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Where Do You Mostly Write Your Songs?


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Hey gang

 

Where do you mostly write your songs? Is it a place you choose just for convenience? Comfort? Does it have something special you just can’t get anywhere else? Do you prefer to be in the middle of a bunch of activity? Or is quiet solitude more your pace?

 

I am at home in either environment, but I prefer a notebook and my phone audio recorder in the quiet corner of a reasonably active cafe. Still, it might be my preference, but I think the most common place is in my studio with my guitar or piano.

 

cheers

 

John

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"In my head."

 

And, every time another song wanders through it, I reach for my phone, punch "Voice Memos," and start humming.  If lyrics are wandering around at the same time, I say them.

 

Some folks have begun putting (broken-down ...) pianos in public places.  Sometimes I just sit down and play. ... After putting my phone on top of the thing and turning on "Voice Memos."

 

Plenty of artists have learned this lesson.  One thing that clearly stood out to me, as I re-watched the documentary It Might Get Loud, was that – instinctively – when any of the artists "improvised," they switched on a tape recorder.

 

Now of course, "that's merely the beginning."  Songwriting, proper, is really very much a very-deliberate act of development that might actually lead to several outcomes.

Edited by MikeRobinson
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  • 2 months later...

Hi John.

I would say that it's changing all of the time.

Sometimes I write while traveling, sometimes at home, then if I change a home I write there, normally in any room which at the moment I feel I have inspiration on. What's more important for me is the notebook that I write the song in, somehow it gives me more of a feeling than the place itself.

 

By the way, how can you sing in a cafe? that sounds very challenging, aren't you a bit embarrassed by the surroundings?

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17 hours ago, haim shim said:

By the way, how can you sing in a cafe? that sounds very challenging, aren't you a bit embarrassed by the surroundings?


In a cafe I don’t sing at full volume or anywhere near it. I tend to vocally doodle, quietly until I click record... and then I speech-level-sing. If out and about at shops, walking about, I sing at a gently projected volume. I used to do it at my old job. I started playing at 4. My mother was a singer and piano teacher. From a very young age my sisters and I used to be trooped out to perform for her friends, especially her music friends. I was performing in public from 8-ish, singing in choirs, then playing in youth orchestras and pipe bands amongst other things. I decided at some point that the best way to deal with any notion of embarrassment is to sing as I go about my daily activities. It also meant I got a lot more writing time and practicing! Life’s too short for embarrassment lol Add to that I find if you engage the people who react, they just accept it. In a cafe I’m not performing, but not hiding either. More respecting their space. Sort of. Lol People do ask, probably because I’ll be scribbling on a pad, recording etc. I’ve even been known to do something basic in GarageBand, though I use headphones. But when they ask, they are often interested and quite accepting. I guess I also tend to pick places where chat is louder than the background music. That way I am not ruining someone’s enjoyment of a song. Being sensitive to the environment also helps. If people are having a deep and meaningful, it’s probably the wrong vibe. 
 

:)

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 5/5/2021 at 9:24 PM, john said:


In a cafe I don’t sing at full volume or anywhere near it. I tend to vocally doodle, quietly until I click record... and then I speech-level-sing. If out and about at shops, walking about, I sing at a gently projected volume. I used to do it at my old job. I started playing at 4. My mother was a singer and piano teacher. From a very young age my sisters and I used to be trooped out to perform for her friends, especially her music friends. I was performing in public from 8-ish, singing in choirs, then playing in youth orchestras and pipe bands amongst other things. I decided at some point that the best way to deal with any notion of embarrassment is to sing as I go about my daily activities. It also meant I got a lot more writing time and practicing! Life’s too short for embarrassment lol Add to that I find if you engage the people who react, they just accept it. In a cafe I’m not performing, but not hiding either. More respecting their space. Sort of. Lol People do ask, probably because I’ll be scribbling on a pad, recording etc. I’ve even been known to do something basic in GarageBand, though I use headphones. But when they ask, they are often interested and quite accepting. I guess I also tend to pick places where chat is louder than the background music. That way I am not ruining someone’s enjoyment of a song. Being sensitive to the environment also helps. If people are having a deep and meaningful, it’s probably the wrong vibe. 
 

:)

 

That idea makes me think about it further and I see the logic in it... I thought you are there with a guitar and singing lol. It's nice to read that you are playing live from a very young age. Also I guess the restaurants and cafe's in America are larger than here... I remember it actually. Here everyone is on top of each other's faces haha.

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  • 1 month later...
1 hour ago, Adamiko Zech said:

Bathroom, for real 


lol Apparently 80%+ of Facebook posts are written in the bathroom!

 

What is it about being in the bathroom inspires you? The ambient reverb? Lol

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My words and music ALWAYS start with guitar noodling at the kitchen table, a comfortable richly-acoustic setting that has become second nature.  6-10am is my best time.  Good natural light, food and drink at hand, large table for writing, supportive chairs, birds outside, quiet inside. Developing a song acoustically for me is natural and relatively quick ... grab the guitar and you’re ready to start.  Pencil and paper are simple to use and also for quick editing.

 

I juggle ideas that resonate intellectually and words that are comfortable for me to sing (which can be quite different from written or spoken words).  The word structure/rhythm can help generate the music.  Or else I noodle on my 12-string until some rhythm or chord structure seems fresh and itself suggests a mood and lyric direction. If nothing happens easily, I’ll just do something else!

 

Once a seed has been planted, I then work on a way to bring the chords back to the start and also branch off into at least one separate chord group, although this rarely leads to a classic verse-chorus structure per se.   Once started, I’ve learned to never leave the table unless one such sub-structure is in place and written down ... else I simply forget it and cannot recreate it, even a few minutes later.

 

I don’t consider anything done and worth recording until, simply and acoustically, it has a satisfactory completeness of intro, verse, chorus, break/bridge, outro, in a more or less comfortable key that I can sing, nice full-sounding chords,  and a tempo that suits the feel and doesn’t exceed my playing ability.  Only then do I feel it’s worth the effort to transcribe from scribbled crossings out more permanently into my personalised MS-Word template for songs.  This shows the beat of syllables and also any non-standard chord shapes as particular chord inversions can make all the difference to the sound and feel.  From that point there is always ongoing refinement, but this can now be done as scribbled edits on a page printed from the computer and edited there.

 

My approach to lyrics is they:

·         need to be about something, please me, and be G/PG for a general audience

·         should have rhyming lines, and occasionally rhymes within lines

·         should not be easily guessable by the first-time listener

·         should not repeat too often, if at all.  ‘Repeating’ is a requirement for pop songs, but I dislike it. 
          (
Give me a Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen word-laden song any day!)

·         avoid words like love, baby, darling, or fillers like “oooh/aaah” etc..

·         ... if lyrics don't 'appear', I instead shape the piece as an instrumental

 

If music/lyric ideas are not scribbled down, it means they are not worth further exploration.  This is my ‘quality’ control. I do not keep notebooks of unfinished ideas ... in fact I cringe at the thought of books and 'tapes' of unfinished stuff ... it would take a lifetime to go back and make sense of them.

 

PS. All the above is a copy/paste from a 'making of' book I wrote nearly two year ago for my 2020 "The Flat White Album". All 30 tracks were written, complete, at the kitchen table BEFORE recording anything.

 

Greg

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

George writes most of his songs in the trance like state found between pure exhaustion and midnight munchies. 

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On 7/1/2021 at 9:02 PM, George Yates said:

George writes most of his songs in the trance like state found between pure exhaustion and midnight munchies. 


I like the 3rd person observation lol

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