Self Sufficient Musician

How do you start a song?

My answer: anywhere I can.

Songwriters are creatures of habits just like everybody else, and they tend to develop a single method of writing that they stick to. Then they fall into a rut or hit a writer’s block, and wonder why they’re stuck. 

In reality, songs don’t have to be born any certain way.  While it’s not wrong for a songwriter to have a primary/favorite method of writing songs, being aware of other entry points can greatly enhance your writing and reduce the chances of you getting stuck.  Below, let’s list up all the places where a song begins to hatch out of its egg: (continue reading…)

In just about every other areas of music instruction, they encourage students to analyze, learn and steal from the greats.  Guitar students start out by playing along to their heros.  Singers sing along.  Classical music students analyze Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and likes and learn what stylistic elements identify their compositions as their works.

Rightfully, this is a tricky topic with songwriters, because we’re so afraid of plagiarism.  Even if you don’t end up in court, being accused of plagiarism, being a copycat, is a major insult.  And I’m not advocating that plagiarism is acceptable — it’s not.  But learning from the greats is still the most effective way to learn a craft.  What you do is instead of copying bits of music — though that’s where everyone must start — you analyze songs and learn the system that makes the great songs great.

And this also extends to the art of record producing — great arrangers, engineers and producers are constantly analyzing what they hear in recordings.  Instrumentation, mix, types of reverb used — all that information is available to those who know how to listen.

Once you start analyzing, you’ll discover that each piece of music/recording contains an amazing amount of information.  It’s packed full of techiniques that you can employ into your own songwriting and production. Below let me identify what you can glean from a recording, so that you can start developing the skill of listening critically. (continue reading…)

I know that among some musicians — particularly rock musicians — it’s glamorous to say that you don’t know much about music theory.  Knowing too much will spoil it, they say.  It ruins the mystery and stifles creativity.

In response to that, let me tell you a little story.  I once heard a man who is a famous speaker designer, well-established in the high-end audio circles.  He said that when he was little, he used to take apart everything: radios, TVs, typewriters.  And tried to put them back together.  Some of them he couldn’t put back, but this activity gave him great insights into how electronics worked.  I don’t know when and what kind of education/training he received, but it sounded like that came after this era of taking things apart.

How We Learn and Understand

Among guitar players, we encourage beginning to intermediate players to learn from their heros.  Copy them, actually — learn to play what they played, by ear, preferably.  We all have to start from imitating — like little kids do with speech — and this gives us insights about how things work, even if they don’t know the system behind it.  Little kids don’t know grammer or spelling, but during the course of acquiring language skills, sooner or later they realize that there are systems and there are rules.  Learning these guidelines help them figure out what to do, for example, when they encounter words that they hadn’t heard before. (continue reading…)

There are many resources out there for how to write hit songs.  But few discuss how to become unique.

But think about it.  All the artists that are worth remembering in the history of music industry — everyone from the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Abba, U2, the Police, Tori Amos, Queen, Bjork, Nirvana — are all so unique.  Oft imitated, sure, but never duplicated.

Now, admittedly, some artists become more known for their distinctive persona than originality in their music.  And that is no less valid way to get established.

That said, here I’m going to guide you through how to go about developing your own unique songwriting style, one so distinctive that you can’t help but stand out from the crowd.

(continue reading…)

There are many resources out there for discussing how to write a ‘hit’ song.

And there are a number of techniques, like analyzing past hit songs to determine common characteristics and emulate them. That’s useful information if you plan to pursue a hit-based career.

However,  here at SSM, we are more concerned with being unique than hit.  Why?  It’s because being unique is much more reliable and practical way to ensure that you have a lasting career as an original recording artist.

Quickly, here are the reasons why.  (continue reading…)