[How Long Does It Take You To Write Lyrics?]

When I made my entry to a recent lyrics-contest here, I wrote the whole [draft] in about fifteen minutes.  It does not rhyme, but it does tell a story.  The line, "Charon, come and take me now," referring to the ferryman of the Dead, is what drove it, and I made-up all the rest.  I'm thinking about tunes now, arrangements really, to go with it, and when that tune finally does come together (I've parked it while working on an instrumental), the lyrics might change somewhat to fit.  We shall see.

[Lyrics? Melody? Which One First?]

Probably both at the same time.  

 

And, for what it's worth, there's a lot of good-idea in "the 'scrambled eggs' story."  Maybe you start by writing nonsensical lyrics (like "scram - bled - eggs") that more or less match the rhythm of the tune that's in your head.  Likewise, when the thing that you're certain of is "a particular snatch of lyric," you write (and carefully keep ...) a "nonsensical" bit of melody to go over it, deciding e.g. whether the flow should be going up or down, whether a note should be sustained or short, and so on.  In this way, you keep going.  (And in my case, "don't stop and think about it, just keep it and write another one.")  (There'll be time enough for countin' // when the dealin's done.)

 

I guess I can't respond to either of the two poll-choices because, most of the time when I'm being creative about anything, I say that I "sneak up on it," freely bouncing between one and the other. A snatch of melody might be drifting through my head; a cool line of lyric; and maybe it doesn't entirely make sense at the time.  Grab that butterfly out of the ether and glue it to the page, then shove a pin through it.  ("Gotcha!")  But then, looking across all of these bits, I start figuring out ways to possibly fit them together.  And, as with Tinkertoysâ„¢, there are lots of ways to do it.  Eventually I have to be sure that all the scrambled-eggs are gone, but not right away.

 

Another fun (and useful!) trick is something that I learned from a book, The World of 'Star Trek.'  You might think that it was always the case that Captain 'Kirk' would fly the 'Enterprise' with 'Spock' and so-forth ... but what they actually did was to fill many typewritten pages haphazardly with words.  Just banged them out.  Then, went back and read what they had written, finally making their now-'obvious' choices after many committee meetings.  (In the first pilot episode, "James T Kirk" was named "Christopher Pike.")  I've read similar stories about lyrics being developed that way.  Get an idea of the rhythm you want and then start hammering away.  (Notes, or words.)  Capture everything ("gotcha!"), then go back and read over what you wrote.  Now, the task becomes like that of assembling a jigsaw puzzle.  Nothing in the finished work gives any clue to the brainstorming process.

[When Was The Last Time You Were Actually In A Music Store?]

Well, it should come as no surprise that there are still plenty of professional music-stores ... here in Nashville.  

[Copyright Question Regarding Remixs]

What you can very often do is to write a "similar."  It's not the same tune – it is your original creation – but it might be only a snippet that you specifically intend to use as a source for remixing, not a complete tune (yet).  It sounds acceptably like in the flavor of the source that you had in mind, insofar as its musical genre, style, mixing-qualities, instrumentation and so forth, so it fits into the slot that you have.  But, it's provably your original work.  (And now you are free to "tweak" this fragment to suit the greater-song into which you plan to insert it, since you now own both of them.)

 

And your attorney, who reviewed the entire work before you started trying to make commercial use of it, documented in writing that he had reviewed it and that in his or her professional opinion there was no infringement.  You have that letter in the lock-box at the bank . . . 

 

Folks I know who have done that simply included the song-fragment as one of the entries in their copyright-registration, thus explicitly securing their claim not only to the assembled product but to the components that they used to make it ... and, in so doing, legally documenting what the actual source-used is, lest anyone should accuse otherwise.  (In the US, at least, this does not add to the cost.)  If at a later time they decide to develop the fragment further, they simply refer back to the previous registration(s) that included some part of it, thereby tying the whole legal thing together.  Perhaps you could do that, and thus keep your project moving ahead.

[Sound Levels For Mp3]

"Me, too."  I would like to find some definitive (online or not) reference sources about "mastering for highly-compressed digital distribution formats, and for earbud headphones."  

 

Abbey Road had "a cheap set of speakers" in their mastering room for a reason.  Okay, and for the same reasons, what do we need to know in-advance when mixing and/or mastering our stuff, to prepare the work for being treated as kindly as possible by MP3, SoundCloud, and so on?  Especially if we plan to release for low- and high-resolution formats from the same basic material / mix? Anxious to know, too.

[Promoting Your Songs - Brilliant Tips]

Personally, I get most of my leads to really-good music through sites like this one ... and others like http://www.macjams.com (a long-standing amateur music site primarily for Mac fans) ... and http://www.taxi.com ... and by following links to the profile pages of people whose songs I like on SoundCloud and so on (after picking-up a reference to it in places like, well, here!)

 

Part of the fun of music is discovering it for yourself.  No, most of the fun.  "I found it, so now it's mine."  

 

 

I think that lots of people still approach "marketing" in the old-school ways, in which people couldn't and therefore didn't talk to one another en masse, and the only way that you could hope to get your word out was to be the one who did all the hauling.  If you simply go to where other like-minded people already go, and join them, not as a "n00b-(bot...)" with exactly one post to you name, but as someone who actually has interesting things to say (and, oh by the by, convenient hotlinks to a page where you just happen to have things to sell), someone's going to go there.  They might listen to your stuff and buy it because they like it, and want to, and is there really any need for more reason than that?  (The "Three Investigators" book series that I loved as a kid, and still do, called it:  "the ghost-to-ghost hookup.")

 

I made a lot of money for a lot of years with a software product that I never particularly "tried" to promote.  But it became the "go-to product" for people who needed to solve the then-thorny problem that it did.  I couldn't have advertised the thing in Bulgaria or Iceland or South Africa or Taiwan if I had ever hoped to.  But I did sell copies in all those places, and those copies were never cheap.  (Also, I never provided a "free" trial copy.)  "Everyone knows someone else who knows someone else," and it does not take many iterations of that cycle to get the word out to a vast number of people, even though you weren't the one "carrying" the message beyond its very first hop.  If you focus on providing a good product, well, everyone likes good music, and we all have different tastes.

[A Cool And Easy Way To Use Your Computer To Write (Or Start) Songs]

I want to add just a couple of thoughts as to why this technique actually works so well . . . 

 

Our brains have a tremendously-refined, yet largely unconscious, ability to recognize pattern.  Songs, therefore, are naturally built up of repeated patterns.  Yet, what you might not realize is just how much pattern-recognition capability all of us actually have.

 

We can recognize a pattern built up of other patterns, even if some of the constituent parts are played backwards or upside-down; even if we've included only the last half of a region and butted it up against only the first half ... or, why not ... the middle, not even on an even measure-line(!) ... of something that we've recently (and completely) heard before.  Our brains will recognize it, and will embrace it as being familiar.

 

We'll be aware of the patterns at several levels at the same time:  the familiar repetition within regions (or slices thereof); the similarities and differences between the regions; and, at the same time, the complex layered patterns of the regions themselves.  Our brains will take all of this detail in stride, and enjoy the experience.  We can both =see= it (in the little note-dots that are usually in the little region-boxes), and =hear= it.  Effortlessly.

 

This is something that is very deep, physically, within our brains.  An exceptionally large portion of our brain "comes alive" on scans whenever we do it.  Maybe it was essential for spotting yonder hungry tiger in the bushes, long ago.  But, scientists confirm that it is there, even as they struggle to explain it.  We can be deep in conversation or deep in thought, and change triggers an instantaneous, disruptive reaction.  ("Tiger!" ??)

 

The DAW – the computer – can take you to those places like no other musical tool can, or ever could, because it has no difficulty at all with taking whatever ("hey, let's throw this against the wall now and see if it sticks!") arrangement you've come up with, and playing it back for you instantly and perfectly.  It will happily tolerate each and every variation you dream up, and, if you let it, it will keep them all.  It doesn't matter in the slightest how good of a "player" you are or aren't.

 

Your innate pattern-recognizing capability will also come into play as you do this.  It will guide your own decisions, again unconsciously (or maybe not), as you "noodle with" whatever you decide to put into a new region.  That's why I emphasize that: you should {a} never throw anything away, and {b} be as spontaneous as a five-year old kid in a mud puddle (with a garden-hose nearby).  There's a reason why I said that.

 

Yes, your musical training (if you have any) will definitely guide you, too.  I'm not saying that the creative process is mud-puddles and random chance.  But it is a thing that the computer has enabled us to tap in ways that never were so accessible before.

[A Cool And Easy Way To Use Your Computer To Write (Or Start) Songs]

Your computer probably has a DAW (digital audio workstation == musical word-processing) program installed already.  Every Mac these days, for example, has GarageBand, and PCs are finally getting in on the action, too.  If not, it's easy to download these programs for every major platform.  Okay, but I don't want to talk about that.  I want to give you some ideas of how you can use that tool to compose interesting, original songs (or, song-bites) using MIDI.  

 

(That is to say, where the computer is generating the music that you hear; i.e. "not audio recording or live instruments.")

 

I just want to outline an approach that you can take, basically to get started, and there are endless variations on what I'm about to describe.  The key point is that we're going to try to leverage the computer's unique capabilities to go farther than we otherwise [easily] could have.  In much the same way that the text word-processor let us leave the typewriter behind.

 

Open up any DAW program and there will be two basic things available to you (read the manual ... heh):

• A "piano roll" display, which works just like the perforated strips of paper did on a player piano.  Parallel "lanes" corresponding to notes, with the highest notes at the top, and the horizontal axis is time.
• Probably at the top of the page, an area where you can define and arrange regions, each region being shown to you in the piano-roll area when you click on that region.  You can copy/paste them, move them, lengthen and shorten them, and so on.

Those are the two tools we're going to use, and I'm not going to tell you how to do that.  I'm just going to quickly suggest what you can do with them:

1. Define a region that is, say, just two bars long.  Maybe a little longer, but in any case, short.  Now, put notes in them, following some [any ...] sort of pattern.  Up and then down, or a few notes in a pattern that you repeat.  It can be anything you like.  (And don't think that you have to fill 'em up... silence is important, too.)  Just start putting a bunch of these little regions and listening to them, in no particular order.  You might not use 'em all; you might not use most.  But, don't discard them.  (You never know.)
2. Take some of the regions, copy/paste them, and .. "fiddle with them."  Make variations.  Feel Free.â„¢  Keep the regions short, more-or-less the same size, but maybe not all exactly the same (short) size.
3. Important:  As you come up with these regions, try to start them from (nearly) the same starting notes and to guide them to the same set of ending notes.
4. If your DAW can do things like flipping a region upside-down and/or backwards, make copies of some regions and give 'em a whirl.  Try other things, like moving all the notes up and down a few steps.
5. Don't let your critical mind get too critical.  "Just Do It.â„¢"  Don't delete things:  make a duplicate, fiddle with the copy, and then keep both.
6. If your DAW lets you "write-protect" a track or region, that can be very helpful.
7. (Heh...) Save constantly.  (If you've got a Mac, get to know Time Machine.  A removable drive costs next to nada these days.  Plug it in, let TM start doing backups constantly for you, and forget about it.)

Now, open another track (or window) in which you'll now try to put a song together.  Do it by copying and pasting some of your regions and stacking 'em one after another in that track.  Mute the other tracks, play it and see how it goes.  Experiment freely.  If nothing seems to be "clicking" yet, keep going.  (Besides... it's fun.)  Suddenly, something will click.  Maybe several somethings.  Maybe more somethings than you can use right now.  Never underestimate the power of serendipity.  (At the Grammy® Awards party, you can take full credit for it anyway.)

 

Take advantage of repetition.  Like a musical "loop," a region that leaves from one point and that more-or-less comes back to it can be repeated and it will sound both fine and familiar.  It won't sound "repetitious," and if it does, pull a piece out and drop a "variation" in that slot instead.  Repetition and contrast is the stuff that helps hold a song together.  After a few reps and variations, try switching to something completely different and working that for a few more bars.  You might find that you need to stich together a bit of "glue," maybe one or two bars long, just to connect one thing to another more smoothly.  Cool.  Do it.  Keep 'em all. Keep 'em all. Keep 'em all.

 

Feel free to open a new track and try something else.  Keep your darlings.  You're not exactly going to run out of resources, eh?  Don't delete things!  (A product of your creativity is a valuable thing, and if it sounds like a "clam" right now, maybe in the future it will not.)

 

(Does your DAW let the computer "select and arrange at random?"  Try it!)

 

Try adding a different kind of instrument – another parallel track – and start dropping regions into it, too, playing both at the same time.  Not workin'?  Cool.  Mute it, forget it, hide it if you can, keep it.

 

When you're sure that you've got it ... great ... make a copy, nice and safe, and then ... start smashing it up again.    You can't lose what you've already did, so try something else.  ("Why not?")

 

You haven't had this much fun since you were five years old in a mud puddle.

 

You won't know just what you might come up with, doing things this way, but you will come up with something that really, really surprises your ear.  Probably many somethings.  You won't necessarily come up with "a finished work, just like that."  (Only Venus came out of an oyster-shell fully formed ... and fully ... but I digress.)   What you will come up with is a much fresher and original starting point than you otherwise would have, and you leveraged the unique power of the computer as a music-processor to help you get there.

 

Yeah, eventually you'll have to take some segments and start seriously arranging and refining them, into a finished song product, but that's really a separate process from this pure-creativity.  Playing in the mud for an hour is a great way to start or end your day, and you build up a resource of truly-original stuff (along with some clams) from which you can draw.

 

And, believe me, sometimes "serious creativity" really does work this way.  Maurice Jarre was beating his head against the wall trying to come up with a theme for Dr. Zhivago ... the Director kept turning his efforts down ... when, at the end of another frustrating session, he was just fooling around on the piano, fiddling absently with a few notes, when the Director turned to him, suddenly smiling.  "That's it!" he said.  And it was ... Lara's Theme.  ("Somewhere In Time.")  And an Oscar.  There it ... was.  Sure, a huge amount of work yet to do, to get it shaped up into a film score, yes, but.  There it ... was.

["simply, Modes." Simply Explained ...]

@Tom – It's gonna sound really embarrassing that I didn't know about those pages.

 

@Kel – 

 

Like you, I'm a DP-geek by trade, probably of similar age, who also writes music with a score. 

 

(Except that I now use "MuseScore," http://www.musescore.org, which is an excellent free, multi-platform score writing tool, especially if you download and use better (larger ... also free ...) SoundFonts to go with it.)  Trust me, sometimes "free" is good, whether or not (and not because) it is free.  Folks tell me about Sibelius and I frankly don't think I'm missing much.  The tool is powerful, flexible, stable, and good.

 

I am also very interested in "figuring out how things work, so that I can then 'work' them."  Stuff like "the harmonic series," how notes work for and against each other, "equal temperament," pure-geek stuff that, like working with computers themselves, is genuinely interesting and therefore enjoyable to me, as long as I can move it from the purely theoretical to something that's actually boots-on the-ground useful to me.  (Okay, call me crazy that way ... (wink!) ... but I found my areas of genuine lifelong interest early.)

 

 

 

I know that I really would have pissed-off the Wizard of Oz, because I would have walked right over there "behind the little curtain," and started trying to figure out the dials and switches and knobs that made the thing work.

 

"How did he [know to] go in that direction?  Because he knew that the hidden doorway was there – and where it leads."

 

I also don't like obtuse explanations of what, I know, ought to be simple things.  For example, I was offended that I had to memorize that line about little monkeys or risk failing the final exam – which is another byzantine educational practice IMHO.  No one ever told me what "modes" really were, nor how they worked, nor why.  Same thing with the Circle of Fifths:  better be able to draw it, or else, but for the most part that was the extent of where it went.  (Maybe I just had a really bad teacher.)

 

Anyhow, maybe kids discover them when they put their hands on the keyboard in the "wrong" place, and maybe their music teachers reach over and grab their little hands and "correct" their "mistake."  (As mine did.)  But this also counts, to me, as a real musical discovery.  You might do it entirely by accident.  Or, you might compose a piece of music and sit down to play it – or have MuseScore play it for you – and "oops that's not the right starting point for this key" and maybe it sounds awful or maybe it sounds unexpectedly right.  Different, but right.  And yet, you don't know why.  Much like the first time you paid attention to the black keys and ignored the white ones, and said dumb things to your kid brother that you thought sounded Chinese.  If you were a geek like me, you said, "Why is that?"  Maybe no one had the answer for you, but you wondered anyway.

 

Modes are something that you can easily do – DAWs often have these features in their "piano rolls" – and they are, or at least they were to me, a completely unexpected surprise.  Once I realized what they actually were, and started seriously fooling around with them, it was another hidden door.  Hid, for all this time, by a phrase about those dammed "little monkeys" and an 'educational' (sic) system that was content with rote memorization.  Later on, I learned that some cool jazz stuff is done by putting the melody in one mode and the accompaniment in another.  I had no idea; never thought of that.  But I do understand why it could be done, and what its result might be, and yeah, I'm "nerding" around with that idea.

["simply, Modes." Simply Explained ...]

Y'know, Tom ... I've been thirty(!) years now in the I.T. business – watching it all go straight to <<a country-song lyric>> while not-so patiently (frantically ...) hoping to make a cross-career break into "21st century Music."  So, I reckon that "the last thing that the world needs is Another [independent] Blog.â„¢"

 

I'd frankly rather to contribute content to yours!  You've got momentum, so I don't have to.

 

It makes far more sense to me, to contribute useful(?) content to a well-known place where many thousands of like-minded people already congregate, than to carve-out (at my own expense) a unique-to-me yet one-of-a-kind place and pray to The Gods of Google to inform the rest of the world that such a place even exists.  I want to get the word out ... and to connect with fellow musicians who wasted time memorizing drivel about little monkeys ... not to set up yet-another printing press of my own.  (Getting "other people's word out" is, at the moment at least, my day job.  Equals yuck scotty beam me out of here.)

 

Happy to be a [staff?] columnist.  Used to be a trainer/writer/teacher.  Hope to sell a lyric to a rubber man.  Don't need to be a blogger.  If you got a thing to say, go to where people already are.

["simply, Modes." Simply Explained ...]

I don't pet little monkeys after lunch ... and I strongly suggest that you shouldn't either.  Something about those bananas they eat (or maybe it's the little foo-foo drinks that usually accompany them) really pisses them off.  Plus, it reminds me much too much of Music Theory class, where that line was actually a mnemonic device that I rather-desperately used to remember this:  Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian.  (Damm, it must have worked ... professor, be ye proud.)

 

I remembered those words exactly long enough to pass the course, then forgot about them for the next twenty years ... until I finally learned what they were really talking about, and why it could actually be very useful to me (or, to you) as a songwriter and composer.  I promise that I won't mention those words again.  (Class is over... you graduated, maybe, and eventually paid-off your student loans, maybe.  Welcome to the rest of your life.)

 

Now, let's do them.  Let's do Modes, and those pseudo-latin names that were worth 25 points on the final.  Turns out, it's easy.

 

Grab your handy piano keyboard and play one of those one-handed songs that you find on the first three pages of the first music books.  Say, Merrily We Roll Along.  Park your hands on the all-white keys beginning with Middle C, and, without playing any chords, play the melody.  Slightly emphasize the "C" and the "G" as you play.

 

(So, how does it feel to be seven years old again?  Two more years until you grew enough to reach the pedals ...?)

 

Now for some bona fide magic.  Here goes ...  

 

Shift your hands two places to the left, and, still on the all-white keys and still without playing any chords, play Merrily again.  (Where you were playing "C," now play "A," and just do the all-white-keys as you did before.)  E-D-C-D-E-E-E now becomes C-B-A-B-C-C-C and so on.

 

Now, listen.  No, I mean it.  Play it again.  Now, listen... until you stop focusing on what you're doing and can hear what you are doing.

 

OMG!  (Okay, okay:  "WTF?!")  It sounds minor!  And, in fact, it is.

 

Okay, more magic.  Two places to the right.  Play Merrily again, all white keys, centered on E in place of C.  Different again!  

 

We're on a roll, here.  Let's do magic seven times.  Just keep doing that until you've tried all seven starting white-keys.  And what you'll immediately see is that all of them sound different ... sometimes very much so ... even though every one of them used only the white keys.

 

But ... why?

 

Here's the "simple explanation" I promised you:  "now, look at the black keys."  You know that there are 12 keys in the total scale, and that each adjacent key, white or black, is one so-called "half step" from its neighbor.  This means that five of those white keys are a "whole step (= 2 half-steps)" apart, because there's a black-key in between, but that keys #3 (E-to-F) and #7 (B-to-C) are only a half-step away from their upper neighbor since there is no black-key in-between.  

 

Therefore, if you played the C-major scale (all white keys starting with "C"), even though the keys that you played were "all white, and obviously 'next to each other,'" in fact they were not.  In fact, you played a mixture of whole and half steps, with the half-steps in positions 3 and 7.

 

Not coincidentally, "positions 3 and 7 are 'a fifth apart.'"  (A fifth:  E - F - G - A - B ... 1 2 3 4 5.  A fifth.  E-to-F would have been a "second," E-to-G a "third" and so on.  All the way to an "eighth," which we prefer to call an "octave."  But, I digress.)

 

So, what happened when you shifted your hands?  You shifted (actually, rotated) the placement of the half-steps in that underlying sequence!  When you shifted your hands two places down (or, six places up ...) to "A," then the half-steps – which previously were at positions 3 and 7 – now occupied various different places on the scale that you were then playing, although they remained a (rotated) fifth apart.

 

Let me say it again:  When you played "Mer-ri-ly" as (shifted right ...) C-B-A instead of E-D-C, a half-step got in the way.  These three notes that formerly had been a whole-step apart, weren't a whole-step apart anymore, because there's only a half-step between C and B (whereas there had not been, between E and D).  Furthermore, the outer neighbors C and A are also a half-step closer than E and C had been.  Yeah, even though we are still playing "all white keys," truly everything has changed.

 

And that, Virginia, is what "modes" are.  

 

It is both generally and categorically true that:  notes that are "next to one another" in your melody, are not necessarily "next to one another" in actual tone.  However, within any and every "scale," there is a regular pattern to their spacing.  And so, what you're actually doing, with each mode, is re-arranging that pattern ... while ... (importantly!) ... doing it in a consistent way.   Every re-arrangement is a rotation.

 

(okay, up for air now ... breathe  breathe  breathe ... 'cuz I'm gonna toss one more thing at ya)

 

There's another way to achieve this "rotation."  Yes, you can also do the exact same thing another way!  You can keep your hands exactly where they started.  Always "E-D-C-D-E-E ... etc"), and continue to slightly-emphasize C and G, but now, do it in different keys.  Now you are not continuing to play "all white keys." You're respecting the sharps-and-flats of whatever key you're in.  But...  you are continuing to emphasize to your ear that "the root of what I'm playing is [not "the home of the key that I am now in", but ...] the note 'C' (sharped or flattened as the key-signature prescribes)," and that "the fifth is 'G' (ditto)."  The center of your melody hasn't shifted to G!  No, it's still at C, and so, if you look closely at what you're doing, you'll see that, thanks to the sharps and flats, the sequence of whole and half-steps has shifted beneath your fingers as before, even though your hands haven't moved.

 

(Don't let me lose you here:  "the pattern of sharps and flats" that corresponds to (say) "the key of 'G'" just happens to be exactly the right ones to produce the same arrangement of whole-and-half-steps that you plainly saw in "all-white keys starting-and-ending with 'C'," when you decide to start your octave with 'G', instead.  All key-signatures are like that, and this is why.  If you want to start at such-and-such note, and preserve that same w-w-h-w-w-w-h pattern of steps, the key-signature for that note tells you which notes must be sharpened or flattened.  

 

(So far so good?  Cool.  Now, make the intuitive leap:  "ergo, how do you shift the pattern without physically shifting your hands?"  Right you are!  You pick a different key-signature, thereby shifting the pattern, then you don't shift your hands!  Q.E.D.)

 

(whew!!  Okay, class is over now.)

 

There's actually a fairly-endless fountain of possible creativity here, because "'the scale' of your tune" can actually be anything you like, as long as the set of notes is consistent.  (Does it have to be w-w-h-w-w-w-h?  No.  Does it have to be twelve (or seven, or five) tones?  No!)  You might have seen that when you played a very oriental-sounding (pentatonic ...) melody using only the black keys of the keyboard.  "The scale of your tune" is whatever you want it to be.  It will become the most-elemental framework against which every other aspect of the song is hung.  Every note in your "scale" will be separated from its neighbor by some "interval," and there will be some pattern to those intervals, just as there is with "all white keys" or, for that matter, "all black ones."  There's a naturally-occurring system of tensions inherent in every one of those intervals (and even the notes, which in fact are not equally-spaced), which you can take advantage of in your music.

 

Just remember to be sparing, and thereafter consistent.  The ear can only take so much.  Establish from the outset what "the 'normal' for your music" is going to be, whatever it is.  ("Modes," as described, work because they are still "rotations" of that prevailing "normal," hence an acceptable variation.)  It's possible to stray so far-away from the main stream here that you just confuse-the-hell out of your listener, but it's also possible to serve him something he's never heard before, using "just the same twelve white-and-black notes."  (Or-r-r-r-r....)

[Music Theory Question]

Also, as I recently re-read in one of my favorite tiny-books:  "Music theory is generally descriptive, not prescriptive."  It tells you what you did, and suggests why it did or didn't work (and what else might).  But it doesn't tell you what to do.

 

 

The major triad in root-position is two minor intervals in their proper place in the overtone series.  In the second and third inversions, there are major and minor intervals, with a perfect fourth supporting the root.  Thirds become sixths.

 

Intervals, not notes, are really "where it's at," and in any sequence there are always at least three factors at work:

1. The intervals within a particular chord.
2. The flow between notes of adjacent chords, which is an arpeggiation that can spell-out (over time) one or several chords that are neither the start nor the end of the pair, nor any one of the chords around and through which they flow.  If you use suspensions and other tricks, one thing that you're doing is to emphasize these "ghost chords," which otherwise exert a very "phantom" influence upon the total phrase.  Phantom, yes, but ghosts are real.
3. The intervals that the notes of any chord imply relative to the song's established tonal-center or "public key," are in addition to the established ones that they have within their own "private" key.  Every note in the scale has certain tensions, and if you're playing, say, "D-major" in the key of "C," the D-F#-A of that chord is perceived, not only as (say) a root-position triad   (1-3-5) of the chord's home key of "D," but also as a (2-4-6) against the song's home key of "C."  So you've got both the comfort of a third, and the dissonance of a second.  (Three seconds, in fact, in root position ... no, make that six since they're hitting their neighbors above and below ... but, notice, not-so-much in other inversions.)  If you modulate to D as a new key, that sense of dissonance will quickly go-away; if not, it lingers.

When you talk of "voice leading" – of "why voice-leading?" – I think that's really "it."  The leading is occurring over time.

 

The "little book" that I speak of?  Why, yes, imagine that – I have it right here ...

 

The Elements of Music:  Melody, Rhythm & Harmony, by [Dr.] Jason Martineau.  (New York: Walker Publishing Co., 2008.)

ISBN-13:  978-0-8027-1682-8.

 

It is literally small, 7-1/4" x 6", and a mere 58 little-pages long, but it is stuffed with approachable information, such that it took me about 5 minutes to carefully read every page, each of the very many times that I have done so.  And, each time I do it again, I learn more.  (In that regard, it's exactly like the middle-third – the "textbook section" – of Jimmy Webb's Tunesmith.)

[Can I Copyright(Sr) A Song I Put On Soundcloud Together W My Unreleased Ep?]

I agree.  But I'm not an attorney either.  If it were me, I'd make just one application.

[Registering In The Us Copywrite Office]

The "collections" mechanism is simply a matter of administrative practicality.  For one registration fee, basically any number of works by the same author(s) (claimant(s)) can be registered at once.

 

The components of the collection can be of any appropriate form or forms; for example, a set of audio files plus lead sheets plus documents containing lyrics.  Whatever is appropriate.

 

The legal rights then apply severally to every component of the collection.  The notion of "a collection," in other words, is a pragmatic record-keeping device, meant to reduce the total number of claims that must be processed by the copyright office.  It doesn't alter the rights that you obtain – it just reduces paperwork and fees.

[Performance Rights]

And I would echo that sentiment.  Your situation sounds "fuzzy" and "ambiguous" and "not nailed-down in (sufficient) writing," and that's just not a good situation to be in.  As they say, "everyone who's staring at each other in a courtroom, every one of them unhappy, started out as friends."

 

Consult a friendly attorney who knows, or who knows someone who does know.  (You should have an attorney, regardless.)  Make sure that the proper documentation as recommended by him or her is properly signed and executed, and that it is kept forever.  Verbal agreements and "handshakes," sincere though they might be, simply are not enough in cases like this.  Especially if your song does go anywhere, people are gonna get hurt, and they'll be finger-pointing at one another because everybody basically has their pants down; has walked into this thing ignorant and un-prepared.  Which is an entirely avoidable situation to be in.  "Don't go there," and if you are there, "get out of there."

 

Laws are changing all the time; precedents are being set and reset.  As Judge Wopner said so long ago on People's Court:  "Get it in writing!"  All of the parties in this situation need this to be squared away, now.

[A Couple Of Questions For A Varied Collection]

As far as I know, "the official registered copies" are what the Federal Judge is going to look at when (s)he is considering whether to rule that infringement has occurred.  Therefore, I think they must be usable in that context.  An audio recording, in the case of your microtonal songs; a printed lyrics sheet of the square-dance words to a folk song; a lead-sheet if you have one (i.e. when you have no audio); a mixture of all three.  Your non-traditional schema (very interesting though it looks to be!) probably wouldn't be "playable" hence particularly useful.  So long as they are all usable, officially registered copies that will serve to identify "the claim" in case of an action alleging infringement.

 

Your lyrics to "Fire on the Mountain" would be the (only) substance of that particular claim.  You're asserting your rights to the lyric, regardless of what music (if any) it may be set to.  Certainly you can mention that it's intended to be set to "Fire," but you should also explicitly mention that you are making no proprietary claims with regard to "Fire."

 

If your co-writer friend wants to be a co-claimant on one particular piece (or a separate group of pieces), guess you'll be spending $70 instead of $35 because you'll be filing two claims:  one for each group.

 

Separately ... I'd like to know more about your microtonal schemas and whatever software tool it is that you're using to create them.  (Perhaps this is not the right thread, however.)  Your music sounds very interesting.  A topic for a different forum space, yes, but one that I'd like to pursue.  

[Real Name Vs Stage Real]

Amen to that!  "A picture's worth ten thousand words," especially when thousands of people around the world can see it.  Change that profile immediately.  If you want to be treated seriously, you've got to look the part in everything that you present to the public; including right here.  Especially right here.

 

FYI, lots of performers use a stage-name that has become a trademark, without legally changing it.  Vincent Furnier, for example, can cash a check made out to Alice Cooper, which is the name of the fictional character (originally, the name of the band) that he plays in his rock shows.  He's well known as the granddaddy of "theatrical rock-n-roll," and he himself describes it as theater.  He speaks of "Alice" as the third-person that "Alice' is, in the same way that Charlton Heston would speak of "Ben Hur" or of any other of the many hundreds of fictional characters that he portrayed to entertain the public.  If you decide to go on stage as a persona, then you are an actor playing a role.  Your millions of adoring fans might know you [only] by that "other" name, but you don't have to change your driver's license.

 

(At least, it's not as bad as the Great Depression / Vaudeville times that George Burns once wrote about:  "if you bombed out in one city, you changed your name and went back, because you had to eat.")

 

(Or the apparently-true story about Paula Abdul, who went to an audition with a box of leotards.  She was turned-down three times, and each time she left the room, changed outfits, changed her name, and got back in line.  She was picked, and that's how her career began.)

[Registering In The Us Copywrite Office]

You can find everything that you need (with regard to the United States) at http://www.copyright.gov, including the ability to register your works online.

 

Actually, the companies that are trolling these waters are doing so for a fairly legitimate purpose.  There is an extremely important legal principle known as the Doctrine of Laches, which basically says that you are required to be timely in asserting any claim, or you might forever lose the ability to make a claim.  Holders of important copyrights know that "the moment of registration" is an ideal time to detect an upcoming (commercially significant ...) infringement and to stop it before it happens ... or at least, to ask questions.

 

Not all of your personal details are made public.  Some details are requested so that the Copyright Office can contact you with any questions they might have, and they're understood to be nobody else's business.  Simply retrieve any entry to see what data is included in the public view.

[Copyright Question Regarding Remixs]

Since you intend to make commercial use of the remix, I would flatly tell you to obtain ... and pay for ... the written legal opinion of a qualified lawyer.  Nothing else will do.

 

Following that lawyer's explicit instructions exactly as he or she gave them to you, you will need to document your "due diligence" in searching for any potential suggestion of infringement; every letter that you wrote and when you wrote it; every reply that you obtained.  And then, from that lawyer, his or her statement that in their expert opinion, the necessary legal requirements have been correctly identified and met.

 

Fast-forward to the point when your commercial product is wildly successful    ... and here come the opposing lawyers, with their claim of copyright infringement and their prayer to the Honorable Court that the Court should grant an injunction stopping the distribution of your product and a hefty penalty.  And let's say for the sake of argument that their assertions are totally false.  But you are the defendant, and they can nevertheless shut you down or back-room strong-arm you into paying them lots of money to go away.  Did you mind your P's and Q's?!  Can you prove to His Honor, in complete detail, exactly what you did?  Can you prove to His Honor that, if infringement did occur, that it was "innocent?"  And so on.  'Cuz if you can't, His Honor just might grant a "temporary" injunction while the Court takes its own sweet time to sort things out ... by which time your venture is bankrupt.

[How To Get Album Reviews?]

Do things like ... this.  Tell people about it, anywhere you think they might gather.  Including here, where you know that you'll find a musically accepting and diverse audience.

 

But I'm still waiting (probably forever) for Spotify's whatever-it-is to start.   Consider putting copies on SoundCloud ... maybe they're complete, maybe they fade out after 30 seconds ... and anywhere else that it is easy for anyone to very quickly start playing it.

 

 

Show-Stopper: Spotify wants me to log in?  Naah, don't wanna take the time for that.  Don't care that much .. it was just an idea.  See-ya!

 

Oops.

 

Even the slightest obstacle that stands in the way of "instant gratification" can kill the sale.  (Like, basically, Spotify just did for me.)  You've got about 30 seconds of interest, max.  You must get my speaker started!!

 

Also ... be careful about how you present yourself.  Don't beg.    (Even if that is precisely the way that you feel!)

 

 

Alfred Hitchcock's acting advice to Ingrid Bergman:  "Ingrid, fake it!"

 

 

Nope, what you've got to offer is really great stuff and you want to give us (the world) the chance to hear it.  You're the salesman, confident in your product and confident also that you have good reason to be so.  But also:

 

Remember the duck principle: "Be calm and cool on the surface.  Underneath, paddle like hell!"

[Receiving Input?]

I like to think of it this way ... to a certain extent, any song is "a work of fiction."  It's a poem, accompanied by music.  Its intention (maybe!!) is to evoke a feeling and/or to convey a message to (the heart of) a listener whom you will never meet.  And, throughout it all, to "sound (and indeed, be) 'real.'"

 

And this reminds me of the old story of the "bottle of EverSoMuchMoreSoâ„¢."  In the story, the glass bottle was perfectly empty, of course, yet the people were persuaded that it contained a magical, invisible stuff that made whatever-it-was ... well ..."  And I think that it's usually a good thing to try to put some of that magical stuff onto your own lyric and song writing.

[Mastering recommendations?]

As a recording engineer, I always tell my client the importance of having a professional master their project when I finish mixing. I think having another set of ears on a recording project never hurts. It allows someone to hear something you may have missed. 

Another thing that I have found, is a lot of artists think that mastering is a process that is included in mixing, and they don't budget for the extra service. In this case, I typically reach for a good parametric eq, a multiband compressor, and a limiter. With those three tools, you can normally achieve a decent "master" without breaking the bank going to a professional, but if you've got the funds... always go with the pros. 

 

And I will be very quick to agree with that.  I'm a professional, too, and I constantly deal both with amateurs and with the people who trusted them just as much as they (innocently, usually ...) trusted themselves.  You should engage "someone who knows."

 

Just as soon as you (or the company that's interested in commercially developing your seminal work ...) can afford to do so.

 

But you also have to start at a point where you just might not have much money to spend.  Just like Paul McCartney's early demo which has bathroom sounds (from the next flat?) in the background.  So, you might have to "prepare your 'pitch'" with what you have, and with whatever skill you can muster and/or barter for.

 

And it's probably not realistic to think in terms of "self-pub," because, gratuitous and warm-fuzzy though such a thing might be, it's going to be very difficult to achieve critical-mass.  (A day in the life of just another piece of junk e-mail that really wasn't junk at all but it was lost in the fog and nobody ever knew ... hey, there could be a song in that.)

 

I do think that there is, and that there always will be, professional recordists, arrangers, mixers, masterers, (mix-masters ...? ... hey, every well-appointed kitchen needs one ...) and so forth.  But they're not going to be staff-members of big "record label" conglomerates.  (Some of them, of course, used to be, but that's also the new economics at work.)  There is no more profit-margin out there in the record business to support any sort of speculation; not even the classic "record deal."  The product, itself, sells for far less money, and it sells against vastly increased competition.  It's one thing to sell "a gold record" when each copy sold for $16 and the company could honestly book a net-profit say of $6.  It's quite another to sell a million quarters, even if you get to keep 23¢ apiece.

[Seo, A Musicians Worst Enemy]

Dissenting slightly here ... it always struck me as a crap-shoot approach, to assume (literally ...) "if you build it, they will come."

 

Most likely, they won't.  Not for music, anyway.

 

For music, I would "talk up my music" on every music-oriented forum (like this one) that I could possibly find.  Consider what places you might "hang out" if you were interested – as a listener – in the kind of music that you write and play.  Which of these sites have a "new music feature" section?  Which ones (like "macjams.com") have a random-selector which might introduce your music to someone by pure luck o' the draw?  What Internet radio stations out there might play your music?

 

I've found the great music that I enjoy ... from Internet radio, from satellite radio, but mostly from hanging-out (online) with musical friends who share common tastes.  I've never found a single song by "Google searching" for it.  Ever.

[Do you use a metronome?]

I hate mechanical beeps. Especially if the beep is not in tune or even in key with what I'm doing. I find a simple soft kick, snare or side stick a lot more bearable.  I won't put it on all the beats.  It depends on the song but usually it's either One and Three or Two and four.

 

A beep is just what I have very easy access to.  But I do find that it's helpful by sounding distinctly unnatural.  It is played very, very softly, it's mostly white noise, it's a pulse and it has no rough edges.  But, even so, that's exactly what makes it stand out, if and when you want to focus your attention on it, while also making it something that you can absolutely tune-out.  It isn't part of the material, and it doesn't sound like it should be.  It's just a common point-of-reference that everyone heard.  You can focus on it, or fuhgeddaboudit.

 

Give the singer a little phone-mixer box with knobs on it, one of them "click."  Let them turn it up or turn it off as they please.

[Mastering recommendations?]

I'm a musician by pleasure, and a software guy by profession.  (Hey, I like to say, still, that I make my living by doing what has always been my hobby, and that I've been able to do that for over 30 years now.)  But a very interesting thing – a completely unplanned-for and unexpected thing – happened to me "on the way to the Forum."  I conceived the need for a niche software product to do a particular thing, and wrote it (if only because I needed to have it, and was very surprised to find that it didn't already exist).  Then, I just let the word get out on various internet discussion-groups of the day ... and, well, "it did very good things for me."  Not a Porsche or anything like that, but nevertheless, "very good things." 

 

You can still buy a copy of it today, and some people still do, although most of the money came from OEM licensing to products that I'd never even heard of.  It still solves the problem that it was built to solve, as well as ever it did, and it costs over $100 USD a copy.  (In some Editions, several times that...)

 

Cost of goods sold?  Basically, zero.  (I needed the product, so I was doing it anyway.)  Cost of distribution?  Zero, except for postage in the days when I was still shipping out floppy-disks.  Market penetration?  Most of the countries on the planet, I think.

 

I could never have made that money if I'd been putting the products on disks, putting them in cardboard boxes, and shipping them to retail stores, every one of which had the contractual right to send unsold copies back at my cost.  So, I never tried that.  People who needed the product found a way to find it.  I made a profit because all of the revenue essentially was profit.  Even though I never particularly set out to "write a commercially successful product," and I never borrowed a dime of investment money.  (This during the heyday of the "dot-bomb bubble," when people who should have known better were telling me to "go for the First Round."  Well, I did send one letter to the holy grounds in Palo Alto, but they never wrote back and I never wrote again.)

 

Today, I think that we tend to overlook the power, and the opportunity, of "Cost of Goods Sold = Zero."  But that is the commercial environment that we live in today.  I-F you have a product to sell that is "up to snuff," in the eyes and ears of the person who is inclined to buy it, then you can sell a copy of it for "jukebox prices," even 25¢ a copy, and still make money because you get to keep nearly all of that quarter.

 

The difference between the two scenarios, of course, is that in music there is no "perceived barrier to entry."  Anyone can produce drivel and shove it out there – SoundCloud doesn't care, for example.  But that's just to be expected.  You can't "open the doorway to everyone" and then try to post a bouncer at the door.

 

Still ... there are companies out there who have set themselves up in the role of gatekeeper:  taxi.com, for example, and they do charge admission to keep the riff-raff out.  But it's nothing like the barriers-to-entry that used to be erected by the record labels who did, to their credit, have to deal with "speculatively printing product and shipping it to stores who had the right to send it back."

 

Those barriers-to-entry existed for a reason, but that reason was established by the then-realities of a production and distribution system that was, then, "the only way to do it."  That's not the case anymore, and I think that we all have to keep this foremost in our minds.

 

For many platinum-album decades, the "Sound City Studios" was a hit-maker ... with legendary rooms, over a thousand pieces of off-board audio gear, many millions of dollars in investment that earned many millions more.  All gone!!  (And the subject of a very interesting documentary.)  They simply weren't competitive anymore (although they still do lease out "that legendary Room").  You don't need "all that gear" to do it anymore.  If you know how to do it, you can do it with your Macintosh ... and your competition is out there, doing just that.

 

But ... they might not be trying to "put a hit song on the radio."  They might be doing tracks for radio and television.  They might be spreading the word by word-of-mouth.  They might be making very good money because there simply is no overhead, no fixed costs, to what they are doing.  You can "buy it now."  They're lean-and-mean, and profitable.  They're selling stuff for a quarter and keeping most of the quarter.  They're selling and licensing their product directly to the consumer, and they're not waiting around for "a deal."  The barriers are gone-for-good now, and both producer and consumer are "acting accordingly."  For better and for worse.

 

Today's gatekeepers will participate in bringing a commercial product the rest of the way to market, but they've found a way to do that without putting a lot of their money at speculative risk.  You have to find them, have to have a solid thing to offer them, and you have to pay a nominal sum to get in.  They serve the purpose of "a really great spam filter," and if you've ever tried to get e-mail without one, you know how necessary that has become.  There are no "margins" to fall back on now.  Nothing between you and the jukebox.