone in' and hear specific parts of the composition.

Okay, I'm a Geek. I actually use a source-code version control system.

[Need Advice For Music]

If your "chops" are "sorta so-so, at best" (as mine certainly are), you can also use your computer as a sort of musical word-processor. Programs like GarageBand (just for example) have a "piano-roll display" in which you can put notes down as lines of various lengths on "a wide sheet of paper" (the electronic player piano roll). The vertical position is the note; the length is the duration. (Believe it or not, composers have written music by punching holes in real piano-rolls...)

And it works. Y'know, I don't think anyone suddenly became a fantastic perfect typist when the computer came along, but now you never see a tpyo anywhere. No one makes spelin errors, either, because the computer catches all the misteaks and you can fix tehm before anyone seez themm. The computer not only simplifies the process of writing, but it significantly adds value to the process.

So now, the computer has handed you the ability to construct a piece of music, to build it up, and to always be able to hear it being played perfectly, every single time. You can build a song that way, and maybe someday hand it over to a live band of players who can add their own jazzy interpretation to what you've written. (All creativity involves collaboration, I think ...)

So, now, what can you do with it? Well, here are a couple of not-quite-intuitive observations:

• The human brain is very attentive to patterns, and therefore to repetition as well as contrast. We like to hear things repeated. We like to hear things repeated in a slightly different way. We like to hear contrasting sections which seem to be related to what we've heard recently.
• The intervals between notes (that is to say, the "gaps") are really just as important, perhaps more so, than the notes themselves. So, we pick up on the fact that the intervals between notes are being repeated, not just the actual notes. We also pick up on rhythm. And, never forget the musical value of silence.
• This fondness for repetition and structure applies not only to the song as a whole ("bridge", "chorus" ...), but also to the phrases of music in the song itself. Visually, you can actually see that pattern on the piano-roll display.

Another very interesting tidbit, found long ago by guys like Bach and Brahms, is that we recognize (and enjoy) purely mathematical tricks, like: retrograde ("rearranging a line of notes backwards"); inversion ("playing a line of notes upside-down"); or retrograde inversion ("both"). Our ears somehow pick up on the pattern even if we can't immediately put our finger on it. Some music-writing programs have macros and things to help you try out things like this. Cutting and pasting, rearranging things almost at random, can also make musical surprises. An honest-to-goodness "typo" can take a song in an unexpected direction. (So: the file can be of unlimited size, and the "Delete" key is not your friend.)

What's so much fun to me about this (and fair warning, I'm a computer geek by trade...) is that it busts you right out of the confines of your music-lessons (or lack thereof). You can literally put anything together and play it and .... ... well, it does take a little patience. But the limitation of what your head can persuade your hands to do is now gone. (Just as the word-processor put "professional typists" right out of business.)

Now, a postscript on what I said about building something up. You start small and simple and you add to it, religiously keeping every single draft without saving-over anything. You can experiment. Sometimes what you get is and sometimes you get a "clam." But you can just keep approaching it from different ways and the computer is doing a lot of the dirty-work for you. Get the melody down, maybe. A chord progression. Just a sketch at first, then (having carefully saved it and brought out another working copy) you start adding here and there. Maybe it goes into the "Crumpled-Up Pieces Of Paper" folder, never to be actually discarded, or maybe it becomes the next version of something. You just never know where these things may lead. But it can take you places you can't go with just your own two hands.

[Song Lyrics Rights]

I. N. A. L., but ...

The manner of your post implies strongly that there was some kind of "business" relationship between the two of you. May I presume, then, that the two of you had the presence of mind to put it in writing and then sign your name to it? Gee, I hope so.

Otherwise ... I'd like to suggest that the two of you go back there behind the woodshed and get yourselves into a good knock-down drag-out fist fight until ... you've knocked a little sense into one another.

I mean it. Duke it out. Get everything out into the open. And then . . .

For the good of the song, if nothing else, find some way to reach a mutually acceptable agreement. Then, put that agreement in writing and sign your names to it, both of you keeping a copy. (If there might be serious money in it, each of you sign it in the presence of a notary public... AAA offers that service for free to its members.) "Maybe next time" you'll do it differently, "older and wiser," but that will be water under the bridge by that time.

A good song, a good project, doesn't deserve to wind up on-the-skids because you don't quite see eye to eye anymore, even though Lord knows that way too many of them did. Perhaps the two of you can find a way to admit that both of you were, maybe, just a little bit wrong, maybe said a few things to each other that you shouldn't, and thus maybe the song can be rescued, for the good of the music, even if the two of you choose to never work together again...

"You worked so hard to make it, and it took so long to bake it, and you'll never have that recipe again." Don't "leave the cake out in the rain..."

["why Am I Not Famous Yet?"]

I think that "the Music Industry" is seriously caught off-guard by the explosion of what they call "un-signed music." Music that is being produced by people who don't have any sort of recording contract, and are not producing anything as a "work made for hire," and who are selling directly to the consumer. It's never again going to be the business that it was "pre-Net." Ever. And, all-l-l-l of that " you, there's nothing you can do about us, so face it, you're -ed" bad karma is coming right back onto a lot of people in spades.

Bad attitudes, and bad business decisions, and smoking bridges, made when none of them thought their party could end. When the game changed, they had no friends among people who, up to that time, had been forced to do business with them.

["why Am I Not Famous Yet?"]

Lastly, I would just like to show my appreciation for experienced people like yourself, who freely give their time and abundance of experience to others including myself. I have just recently returned to lyric writing after a fifteen year absence, and even though it was initially difficult for me to hear your feedback on some lyrics that I had written, It turned out that you were absolutely spot on. I suppose that it was hard for me to accept that I was very rusty, but your constructive criticism has encouraged me to re-evaluate what I write. Thank you. Kind regards, Ray

Why, thank you ...

Maybe I am missing my future calling as a promoter or a critic. Sure would beat the hell out of continuing to be a computer-programmer for the rest of my life...

["why Am I Not Famous Yet?"]

I think that both Madonna, in her day, and Lady Gaga, in her day, know precisely how the marketing aspects of the business work, and how to shape it to their own personal and business advantage. Right down to the selection of their public name. (Well, "Madonna" is of course the first name of Mme. Madonna Louise Caccione, but she subsequently played up the Catholic-notoriety angle to the hilt, most explicitly and knowingly in titles like Like A Virgin.)

There is no denying, also, that "Sex Sells," whether you have settled upon the schtick of putting on a cone-shaped bra or something equally schtick. People are not going to buy your grade-8 musical performance abilities, and they don't want to buy your demos. However, being possessed of that level of performance and song-writing ability never hurt anyone. This is a business, and you are developing and marketing a commercial product. You know that you have only a very limited amount of time to stock-up the bank of songs that will be played on XM Radio (you hope...) forever. When the "retro" stations are playing "the oldies hits of the 2010's" and they really are "oldies" and you're gulping down Metamucil vitamin supplements while wearing Depends baggy pants, you want those royalty-checks to still be coming-in.

[Excellent Method]

Never throw anything away. Ever. And that includes "saving over" an existing file when you change it.

["why Am I Not Famous Yet?"]

I think it's also worthwhile to notice that Charles M. Schulz produced a total of 17,897 strips: 15,391 daily strips, and 2,506 Sundays. He drew every single one of them by hand, while simultaneously managing a world-wide licensing business. He took only one five-week "vacation" during his entire life.

There are plenty of musical performers out there who voluntarily keep very grueling schedules. The trumpeter Chris Botti, for example, has been keeping up a touring schedule for years in which he performs somewhere almost every night of the year.

I'm not saying that you have to dig a grave for yourself in order to "make it," but maybe I'm saying that it helps. Luck favors the well-prepared. Even "famous name" songwriters and performers constantly keep doing it as long as their health holds up, because the competition is fierce and, well, as Charlie Daniels put it, "they'll forget about ya, soon."

It definitely is a volume game. The more stuff you have out there on-sale, the more revenue you'll bring in even if none of them are burning the top out of the Billboard chart.

No matter what it is that you are selling, or to whom: "He who has a thing to sell / and talks about it in a well / is much less apt to get the dollars / than he who stands on roof and hollers."

Then there's the lesson that Tom Watson, Sr., the founder of IBM, gave to his salesman: "Two salesmen were sent to Pango-Pango to sell shoes. One wired back: 'Coming home next boat. No one here wears shoes.' But the other one wired: 'Marvelous opportunity. Send all you have. No one here wears shoes!'" Success, in other words, is what you make it. Laugh at "outrageous" acts like Lady Gaga if you want to, but that lady, like Madonna before her, knows exactly where she's going and exactly how to get there. She knows exactly what product she needs to sell, where to get it, how to package it, who her audience is, and how to sell it. She will go far.

The days are long gone when Nashville and L.A. and "Tin Pan Alley" were the king-makers of music, because the barriers to entry have all been demolished. Literally anyone can not only produce a good song (or a bad one!), but they can produce it and send it to the world. So you are not only competing with good stuff ... you're competing with bad stuff, as well! But on the other hand, there are no real limits as to where you might find ways and places to sell your music. The "cost of goods sold" is ... zero.

And, even if you don't "sell" a single note, there is the pure joy of doing it and of being recognized and appreciated by your own peers for doing so. You never know where such things might lead. Even if they lead "nowhere," music is still a self-rewarding journey that is well worth taking. Music will change your life.

[A Trip To The Woodshed]

I'm on my fifth (or so...) read-through of Jimmy Webb's tour-de-force, TuneSmith (ISBN-10: 0-7868-8488-6 ... yeah, of course "I've got it right here."), and in the past couple of days I really had it hammered-in to me just what he meant by the phrase, "Woodshedding."

Jimmy defines it this way (in part...): "Woodshedding" is an old musical slang expression that means kind of working things out by trial and error -- fitting things together and discarding others as we go along."

I just experienced it for myself. I made myself do it, because I was stuck. I was working on what was to become Trading Places. I'd come up with a nice little motive (Ditty), and a contrasting punctuation or two to go with it, and a funky-bass part ... but I had no interlude and no ending. What I did have were several dozen "throw-away" (so to speak...) drafts that were all: aimless, inappropriate to the piece, and going nowhere. And this is when I realized I'd have to go to the woodshed.

For these parts of the song, I needed segments of music with specific lengths and characteristics. They had to "go from here" and "go to there," and accomplish certain purposes along the way. "Noodling around" was obviously not going to do that. I'd already wasted three days on the attempt ... coming up with stuff that might be the germ of a future song, but that wasn't doing anything at all for this one. So, understand that I was "going to the woodshed" more or less out of desperation . . .

Here's what I did, and I'd love to hear comments on it.

• I wrote a melody-line of quarter notes, leaving a few blank measures before it. (Remember: I'm using "MuseScore," a music-score writing program.) I focused on the intervals between the notes: interval and direction. I tried to notice how they looked on the page.
  
• Then, on the drum line, I dropped-in a sequence of hi-hat hits just to mark where I wanted the downbeats to fall. (Lots of copy-and-paste here.)
  
• Next, I started to literally transcribe those notes, with some rhythmic variations, fitting those to the rhythm sequence that I'd made.
  
• Then, I started trying to put to work Jimmy Webb's "chord substitution" technique, because all throughout all of this, I didn't feel anything at all "creative" coming.
  

There were no "springs of inspiration" here: I was digging a well. Dirty, smelly work, partly because I haven't done this enough (yet!) to really know what I'm doing.

I tried tricks, really for the first time:

• "'Upside-down' and/or 'backwards,'" or to say it high-falutin', "inversion" and "retrograde." The major note sequence from the opening line, turned end-for-end, turned upside-down, and both at once. I dropped each one of these into the quarter-note sequence.
  
• Since the song is called Trading Places, and it's built around a Vibraphone and a Marimba part where the two players are literally "trading places" sometimes within the same measure, I copied a line from one part, pasted it into the other, usually shifted slightly to the left or to the right, then shifted up by a third or a fourth. I fished-out all the "clams." An eighth-note sequence might become "sixteenth and dotted-eighth" in one, and "dotted-eighth in one and sixteenth" in the other, just so that the two players who are playing the same thing aren't playing it in precisely the same way. (Hamming it up, you know.)
  
• In one case, I turned all the quarter notes into half-notes for one of the overlapping phrases, and since one part was now twice as long, I copied it, pasted it in (shifted by one note so that this instrument would finish the repetition one beat after the first), and inverted it.
  

Rhythm and final-bass parts came last, and I admit that right now they're still sounding a lot like "loops" because of the cutting and pasting, and because I am neither a bassist nor a drummer.

Whew! And here's the goofy thing, the amazing-to-me thing, and the reason behind this post: after all of these shenanigans with "a musical word-processor," suddenly, it worked. I'm writing this while listening to a rather cool-sounding (if I say so myself...) piece of music that I don't entirely recognize. But I like it. And the "woodshed parts," being the interlude and the coda, are the ones I think I like the best. It sounds like two people are actually playing it.

Also: I think that the "musical word-processor" technique worked very much to my advantage ... I guess it's like the composers who wrote music by punching holes in blank player-piano rolls ... because, "I myself could never play this stuff." I don't have the chops. But... I don't need them.

[Listen While You Surf ...]

I've just noticed something ...

I've been listening to my latest piece (a rather funky mega-extension of some material, some of which you've heard in my recently-posted Ditty sketch, but weighing in now at 1:49), over and over while surfing the Internet, reading the forums here and elsewhere, and ...

... folks, it makes a difference! You will regard your own piece differently when you are not paying 150% attention to it; when you're listening to it as, well, "background music."

(Oh, you are "paying 150% attention to it," of course, but you're using a different part of your brain now.)

First of all, one would hope, you will actually enjoy it. (It will sound, curiously, somewhat like it was written by somebody else.) You'll notice little things that might need improvement, such as, in my case, stuff that's just a little bit crowded-together, or a note that's repeated a little too often in a phrase. But it doesn't cause you to "drop everything that you're doing and go and fix it right away." (Not anymore, anyway.)

What's happening here is that the song is beginning to divorce itself from its creator: to take on a life and a character of its own, and to be regarded in the same way as, well, "she's really not My Little Girl anymore; she's a beautiful woman." You're listening to it now with a little bit of distance, a little bit of objectivity. And that's really what you need to be able to do. Things that you may have wrestled-over begin to take on a different significance in context, whereas things that you may have overlooked might suddenly jump out at you. You also find yourself in a better position to consider, "well, is this thing pleasing?"

Or, "Would I download this?" "Would I 'fave' it?" Not that music-making is a competitive thing, except for the fact that of course, it is. Self-competitive, you know. You want it to be good. "Honestly, Good" to you.

I think that this is one of the reasons why writing-instruction books emphasize the need to "put your manuscript down for several weeks" before reading it again, so that you can begin to regard it as your audience would do.

[Musings On The Computer As A Composition Tool]

As "my little Ditty" continues to grow and pass 2:17 in duration, I realize (a) that it is evolving into a rather avant garde fusion-jazz type piece; and ( sometimes I find myself regarding it and wondering who-in-the-heck wrote it. Even though I know the answer to that question (of course), I am also mindful of the fact that the song is beginning to take its leave of me. And as I stand on the front porch waving good-bye to that receding car (thankful that it narrowly missed that fence-post...), it makes me think about the creative process that produces such things. Since there just happens to be this nice tree-stump standing here, I think I'll climb on top of it and say a few things out loud.

As you may know, I'm using an excellent, open-source, music scoring program (MuseScore and what I am listening to is the product of its rendering through a built-in VST and SoundFont. So I am literally writing everything one note at a time, and using word-processor like tools such as copy-and-paste and various programmed macros ("inversion," "retrograde," and so on).

One thing that I notice right away is that this brings continuity to your writing which is sometimes a good thing ... and of course, sometimes repetitive. I also notice that there is definitely an element of surprise. You forget to delete something that you copied and, "hey! that sounds pretty good!" so you keep it, and, so it grows.

There's an element of serendipity ... an element of genuine surprise. You play it and it blows you away even though it isn't what you expected at all.

Another thing that I notice is that "your own performance, and hence your own technical performance-skills (or your lack thereof)" is not involved at all. The computer is doing the performance. And, as computers always do, it is executing what you have actually written, perfectly, "clams" and all. (Which is something I can never do with a sheet of music and my own two clumsy hands... never to my satisfaction, anyway.)

Yet another thing I notice, while writing this piece and letting the song play over and over in the background, is that music sounds different when you are not paying 100% of your attention to it. That's important. You need to listen to your stuff in the way that ordinary folks would; not just as the creator. (Uhh, and you can become sick of it, too. Time to back off.) You start listening to a piece as though it did come from someone else, and sometimes you get tangental ideas just like the ones that you get when you are listening to "somebody else's stuff" and you think about what you might do with the same material.

Finally, the computer allows you to create non-destructive revisions .. an endless number of draft copies, and the ability to keep all of them. I've "thrown away" things that I later-on resurrected. I realize that the idea was there, just momentarily out-of-place, and the Delete key was getting ahead of, maybe, my subconscious mind. It allows you to do, "what the heck... what if we try this?" Develop the discipline to copy-and-paste, or to insert space for "a new revision" without deleting what's there, and ... maybe it's a clam (it stays), maybe it's a turkey (it stays), or maybe it's wow (it stays and you feel proud of it and it goes to "the main line").

The computer has an amazing ability to let you transcend your music-lessons. Completely. The computer is not "taking a merely passive role" in what takes place. Yet, the computer is not "doing it for you," either, in the sense of "a loop." What it seems to be doing is enhancing what you can do, both by removing obstacles and also by bringing to bear unique strengths.

(He steps down off the tree-stump, not quite sure of what he's saying, and wanders on down the path less taken, strangely happy there so to be ... as though he knows it a rare privilege to be there and he wouldn't want to be anywhere else.)

[Poet Becoming A Lyricist?]

I am, of course, a serious fan of Jimmy Webb's book, TuneSmith, and in that book he talks quite a bit about lyrics.

Lyrics are, of course, a form of poetry, yet it is a form of poetry that is bound to music ... joined at the hip. I recently bought a retrospective book of Paul Simon's lyrics (on a clearance rack at the soon-to-be defunct Borders store, alas...), and when you read them apart from the music they read like faintly-odd, curiously sparse poetry ... because, well, "fully one-half of the thing is missing."

"A poem," by itself, is meant to be regarded "by itself." A lyric, on the other hand, is not.

[Analyzing A Song Need Help]

One thing that I sense in this lyric is a use of (what I think is called) juxtaposition. In other words, the use of a familiar simile in an unexpected and revealing way.

For instance: "Somewhere underneath the floorboard, I will sweep my garden." Nothing underneath a floorboard can be reached. Floorboards are swept, but only to get rid of dust bunnies. But earth, the basis of any garden, is "underneath the floorboard." You don't sweep a garden, an act which implies trying to get rid of something you don't want, but you do tend one, an act of preservation and nurturing.

Later on, a garden certainly would be "in the backyard," and there would be "roots" there. You might be "diggin' in the backyard" to tend your garden.

The word "underneath" appears both in reference to the garden, and to the mouse, who is not running away to escape the broom but rather is "discovering" (an odd thing for a mouse to do) and discovering that "there is nothing there." There is an obvious connection between that singer, that garden, and that mouse.

Raindrops, "falling from the sky," are "in my eyes." She is "digging" for something, while crying, but she "don't know where they are."

You get a clear picture, albeit indirectly, that the singer/lyricist is painting word-pictures for you through this juxtaposition of images. These are images that "belong together, and yet they obviously don't." Each word-picture that the lyricist conjures up is vivid, yet conveyed with a sparse collection of rhymes and prosody. The lyrics don't make the meaning entirely clear, leaving you to wonder about it. Leaving you to fill-in meanings from your own life experience.

[Songwriting And The Muse]

Hey, just in case, I didn't mean anything whatsoever negatively by my perhaps-careless choice of phrase, "futzing around" ... Let me cover that base right now just in case any offense could be taken.

Having said that ...

I recently re-watched the (very good) documentary, It Might Get Loud, and one thing that you notice from that movie is that, every single time Jack White is playing anything at all, he reaches over to his reel-to-reel recorder and switches it on. Every time he strikes a chord, the tape is rolling. And I presume that he never erases them.

[Composing Instrumental Songs]

I don't think that it is "over-simplified" at all.

Also, if you find that "ideas hurl themselves at you" and don't align themselves, don't chalk that up to ADD or anything else: I believe that this is how creativity works. You have to find a way to organize it, to persuade those high-spirited race horses to accept a saddle and a bit without losing their fire. "Capturing the material, as it happens, however it happens," has been compared to catching a lightning-bug in a jar. Don't kill the thing, of course, but catch it, and then you can determine what to do with it. Here's where the very-loose analogy ends, of course.

One thing that's a little bit different for me is that I do everything with the computer. My performance skills, frankly, are lackluster. My hand/eye coordination is only so-so. (Aww, heck... truth time... truth: I haven't practiced like I know I should, in years.) I'm a crazy "musical-scores are actually fun" geek but maybe that is kinda-sorta like the composers who used to write stuff for player pianos by punching holes into long strips of paper. Perhaps you can find a way to use the computer like a word-processor. Find a way to let it help you create music that, perhaps, you can't play, but that you can imagine.

[Songwriting And The Muse]

Yeah, this is different from writing for guitar, bass, drums and choir.

Like your earmuff comment. Never noticed (thankfully).

Currently working on the last stages of rebuilding my studio, getting everything to play nicely together. I have tools I can fall back on, but this is opportunity to not fall behind technologically.

Appreciate your input and insight, Mike.

Cho

You're welcome. Looking forward to hearing some of your (past and future) work. Believe me, if you've been writing for years ... or even in your own mind "just arranging and orchestrating" ... for guitar, bass, drums, and a live choir, then futzing with the hardware in your own home studio ... (ooh, I love the selection of avatars on this site!) ... is merely a technical distraction that has nothing to do with "the muse" and "creativity."

You did it, either as a vocation or as an avocation or both (which meant, "deadlines" and "the expectations of paying people (not to mention Higher Powers)"). And what is more, you did it in a context that involved "real people," not just electronics in your den.

I would seriously recommend that you take a serious look at MuseScore, unless you already happen to be using Sibelius or Finale, because I think that it is an excellent compositional tool. Plus, "it runs on everything." Although the emphasis of the tool is on music scoring, not performance, with a good SoundFont installed it sounds very well indeed. Certainly more than enough capability, and at no cost, to allow you to write something and to see how it will sound when performed in a live setting. Plus, you can do it while you're otherwise preoccupied by ... connecting wires in your studio ... y'know ... "just to see what happens." ...

[Songwriting And The Muse]

Good pointers, Mike.

I can see where this is an exercise in exploring the depths of what I already know, only putting it into different forms.

In a sence, it's quite similar (and parallel) to J's suggestions. Break up the familiar and explore from different settings/perspectives.

Thanks.

Cho

Yeah, I think that the crux of the suggestion is simply, "start, and don't stop." When you were doing stuff for your congregation, you had a definite deadline. You certainly have quite a bag-of-tricks still at hand, which you used to get the job done. So, the only two things that are different now are:

• (maybe) the source melody; and...
• what modifications, enhancements, embellishments, instrumentations etc. that you feel that you are now able to put into the mix, given that you don't have to prepare it for an untutored congregation of ... ummmm, "enthusiastic" ... singers! (Does God wear earmuffs?)

Writers who cut their teeth at newspapers have sometimes been quoted as saying, in so many words, "the best writing tool I ever had was three o'clock."

Charles Schulz (Peanuts) often said the same thing: every day, he closed the door to his office and he took out a notepad and he doodled. Even if no ideas came that day, he doodled. Every day. After all, he couldn't have drawn 17,897 strips in his lifetime by waiting on a fairy.

[Songwriting And The Muse]

One clever-trick is to grab some short bit from a classical music tune. (If the guy who wrote it's been dead for a couple centuries, then you can be certain that it's in the public domain. Furthermore, if the guy who wrote it's been dead for a couple centuries and people are still listening to it, chances are it must be pretty good.)

You can also grab many public-domain pieces from a resource that's quite familiar to you: a church hymnal.

Okay ... select a short passage, almost any passage in fact, and ... "there's where you are going to start." You don't have to sit there, staring at the walls and waiting for inspiration to strike: your starting point is now right there in front of you.

"Okay, what next?" Aye, there's the rub, but now you are quite free to use experimentation. Make up six entirely different chord progressions that could be used to harmonize that phrase. Write them all down, one after the other, then pick the one you like. Now take the phrase and flip it end for end ("retrograde"). Flip it note-for-note upside down ("inversion"). Do both at once ("retrograde inversion"), then cut out the middle third and squash the two ends together. Keep everything, but then feel free to focus on (cut-n-paste...) whatever you like best so far.

Now... let me add a caveat. I'm using a computer throughout. The computer is "performing" whatever I come up with, so I don't have to be limited by my rather pathetic instrument skills. Neither do you. In any case, you can certainly use the computer to hammer-out something that you can subsequently attempt to play.

One of the best real-world examples of this kind of "improvising on a classical melody" is Barry Manilow's Could It Be Magic, which (according to my trusty WikiPedia) was based on Frédéric Chopin's Prelude in C Minor, Opus 28, Number 20. This particular piece deliberately begins and ends with an actual excerpt from that piece, but there are literally thousands of pop songs out there which are based on existing, classical, public-domain material. It will surely get you started.

The funny thing about this approach is ... even though you'll say that the piece was based on this-or-that classic, inevitably the song will be "entirely yours." It's just that, by starting with a fertile seed from a known-good source, your creativity has something to focus on.

[Circling The Drain]

Well, given that there is one plumbing device, in particular, which relies entirely upon "circling water" to accomplish its very worthy goal ... you're going to have a bunch of perhaps-unwanted mental images "flushing" into the listener's head . . .

[Composing Instrumental Songs]

I am very much "learning, too," but here is one idea that has been very useful to me from other forms of creative-writing that I do ...

First, capture the material. Get a big piece of (note) paper, or a nice empty directory on your hard drive, and just start writing things down. I use an open source music-scoring program MuseScore (which is excellent, by the way ...) and what I do is to notate an idea, leave a few blank measures, and then notate something else. If I have an idea to change something, I copy it to the clipboard, paste it into a new section of the same (or a different) document, and make the changes there. Either way, I am capturing ideas and inspirations but I am doing so non-destructively. "The Delete key should be temporarily removed from the keyboard."

Then, assemble various ideas. Again, do it non-destructively. (You're never going to run out of disk space, and if you're getting close, buy a bigger or just buy another drive and keep going.) When you are assembling, you're trying to find a suitable organization of things that you already have "in stock." Of course new ideas will pop out as you do that. "See step #1."

They say that writing consists of re-writing, and I have very much and very often found this to be true. Whether I'm writing words, or (trying to write) music, or even performing my daily pays-for work of writing computer software. "You won't get it right the first time. You probably can't. Don't throw it away. Instead, shoot for a strategy of successive refinement." That strategy will get you to where you want to go (or to another even-nicer place that you never expected to find).

[How Do I Get Into The Craft Years After All My Piano Lessons?]

Just keep working at it. Don't aim too high too soon - unless you are a genius!

And even if you are "a genius," the creative process always consists of refinement, and experimentation, and practice. ("How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" "Practice, man! Practice!") If you start without expectations that are not realistic, you're just gonna get frustrated for no good reason. Don't matter whether it's music or lyrics or the Next Great Novel or throwing a clay pot on a wheel. Creativity is all the same. You can talk about it all day, but there's no "just add water!" to it.

There is a strategy, though. Okay, so you can't fly over that building in a single bound... that's life. But you sure can walk around the thing, or take a taxi, and get there just the same -- or even get somewhere better, where you never quite expected to go. Yeah, sometimes you find yourself saying, "Wow!" about something you just did. It's a thrill when it happens.