MikeRobinson

No one really cares about the process. Any more than anyone who appreciates Michelangelo's David wants to think about the employees who must have spent hours going over "every single [miserable ...] square inch of that [damned ...] carving" 🤠 with an emery cloth. They just want it to be magic. Therefore, give them what they want, cash your checks if any, and be happy.

To me, the importance of music is simply that I could not conceive of not doing it. Music is a gift from the gods, I guess, and I find myself able to make it. I devote a portion of each and every day to "making it," often downloading scores of songs made by previous masters and marveling at their ingenuity as I patiently try to teach my feeble hands to repeat their recorded masterworks. No one will hear me. I've published a few things, no money so far, but to me that's really not the point. Music is a very strange thing which simultaneously "transcends human experience" and "is an indivisible part of it." I consider myself privileged to be able to produce it – if only for myself. I thank the gods for their precious gift: the ability to do it at all. When I play music, "I go somewhere."

John, copyright registration does not exist in every country, but many foreign songwriters obtain US registrations for one simple purpose: it is a easily verifiable claim of ownership that has been made under the legal penalty of perjury. It's all recorded in a publicly-searchable official government database: anyone anywhere can simply look it up. As the seller, you assert copyright, follow the legal notice ("©") requirements, and register your claim. ("Go ahead ... splurge ...") Screen-print the final confirmation page from the website and you're good to go. (As noted, you can register a "collection" at one time for one price. This concept has no legal meaning: each copyright stands alone.) Registration now serves the same purpose (from the buyer's point of view) as the certificate of title for a car. The buyer (or, your potential agent ...) can "do 'due diligence'," find the claim that anyone else ("the Judge") can likewise find, and document exactly when-and-where s/he did so. Now, s/he can proceed with confidence that s/he is not, in fact, "dealing in stolen goods." S/He has a perfected "innocent infringement" defense, as well as a possible counter-claim of fraud against you. The penalties that are set forth in copyright law are n-a-s-t-y, and of course meant to be so. While, yes, "copyright is intrinsic to the moment of creation," no business(wo)man wants to find themselves in a situation where they are now faced with a lawsuit, and it is "just your word against someone else's" with nothing to back it up. (Given the consequences to me, why should I just take your word for it? Don't you have $35?) Having secured your provable copyright, and having complied with the notice requirements, "feel free" to try to sell your work any way you like. If "NFT" appeals to you, mister or missus owner, go for it ... In the music world, you should also be a member of a "PRO = Performing Rights Organization." Some of them charge nothing to join, and they're basically in the business of combing the world, looking for infringements and collecting your royalties. Furthermore: if you find that some "NFT huckster" is selling your work without license, you can literally send the US Marshals after them ... for free ... and it will be an "open and shut case" which pays you treble damages. 💰 And you thought that "$35" couldn't even buy you dinner ... "Mind your P's and Q's." So many things in life come down to this.

"That remains to be seen." Obviously, he has the money to spend. And now, obviously, he has spent it. Let's all see what happens next. "Buyer's remorse?" Much too early to tell. I never would have spent my money for "any such thing," but he did. Let's all just wait to see what happens next.

Let me please try to head off these illusions at the pass ... When it comes to trying to sell your work and to thereby make money from it, there are actually no "crypto" alternatives to cold, hard cash. "Legal Tender." And, perhaps vastly more importantly, there are no legal alternatives to "[US: registered] copyright." (Which will cost you $35, even for a "collection" of songs, at copyright.gov, and take legal effect immediately, as soon as the web-site gives you your receipt.) (In other nations, your situation will be different, but most nations these days subscribe to a set of "international copyright conventions," which are legally-binding treaties.) "If you want to sell your car, you must first secure the government-issued Certificate of Title." ("Pay up!" to get one!!) Having done that, you can now try to sell your car however you please: to your brother, to a used-car lot, or to a scrap dealer. There is no legal substitute for this – not NFT, nor anything else. A reputable business (or family member) "will not give you the time of day" unless you can produce it. Exactly the same principle applies everywhere. As the owner, you are then empowered to try to sell your intellectual property by any means you wish ... including, if you like, "NFT." And you are likewise empowered to change your mind: "ownership has its privileges." The entire power of government is available to protect your legal rights, now that you have formally asserted them. ("All for $35!") And: with regards to "the NFT business (sic ...) proposition," all that I can say is: "as the owner, I prefer cash."

Hey, Renato ... "until I stumbled upon this thread, I [of course] never knew your songs existed!" So it goes. However, having now listened to them all, I like them all! Personally, I don't play the social-media game: I don't particularly look for other people's feedback. I just want to make good music and try to get it noticed. Oddly enough, your posting on this forum was a tiny form of marketing, and I'm glad that you did it. Now, create something for me to buy.

This is a very solid song. Excellent! I could easily envision the Riverdance troupe dancing to it. The only thing that I might suggest changing is the ending: "instead, let the song go out with a flourish!" I suggest this because, to my ears, "this is the way that this song is logically going." You begin with an Irish-dance idea, then step back after 10 or 20 seconds and predictably introduce another one. Then, later 15-or-so-second sections of the arrangement play with some or all of the ideas thus-far produced. When this idea otherwise might begin to feel "predictable," you step back and introduce a surprisingly new idea which still seems to fit. Therefore, I would suggest that the very end of the song ought to be "the big finish." The entire dance troupe is now on stage, and you recap everything that the song has done until now before giving them a decisive ending. One more thought – songs like this one often benefit from ... orchestral string pads. Yes, there's a double-bass down there, and a cello, playing legato phrases which never command your attention, never take the lead, but which harmonize with key points in the melodies and "act as a powerful river" to move it along.

Here's what I think, for whatever it may be worth: "Begin with an idea, then finish with a process." Whenever you listen to a "finished" song on the radio, or read a "finished" book on the airplane, you are never exposed to the "sometimes very trial-and-error process" that finally produced it. And, the producers like it that way: "it's supposed to feel like magick." The only thing that you're ever supposed to hear, watch, or read is what "the committee" finally decided upon. You're never supposed to encounter the committee meetings. It's never supposed to occur to you that those meetings might have even happened. The illusion is supposed to be that it is "magick," not deliberation. One thing that you may have noticed, while watching documentaries about musicians, is that they've always got a tape recorder, and they always turn it on before they start playing anything.

"Oh s-h-*-t!!" What a powerful video and song!!

I also missed the very earliest stuff produced by The Grateful Dead, when they had very strong folk-music influences and seemed to just be having fun.

No matter what you do, I think that you need to "plan the work, then work the plan." Lots of people try to get things done by "pantsing" – doing it by the seat of your pants – and it simply doesn't work. Good creative work is the result of both inspiration and decision-making, and it isn't "deterministic." I once attended a seminar where the presenter had the audience come up with a very short, three-measure "motif." He then proceeded to develop that motif into a waltz, a country song, a rock song, and jazz. Now, of course he didn't have the time to fully develop in each of these ways, but he was able to illustrate how the same bit of "creativity" which the group had come with on-the-spot could be developed in several entirely-different directions. He was deciding how to do it, and you could have carried-on what he started. The point was extremely well-made.

Very nice. The only thing that I would personally do it is to adjust the relative volume levels: that "high treble brassy part" is fairly overwhelming the plucked strings, but I don't think that you really meant for it to be the one that is most prominent.

As far as "songs without lyrics" goes, I've got many shelves in my house which are chock-full of them ... on both shiny-plastic and vinyl discs. Also – when a song is intended to be used with a lyric, it has to be designed around that lyric ... and, the singer(s). Because the lyric and the vocal performance must take precedence, and the song itself must accommodate the voices. On the one hand, there are stupendous examples of pieces that did this – Handel's Messiah – but endless examples of others that never could – any symphony. Your options as a composer are greatly expanded if you don't have to accommodate a voice!

"Modes," of course, are easiest to see on keyboard instruments, because by definition each ("equal-temperament") note is equally accessible. All other instruments might naturally favor only some modes as being easiest to reach – or, as in the case of non-fretted stringed instruments, might be capable of venturing beyond "equal temperament" entirely. Thanks for sharing what I am quite sure is a great book for guitarists.

One of Johnny Cash's most riveting songs was among his very last – Hurt, which he made in collaboration with Nine Inch Nails. The video was amazing, and painful to watch. But I think that it was one of the very best performances he had ever done. (Video link above.) He was totally and completely in the moment.

But also: "think outside the box." What do you hear, constantly, in each and every television show? In each and every movie? Music. But, it is not music that you are intended to focus your attention on – in fact, entirely the opposite: you're supposed to be watching the show. You're not supposed to consciously identify just how pivotal that music actually is to the show that you are now watching. But, it is an extremely important market for music.

SongStuff is a very important internet resource, and I have been sometimes-more sometimes-less involved with it over these many years. It represents a place where musicians can gather, "talk shop," present their latest works for serious critique, discuss whatever markets they are in, and so forth. In stark contrast to the chatter that is called "social media," SongStuff is a forum. One niche that I have lately begun trying to develop – very much still learning at this point – is work with video producers, ad agencies and the like for so-called "process music." (A good website that is very much targeted at this is taxi.com.) This is the music that you don't listen to as you watch the show. But, every production needs many "yards" of it, and producers don't want their work to sound like everybody else who has tapped into the same royalty-free stock source. (Vince Guaraldi, of Linus and Lucy fame, used the term "yards" to refer to "seconds of music." He would ask the producer, "how many yards do you need?" then go home to his piano and make it. Producers need music that coincides exactly to the length of a particular "cue.")

John, how is this marvelous new .uk area integrated into the .com area that we view "here in the States?" The URL doesn't even seem to be linked at all into the "site taxonomy." This is a wonderful angle for the site that urgently needs to be properly developed – internationally.

An excellent poem. Thank you for sharing. There are many layers of depth to it.

I remember when, as a kid, I stumbled upon a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog in my parent's hall closet. Guess I never knew that they were once hippies.

Very nice shots. Try to sell them.

There are various videos out there ...

It's very easy to overlook the fact that the technology of music was changing right under the "classical composers'" feet. (The first "piano" produced by Bartolomeo Cristofori – a harpischord maker – sounded a whole lot like a harpsichord. The "serpent" is no longer played. The "saxophone" hadn't been invented. Flutes didn't have valves yet. And, so on.) And yet, there they were, "driving the envelope." Writing music for the instruments of their day. One of the most interesting sort of projects that you can now readily find on the Internet are various efforts to re-cast classical works as their composers and their audiences would have heard them. Some projects seek to re-create (or, re-use) the actual instruments, while others resort to modern synth patches while striving for authenticity. It is all extremely interesting. Many folks also do not realize that "the sequencer" is actually not new. Once the "player piano" had been invented, composers began, so to speak, to bring out their razor-blades. They invented tools which allowed them to cut patterns into piano rolls. And so, for the very first time, audiences could hear more than ten notes being played simultaneously. Meanwhile, other musicians pushed the limits of other musical technologies, such as the "orchestrion." In fact, one of the most memorable performances that I ever attended was Pat Metheney's "Orchestrion Project," in which he was standing there on the stage, surrounded by dozens of sometimes-very-old instruments, looking for all the world like a kid in a toy store as he put all of these instruments to work ... sometimes using modern digital technology. You just had to be there, in Nashville – "Music City" if ever there was one (other than Austin). And, I was there. 😀 Lucky me.

Here's generally how I feel about "could any person make music?" To me, a key realization is that "there's actually more to it than first appears." Luck really does favor the well-prepared. On the one hand, "let nothing keep you from your chosen instrument." However, at the same time, learn about the craft – beginning with the realization that there is one. When you encounter and enjoy any creative product, be it a song or a book or even a magazine article, as a consumer you're not supposed to have to notice how it was made. But there was a process, and maybe many un-named people busy working behind the scenes to create "what 'just happened that way.'" Flipping that idea around: "why can't I do what, to other people, is obviously so easy?" Well, maybe the very good news is that maybe it actually isn't! My favorite analogy is this: "When you look at Michelangelo's David, what are two things that you do not see? (1) Marble chips on the floor. (2) The slightest rough surface, anywhere. How big was the team of craftsmen who actually did that? Very likely, Michelangelo was the project manager!

The very nicest thing about this forum – and I have had greater and lesser technical involvement with it over these many years – is that it is by and about musicians. Not politicians. Not anyone who "has a bone to pick by being here." Not anyone who's just looking for a bully pulpit. Musicians. Amateur, semi-pro, very serious, and "I really do make a living at it." Each one very polite and respectful of each other. (Thanks in part, no doubt, to the always-attentive moderators. Thank you.)