MikeRobinson

Threads like this one are, nevertheless, great for reminding people that "there's a planet out there." You do need to "mind your [legal ...] P's and Q's," as with everything, but there are no barriers to entry if you're imaginative (and thorough). No one's printing plastic disks (or vinyl ones). No one's packing heavy boxes full of these heavy(!) disks and shipping them anywhere-at-all. Your "cost of goods sold," literally, is: "zero point zero-zero."

Heh ... laugh all you want to at Miley Cyrus, but that girl learned a very good lesson from her equally rebel (and, equally brilliant) father, Billy Ray. (The guy who made a fortune from "Achy Breaky Heart" on his first album, and "gave the finger" to the Nash-vegas moguls ever since ... while continuing to make them millions of dollars.) Miley also learned from Madonna (the original), and from Lady Gaga: "you must have a schtick, or else you are doomed to be Hannah Montana® for the rest of your days, 'workin' for The Mouse.' " I think that we can comfortably say that Miley Cyrus will never be confused with Hannah, whom she well-played for many years. (However, kindly note that Miley has never "bit that hand" which, I surmise [if Billy Ray has good lawyers, as I am quite sure he does ...], probably still feeds her.) She distanced herself completely from that persona, without damaging it. I personally think that you should strive to write and to produce the very best music that you can ... to learn all that you possibly can about both music-making and lyric-making ... to seek to master the craft as well as you are personally able, then to seek to top those limitations. If you absorb yourself in that pursuit, you won't have time for anything else. Then ... get your music "out there," in front of as many people as you can, and to as many markets as you can: It's not all about The United States. There's a world out there. It doesn't have to be broadcast-radio and/or music-album sales. Television and movies have an insatiable need for music, for example. It is "a numbers game." Johnny Cash had more than 1,200 songs in his "catalog." Dolly Parton has more than 3,000. How many do you know? Some of them are hits; some of them are bow-wow-wow howlll-lll scratch-a-flea. Nevertheless, all of them make money. The Internet changed everything, of course, but the most-important thing that it did (along with the rise of the Digital Audio Workstation) is to completely remove barriers to entry: for production, distribution, collaboration, marketing. "Copyright is Forever.™" Here in Nashville, there are production companies devoted to licensing the works of artists who have been dead for a very, very long time. You're "planting seeds." Hundreds of them. "God only knows" which one will make bear fruit or how much, but "the more seeds you have in the ground, the more likely you are to have a crop." (You, and your heirs.) But, just as "a watched pot never boils," you should be too busy planting more seeds to be sitting out in the fields watching for greenery.

I, for one, would like a very detailed "production breakdown" of how you put together both the song and the video. Because – let's face it – this (including the video) is commercial-grade stuff. If you can do this, then unless you are the executive chef at that restaurant, you're in the wrong business.

Disclaimer: I'm just like you, so I'm nobody that you have to bend the ear to listen to, but as I think seriously of how to improve upon my own songs, I do critique a lot of songs from a lot of sources. Winners and losers and also-rans who will never make it out of the chorus-line. There are three-and-a-half things about any song that I hear (or look at, first, in SoundCloud's graphic bar), that consistently predict whether I'll like the song. The "lift-off": Literally during the first second, certainly the first three seconds, give me something very distinct to hear. An unusual rhythm, a clear percussion part, a harmony. Bring the vocals in within five seconds, or maybe after you've stated the first motif once, and make the first line "hook" me. "Whooo-o-oosh! What happunt? Hey it sounds good, let's hang on!" (Note: I am talking about interest, not tempo.) Then, keep the promise. Don't let me down. During the three-and-a-half minutes that is a typical song, go somewhere. Instruments come in and go out, and maybe some of them don't come back in. Maybe the song builds and builds in volume ... or, maybe it doesn't. We all know what "musical pastiche" sounds like – we hear it on the radio every day. Think different. Lay-off the "thick synthetic string-pads": Synthetic string sounds are meant as pads. They consist mostly of sawtooth and triangular waves, intended to have many harmonics, so that they will "blend-in and sound good" with anything else that's going on, without drawing attention to themselves. They "sound good with anything," except: more string-pads! Mix too many string-pads together (with or without "the ghostly high-string part on top"), and you have a sonic porridge – or, a sonic train-wreck – in the middle registers. Nothing stands out, partly because there's really no space in the audio spectrum for it to "stand out" in. ("Overtones everywhere.") A very similar thing happens when your song consists of nothing but "a pad," because this sound that is "designed to harmonize with anything" has been given "nothing-at-all to harmonize with!" The result is a muddy sound with nowhere in particular to go. (... and a half) Go easy on the reverb, too. Way easy ... : Reverb just makes a string-pad mashup that much worse, muddying up the water still more. If it's a true reverb, say, then sounds from 1/2-second ago are now being shoved into the sounds that are there now. A song should sound great "completely dry." Compression should be used, I think, only as a fairly-final step to cause the song to sit well with, say, MP3 encoding (or SoundCloud's even more lossy version of it), and it should be done in true mastering fashion as a "post-production" step. If you're compressing parts to keep them from blowing out the top, you can really hear them squashing into the rubber ceiling. You don't need to put your music into a sepulchural hall to make it sound great. Variety that can stand a good "scrubbing": If the song starts to lose my interest, as too-many songs do about the first minute or so, I will "scrub ahead" in time to listen to see what happens next. Maybe (looking at the waveform) I might scrub to where I think a break is going to be. What I want to hear is "something different." What I often hear is "exactly the same thing, but more 'intensely.'" Same chord progressions, same rhythm, no contrast. Which results in (for those of you old enough to remember my reference), The Gong Show. "Go anywhere you please, but go somewhere!" And sure, I am speaking of songs that are intended to be "finals," versus ones that are intended to be "scratch demos." If you tell me from the outset that the song is a scratch, I'll listen only to the song and to how the lyric sits in it, knowing that arrangers and producers and vocalists can all come to work their magic later. JM2CW. HTH.

To me, those "subtle changes" are the spice of music ... and they can "make or break the song" to my ears ... if, in the mix, you can hear them. When "the chorus comes around again," do something slightly-different to it. Yay! Add a slight change to the lyric – "he" to "me" or what-have-you – that suggests that maybe the singer "did it." A good lyric, to me, is storytelling, and a good arrangement always supplies something a little new for the ear to hear and enjoy, without robbing the developing story.

First of all, you have a very nice(!) voice, and you made a well-mastered recording of it. I'm no voice coach, but I suspect that the flaws such as they are in this piece have to do with "the column of air." When you've got plenty of wind, you're able to put some very nice inflections into your voice (0:47 "my story to end"). Now let's go a second or two later, when the song builds up around 0:47-50, you pronounce the first part of that phrase very well ... strain a little bit to "no-thing can touch me," and you're straining for wind with ("why do I feel this ..."). So, the voice sounds thin(ner). You don't have the air to modulate the middle or the ending of the phrase. A couple seconds later, at 1:02 ("in-side ..."), you're modulating that phrase beautifully. A few seconds later, straining a bit. And so on. "Breath control." This is a very difficult song to sing, and, all in all, I think that you did an exceptional job with it!

I'm inspired by the same thing that inspired one of the characters in A Chorus Line: "I can do that!" Or ... ... what'd they just do? How did they do that? One of the most amazing, the most daunting, and yet the most exciting and challenging aspects of "music-making" is that there are no limits concerning "what can be done." Therefore, there are also no limits to the surprises that another artist can bring: technically, emotionally, you name it.

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 ..."