MikeRobinson

That is quite interesting. I had presumed that I merely was not looking in the right place. My "googleage" (love the term...), which of course I had already done (some of), didn't turn up anything in particular, and I assumed that I just had not yet stumbled on it yet. (Yes, I tried "stumbleupon.com" too.) Now, I grant you, a true professional marketplace would be well-hid, lest it be pummeled by hacks bearing "three chords and the truth," but I think that sheet music would have a little different market because no one is attempting to sit there and play it for you. I know that there's quite a bit of Facebook activity, and that "everybody's got his web site," but it's not difficult to see that "web sites" have become "islands in the stream," not "the stream itself," the latter being what you want when you've got something to sell. So if "you found a trunkful of songs in your grandma's attic," well ... You know where to talk about your finding (and about grandma, may she rest in peace) = Facebook. You know where to sell the trunk itself = eBay. But, having duly copyrighted them, where do you sell the songs? If there truly isn't one, then I want some venture capital ...

Where in the Web are sites where music buyers go to find copyrighted music, offered for sale by their owners e.g. in lead-sheet form, ready for consideration for purchase? I mean... they don't actually find 'em on Broadway at Fifth (in Nashville, of course...) playing on the street corners. Where do you place your product?

Let me see if I can tackle a few of these questions: A soundfont is a standard file format for containing "software instruments." For instance, a Grand Piano soundfont would contain a whole bunch of piano sounds, at least one per key on the keyboard and probably several. A MIDI file is kind of like a player-piano roll. It gives a great big list of "what note to play and when to play it." To actually hear sound, the MIDI player will need some source of "software instruments," such as that Grand Piano file I just spoke of. DAW is "Digital Audio Workstation" and that basically means a program or tool for creating music. It sort-of "mashes up" all these other functions into a tool that you can actually use to make something. VSTs are "plug-ins" for the software synthesizers that a typical DAW package includes. Whereas a "soundfont" is a file that contains pre-recorded instrument sounds, a "software synthesizer" is a software tool that creates sound from scratch. File formats such as MP3 are used to store musical recordings. Yes, a DAW system would be able to do things like "render a song that's recorded in a MIDI-file, with a selected soundfont (or software synth) providing the music, and to combine it with a vocal.

Most operating systems (and hardware) today is built to take advantage of 64-bit architectures, since memory has become dirt-cheap now. There's always a good reason to keep up with fairly recent software and equipment. But... "which operating system?" That depends entirely upon the software that you want to run, and (if you have a choice, given that...) your own personal preference. The operating system is the horse. The goodies are in the cart. The reason for the horse ... is the cart. (And the reason for the cart is the music!!) Myself? I cheated. Look around me in my little cubbyhole and you'll find an example of Windows and OS/X and Linux. It so happens that I'm a computer programmer by trade and I therefore actually use all three on a very regular basis. Each system is there, nonetheless, for a particular purpose, and that's exactly what should drive your decision-making, too. Buy what does the job you want it to do, and (if possible) that does it in a way that you like.

Write. All the time. Try to rhyme When you want to, And when you don't, don't. But write, nonetheless, With a very bold pencil And a very light hand On the eraser. (Who needs an eraser, after all?) Write it. It's yours. You own it. It's You. Share it. We'll listen. Don't stop. Never stop. writing.

Here's one thing that works well for me, when writing anything at all: Remove the "Delete" key from your (computer) keyboard. Remove the eraser from your pencil. "Writing" consists of "re-"writing. That's just the way that it is. Therefore, clearly separate the task of "cranking stuff out, just to get it out of your head," from the subsequent process of editing and selection. As you go into the second step of that process, don't actually throw anything out. Copy the good stuff to a new document, then carefully file-away both old and new. Just keep polishing, adding page to page but never throwing anything away. You can strike through text, in any word-processor as I have done here. If you edit with a pencil, make a very light line. One of the very best books I've read about writing is Stephen King's On Writing, and he actually shows you a "rough draft" of a short story. I was struck by how very ordinary it was; even clumsy. But then he refined it. The final version (while still not an outstanding story), was substantially better than what first came out. And the point was, if you just "encountered" that story, in a bookstore or whatever, you would only have opportunity to "encounter" the finished piece. You would have no way to see any part of the process that led to it. And so, when you wrote your own first draft, you might just crumple it up and say, "Stephen King would never write any crap like that!" Which Stephen himself disproved by writing a pretty "crappy" (if I say so...) first draft. Most of the actual creative process is entirely invisible in the finished work.

This happens to be one of my personal fascinations. Probably the most interesting part of that "making of" video is that it's such a clear demonstration of how crucial compositing is to the finished product. (In just the same way that the multi-track recording and mastering processes are critical to "finished product" music.) The comps ran by fairly quickly, but you could plainly see how some of the shots involved a dozen elements or more; perhaps many more. (I think my personal record is 61.) Folks try to achieve everything they see "in one shot," and spend weeks on render after render, when it does not actually work that way and never has. Incidentally, I use Blender for my (semi-professional) work, and it's endlessly amazing what it can do. Doesn't cost you a dime (although hundreds of thousands of Euro's worth of development time has been poured into it. Ready to be completely blown away? Look at this.

Mmmm.... I hear a song in your original post! Write down words and phrases that describe how you feel. (You started doing that in your original post!) And, just keep writing. No matter what you do, don't hit the "Delete" key, ever. If you make a tpyo just keep writing. If a sentence isn't XX If a phrase XX If a PUT_SOMETHING_HERE_LATER isn't right, just hit "XX" and keep that stream of thought going. Then, after letting your favorite backup software do its thing, and flagging the original file as "Locked" or "Read-Only," open another document and start copying and pasting. Do the same thing with that document, finished or not. Writing always consists of rewriting, and every scrap of everything you penned XX wrote XX have written, anywhere along the way, could be source-material that might be usble XX useable XX usable anytime. A modern computer system gives the writer an unlimited supply of paper: use it well. You'll wind up with a highly distilled collection of lines that just seem "to have always, inevitably been that way ...how could they possibly be otherwise?." The amount of source-material you produced to get there is not visible to anyone else. But you burn through XX dredge XX dig a lot of rock to get a gold ring. Hmm... that last line sounds like a song.

I guess that, for me, "I'd just like to try to do a nice piece of creative writing." I know that "music is a Goddess who cannot be pleased," and (more or less) "I therefore accept my mortal stature." (As though I had a choice?) I kinda feel, though, that I ought to be able to write about "three chords and the truth," without limiting myself to only three chords and without really thinking that it is (or, really has to be...) "the truth." Instead, it ought to be possible "to be a really good and convincing writer of what is basically fiction." And... to try to weave the very best yarn that I can. Full disclosure: I'm still trying to create good melodies now. My "burnt offerings to the Goddess" at this moment only really consist of "notes." So be it.

I do know that over time there have been many collaborators (Oscar and Hammerstein, et al) where one person did nothing but music and the other did nothing but lyric. I think it's two very different kinds of writing that nevertheless has to be done in close cooperation.

The thing that impressed me most about Stephen King's book was that his first draft of the story was ... uhh ... "crap." Really, it's not much different from what anyone might write. But what happened next (and as he carefully relates) is the product of Stephen's experience. He took the raw material and shaped it into something much better. Now... if you "just sat down and read the story," you would be encountering the final version and you would have had no exposure to any of the drafts. It therefore might never occur to you that any of those drafts even existed. Therefore, if you were an aspiring writer, you might compare your latest draft to that final story (by the admittedly more experienced and successful writer), see that your draft was "crap," conclude that The Writer must come from a different planet, and quit. The process that Stephen King's book (and many other writer's guides) carefully describe ... is very clearly multi-part. First the material is captured, then it is refined. Or maybe, "assembled." Anyhow, two (or more) very distinct and very deliberate processes. And there can be individual differences. In one writing guide by Terry Brooks (Sword of Shannara et al), Terry, an ex-lawyer, describes how he carefully outlines everything before writing it. But then he points out how, after carefully describing his system at a writer's conclave, another (equally successful) panelist turned to him and said, "Terry, I don't think I have ever outlined anything in my entire life." (She obviously meant nothing negative by it ... nor was it taken as such.) And so it goes. The "take-away" from this ramble is just these two things: (1) you can't expect any creative work-product to "just happen," and (2) everybody does. "Hell, yes... of course they do." You look at something, after having sweated bullets over it for however-long, and you can't help but say: "That's it? What took me so long?" And you just have to tell yourself (even if you're not listening): "that's how it works. That's just how creativity works."

Oh, there is one book that is a tour-de-force: Tunesmith. I've been reading it for about a month now ... ... and I'm almost done (with my first read-through).

When you look at a musical score, you see all kinds of notations like accel and rit(ard) which specifically refer to tempo changes. Or sometimes it's just a note to the performer ... "faster," "with feeling," and so on. "The beat," then, is really just the regular stream of "stitches" that binds the fabric of the music together. It's a frame-of-reference that we have all agreed upon. It gives all of the things that need to "line up" in time, something to "line up" with. It also gives us a way to meaningfully write it down. We can agree that there shall be (say...) four beats per measure, each one occurring about (say...) 1/60th of a minute apart, and all of the sound-events are to occur more-or-less "in sync" with that more-or-less regular pulse. But that pulse isn't mechanical. It can speed up or slow down as you see fit. As it does so, the various notes and sounds ... being synchronized to it ... also speed up or slow down while retaining their correct relationship (in time) to one another. Most sequencing and editing programs offer a "tempo track" that allows you to easily describe these "global" changes in the rate at which the song is to be played. They give a concrete meaning (insofar as the computer is concerned) to the vague but important comments like accel and rit(ard).

I do have a few contributions to my name, although the politics among Wikipedia contributors can be very intense. It's more than I want to waste time with, so I just toss-in a contribution and don't look back. As for the post ... I definitely liked both of these pieces (and the "scream") and felt that their whimsical titles just added a little to the fun. But they had serious and thought-provoking content.

I really haven't written much yet, so I am hardly qualified to say. It seems to me, from what I listen to, that musical writing conforms to many rules (it is grounded in mathematics, after all) but it is endlessly creative as to how you can work within those rules. Maybe the right word isn't "rules," because that word in English implies a penalty for going against them, which music really does not have. Maybe it's a language, and the more you know about it, the more you can say. I'm learning. And "babbling notes."

I believe that the general topic you have stumbled upon is called prosody, as discussed in this Wikipedia page. The art of "writing a song" really is two different but related crafts: the writing of the melody, and the writing of the lyric. Lyric-writing is "a lot like poetry, but not quite." And of course, there is more to the notes than just melody: "arrangers" take the initial germ of the song-idea and develop it into what can be played. The various parts of the completed musical experience do co-operate with one another; sometimes by similarity, and sometimes by contrast. It seems to me that music-writing, in all of its aspects, is "rather like a sonnet." It is a rigorously-defined thing, within the auspices of which you can do absolutely anything you want.

... so, turned the darned thing off! Music doesn't always play to a uniform tempo. It slows down and speeds up; it breathes. Sometimes the music is simply written with longer note-durations (half-notes instead of quarter-notes and so on) when one part needs to remain synchronized with another. But sometimes the whole tempo simply slows down and speeds up.

Sure... you make a claim, and anyone can counter-claim. It's always your right to "have your day in court," and the other guy can say the same. But nevertheless it means a lot if you went through the prescribed legal monkey-work to legally assert and to register your claim. (Which you can do on-line in the US ... copyright.gov ... for $35 a bundle of as many songs as you please.) Call it "due diligence," if you will. If you claim that you've got a million-dollar race horse, but you keep him in a moldy barn with no fence ... it's gonna be hard to not get laughed out of the courtroom. But if you timely followed all the procedures and jumped through all the hoops, it means a lot, in a lot of ways. You "obviously acted in the way that someone having a valuable property would act."

I am currently preparing a piece called "Doodlebug" but since the whole thing must be scored, it does take quite a bit of time. Your songs are quite poignant and thoughtful, especially the latest one. It takes a few moments to let "... because I loved you" to sink in, but it really resonates when it does. There might be more things that you can do with the chord progressions, adding substitutions for some of them to add variety and interest each time the song comes around. You could, shall I say, "cabbage" some of the musical phrases in one song and blend them with phrases from another to create yet-another new thing.

You are doing this for the same reason that every writer is doing this ... because they can't do anything else. Okay, I've got a little video reading-assignment for you. Go to YouTube and look up "Livingston Taylor clinic." He (being James Taylor's brother and an esteemed college professor) did a series of three lectures at the Berklee College of Music in 2005, 2006, and 2007. Your assignment is to go and watch all three of these. Now. (We'll wait...) I think that, anytime you set out to produce something for the public ... anytime you reveal yourself in this way ... you need to fully prepare yourself for what that will, emotionally, cost you. And then, as the song says, "do it anyway." Let your only goad ... the only relentless master that you strive to please ... be the music itself. Strive to make it the best music that you know how to make, and then try to learn more. You will run out of lifetime (unfortunately...) long before you reach your goal. But, "the journey is the reward" here. You have absolutely no control over what the reaction to your music will be. You can be absolutely sure that some people will be gentle, and that some will not ... but also remember that the "spoken word" of any forum is actually the written word, which carries a thousand times more impact than actual speech. Even so, what does the music say? What does the craft(smanship) demand? Pursue that. And consider: how many hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of people in this gigantic Internet might well have encountered your work, and loved it, and never bothered to reply? Creators are at the top of the food chain. Livingston Taylor says that repeatedly, and he is right. You might have created "a large pile of offal," or so you think, but: (a) you are undoubtedly mistaken, and ( just how many people in this world have the opportunity, or the guts, to create ... anything? Ever?? Let alone to have the courage, let alone the drive, to reveal it? By the way... I wanna hear your stuff. Post a link to it, please. I'll bet it's good.

My guess on the matter is that the best thing to do -- maybe the only thing to do -- is to keep writing, no matter what. Every book on prose writing that I have ever read stressed the point that "writing consists of rewriting." Maybe a piece of prose sounded fresh and original the first time, when writing the very first draft of it, but I kinda doubt it. Maybe the perfect phrase just poured out the very first time like gilded diamonds upon the page ... but I don't think it works that way. So, maybe as wannabe song writers we start out on the wrong foot with the very first step. We expect the process to somehow be as it isn't, and thus, set ourselves up for a feeling of disappointment that is actually unjustified. One of my favorite writing books (I collect 'em, I guess...) is Stephen King's On Writing. Toward the back of the book he shows an example of editing. He shows you the as-writ first draft of a piece he first called "The Hotel Story," and shows you a little bit of how he edited it. And edited it. And edited it. And caused it to become at least decent. Maybe it's just not realistic for us to expect to sit down with a guitar and have anything of obvious value come out. But hidden inside that terrible-sounding rough draft might be something wonderful, and maybe it's ours to figure out how to develop it into a satisfactory piece. And maybe we just have to tummy-up to the realization that, when we're finally finished, it's going to sound "obvious" and "easy" and "why did that take so long to do?" But, persistence pays off and things get easier with practice. And, paper is recyclable. The really nice thing is... it does not matter in the slightest anymore "where in the world" you are. And, thanks to the computer, you don't have to be constrained by your childhood music-lessons (or lack thereof). The computer is a faithful word-processor for music. But that process of "writing is rewriting" is probably always going to be basically the same regardless of the technology involved. Something else that occurs to me is that: a "good song" might be expressed in a "so-so recording." But performance and recording and mixing and mastering are all technical art-forms unto themselves. We can't wear all hats. If the song is "there," the rest will follow.

This blog definitely qualifies as the "stumbled-upon" category, but it's got a lot of interesting stuff that I think is actually worth reading, despite the intentionally whimsical name: The Sensitive Female Chord Progression. And while we are on the subject of chord progressions, I give you http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM. A cello player's railings against a cello player's classic(al) curse. Also fun listening, and yet, informative as well. Really, it makes you want to scream ... (another fun link) (Wikipedia ... ... I swear, you can get lost in there!)

That's an interesting idea ... the "fuzz boxes" as a musical instrument. They do transform the notes being played and thus alter the notes' true values and their relationship to one another. (I've heard it referred to as "bending the notes on the staff," as one bends or pushes the strings around on the fretboard. Or maybe, "if I smash this guitar to pieces on the stage, what note is played?) I wonder if anyone has actually figured out what notes are actually coming out of the speaker, vs. being sounded on the guitar itself? Those rock-guitar chords obviously aren't being sounded as-writ, when all the electronics are finished doing what they do.

Well, here is where I would love to be able to see the exact combination of notes you are talking about, Nick, because I can't quite visualize what you mean by: To quote Victor Borge ... (sigh, R.I.P., my good man) ... "where the hell is C?" Or in this case, "D?" It sounds to me like one of the points you are making is that the effective distinction between a "2" chord and a "9" chord is the voicing, "open" vs. "closed," since of course they are the same note, e.g. "D." Whew! Music theory in the early morning. Time for another cuppa joe.

Howzabout the songwriter who doesn't sing? As for me, I write computer software commercially ... I write text commercially ... maybe someday I can write songs commercially ... ... but don't ask me to sing them! I'd much rather give you a lead sheet, maybe a simple "scratch" arrangement, but a vocal performance from me would not be a pretty thing. Maybe we should be encouraged, not discouraged, by all that is happening around us. The demand for music is huge ... which is why there's so much out there and somehow it's still selling. People are obviously interested in musical performance, because they buy video games to fantasize about doing it. And a music all about songwriting just won the "Best Actor" and "Best Original Score" Oscars, here in the States. Somewhere out there, among all that wretched "bubble gum," there must be someone who's gonna blow all our socks off someday. But he or she might not be a "singer + songwriter."