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Song of the Month Club - August
What is the Song of the Month Club?
It's a place where musicians come to give and receive feedback on their work. Anyone is welcome, whatever their level of ability.
The spirit of the club is to contribute: if you submit a song for others to comment on, you should also have the courtesy to listen to everyone else's contributions and give as much feedback as possible. Posting a track and not listening and commenting on others is not cool.
The purpose of feedback is to be honest. Essentially you should give your truthful impressions of the song, whether good or bad. Negative feedback, if done in the right spirit and with courtesy, is often the most useful and can help the artist to grow and improve.
All submissions are welcome, don't hesitate if you want to contribute. Instrumentals are very welcome, and songs with vocals are especially encouraged, so if you are thinking of experimenting with vocals this is a good place to get started.
Comments
Jarmin - Beat 'Em (WIP):
https://m.soundcloud.com/jarmin-records/beat-em
Marcel - instrumental:
https://app.box.com/s/d2snzsu1iie30gsof2jdlioifphb24b9
LostBoy85 - Phantom Love:
https://m.soundcloud.com/leo-b-5/phantom-love-master-finale
badmaxton - Breakin' The Past:
https://m.soundcloud.com/bad-maxton/breakin-the-past
AlterEgoUK - Middle Rise:
https://m.soundcloud.com/a-multitude-of-one/middle-rise-remix
Igneous1 - Gilded Hero:
https://m.soundcloud.com/formbank/masteringapp-gilded-hero-220815-mastered
Richard Yot - Lights:
https://m.soundcloud.com/richardyot/lights
dblonde - The Porcupine:
https://m.soundcloud.com/kadhimhart/the-porcupine
touchconspiracy - Symbolic:
https://m.soundcloud.com/touchandcreate-com/symbolic-clip
Jocphone - Junior Terror Loop:
https://m.soundcloud.com/jocphone/junior-terror-loop
Matt_Flecther_2000 - Somewhere in the Middle:
https://m.soundcloud.com/matt-fletcher-2000/somewhere-in-the-middle
JohnnyGoodyear - Wake Up Blues:
https://m.soundcloud.com/johnnygoodyear/wake-up-blues
BvsMV - Some Day When I wake Up:
https://m.soundcloud.com/bvsmv/someday-when-i-wake-up
Andy X - Electric Train:
https://m.soundcloud.com/andyxuma/electric-train
rkmoneky - Texas Gadget BLuEz:
https://m.soundcloud.com/rkmonkey1/texas-gadget-bluez
thus - Wasteland:
https://m.soundcloud.com/thus-music/wasteland
monzo - Austerity Head:
https://m.soundcloud.com/mothers-cock/austerity-head
As well as contributing songs for critique, I thought it would also be interesting to kick off a discussion about the songwriting process, not necessarily just from contributors to the SOTMC but from the whole community.
Songwriting is obviously a personal process, and will vary from artist to artist, but to get started a couple of questions seem quite pertinent to me:
How do you get started with a song? Is it with a beat? A chord progression? A vocal melody? How do you turn the initial sketch/idea into a fully fledged song?
What aspects of a song are most important to you? Is it the groove? Is it the vocal melody? The catchiness of the chorus? Originality? Conformity to a genre?
Obviously I'm still very much a beginner when it comes to songwriting, but for what it's worth here are my answers:
How do you get started with a song?
I usually like to start with a short musical phrase, either a an interesting strummed progression on the guitar, or more recently a 4 to 8 bar loop in Gadget that has a chord progression and an interesting melodic element. I generally tinker with a few ideas before coming back to the one that seems the strongest and most inspiring, and then I will write additional parts and develop a song structure and dynamics, and eventually a vocal melody and lyrics.
I personally tend to write the backing first, then the vocal melody, and then the lyrics as the last stage in the process - although I have done a couple of songs where a vocal phrase (words and melody) have come to me spontaneously when walking the dog or whatever, and then built a chord progression around that, but it seems a much more difficult way of working to me.
What aspects of a song are most important to you?
For me personally I think the vocal melody is the single most important thing in a song. After that a good groove, followed by an interesting song structure, then lyrics, and finally originality is also important. I'm not interested in belonging to a particular genre, but it's very difficult to be original and avoid comparisons.
I reckon if you are interested in progressing and learning an art form you are always a beginner, no matter how long you have practiced. Anyone who claims to be an expert or a master is posturing.
Can come from anywhere really. Might be an accident strumming the guitar, a crazy noise found on a synth, some random dots placed on a piano roll, other times it can come from a concept such as, I want to create a madly chaotic song that eventually resolves into a simple melody. Rarely starts with words/lyrics but I am looking to get into that way of working.
Depends on the song. Mostly that is says something or helps me explore somewhere that I haven't visited before.
I'm not sure it is that difficult to do something reasonably original, the difficulty for me is communicating the context.
Good point - humility is essential if you are to assess your work honestly, and to acknowledge that what you don't know will always outweigh what you do know.
And of course the former grows much faster than the latter
Here's my more obscurist take on this:
Song writing isn't the be all and end all in itself, a lot of musicians would describe themselves as composers as they don't write songs as such. More abstract / less formalised musical forms are perfectly valid and structure can be very different from the more standard verse/chorus/bridge/verse etc.
Having studied electro-acoustic music, I've learnt that sounds in themselves (field recordings , for example) can be the starting point for a piece. For me, the really interesting thing about composing, is that you can do what you want - unless you are trying to fit into a genre that is very defined by it's structures and form.
Very interesting fellas!:) for me it varies as far as starting a song goes but I would say that 80% of the time songs come from me singing into my voice memo app.melodies hit me in the face at the strangest times & I have to rush to record it before it flutters away into Johnny or Richards head! Haha!
So melody first,then music & lyrics.The music part takes me bloody ages but I do enjoy it.Lyrics,I constantly write down interesting words & phrases.I have quite the collection,why I'm shit at scrabble il never know!!:)
I then go round and round in circles loving parts...then hating those same parts..until eventually I settle,play the song to my wife who bless her does her best to look interested!! Haha! and then I can finally let the song go or as is the case now I can feed it to you vultures!:D
it won't be a surprise that I'm partial to a catchy number & especially songs that can capture a certain mood/atmosphere.It might be a surprise that I do enjoy more melancholy stuff.Watch this space!
That's something I forgot to mention: the emotion that the song is trying to convey ought to be right up there with melody in terms of importance (and they are closely related obviously).
The question then becomes: are you writing primarily for yourself - in which case anything goes. Or do you aim to entertain/move/communicate something to the listener? I think both approaches are valid, and really great art is probably a mixture of the two.
I try to synthesize the last honest minutes of a two hour session with the world's most brutal psychiatrist, recognize what's looming at the root of my peat-bog mind, and start to howl.
However....if I'm not feeling that revelatory I usually begin with some lyrics, try and imagine/feel the atmosphere of them, and then wonder how the hell I'm going to make the latter match the former. With the fun part taken care I blunder and slog to try and make the palest facsimile of what I started out so certain about.
Unless I promised to write a country song and then I just wing it.
The question then becomes: are you writing primarily for yourself - in which case anything goes. Or do you aim to entertain/move/communicate something to the listener?
My thoughts are that you primarily please yourself - in the hope that it may be picked up by listeners as well
I think there is a danger if you write stuff with some kind of sense of how it might go down well with others, then there's a (possible) element of losing your way, creatively. This approach is perfectly valid of course, it's just not for me.
I think the trouble with writing solely for yourself is that it can quickly become self-indulgent, so it's good to think of the listener without selling out or compromising your art, but just in terms of communicating a mood and a message.
I suppose the problem or fly/ointment here is if your ideal listener is.....you.
@richardyot said: Obviously I'm still very much a beginner when it comes to songwriting, but for what it's worth here are my answers:
I reckon if you are interested in progressing and learning an art form you are always a beginner, no matter how long you have practiced. Anyone who claims to be an expert or a master is posturing.
Just don't say it to Bucharach, Lennon Maccartney or any other masters of posturing out there.
Don't remember any of those claiming to be an expert or master. The true greats tend to be quite humble and keep learning and pushing themselves.
@Jocphone There comes the time in every prolific songwriter's life when you can write a good appreciated by the majority of listeners song each time he or she sits down and puts their mind to it (good being a very subjective word in this sense).
When you got to that stage a song a day is not such a big deal. I guess you just haven't got there yet.
I agree that one has to evolve but once you've got your harmonies and melodies in the bag you go exploring timbres and textures which in turns takes your creative expression to another level, also of creative control over the stuff you put out.
'The true greats tend to be quite humble and keep learning and pushing themselves' and die in their bedroom along with their creations. This makes me think of that Prince's secret vault full of unreleased material that people salivate over. He hasn't released a huge amount of good stuff so I can imagine how shit his unreleased stuff is.
I really don't think that's the case. A good song is elusive, even if you're Paul McCartney, Neil Young or Bob Dylan - they've all experienced creative droughts where their output was below par.
A common experience faced by many recording artists is that difficult second or third album, and many artists go stale or seemingly run out of things to say when they get older. I'm sure there are many different reasons for this, but a lack of good songs is probably a major factor. How many great songs did Paul McCartney write after 1980? In fact how many great songs did he write after 1970? If we are talking about the "majority of listeners" I would imagine most of them would put his peak somewhere in late 1960s, before he turned 30.
From an interview with Leonard Cohen,
That was a song (Hallelujah) that took me a long time to write. Dylan and I were having coffee the day after his concert in Paris a few years ago and he was doing that song in concert. And he asked me how long it took to write it. And I told him a couple of years. I lied actually. It was more than a couple of years ... Then I praised a song of his, "I and I," and asked him how long it had taken and he said, "Fifteen minutes."
You often seem to portray your own working method as universal. This couldn't be further from the truth. Many different processes, motivations if you get out and see how and why other people make music.
This feels as though it should be a thread unto itself.
Bottom line: Entirely subjective. No right or wrong in that. I find the whole 'It took years' and/or 'Oh I did it in 15 mins' always smacks of dick-slapping and so what. Or maybe posturing as that seems to be the ribbon word here.
Well said. As someone who dabbles in music purely as a hobby and has zero relations in the industry, I would make an educated guess and say that people are people wherever they are and whatever they do. As in any occupation, there will be humble people and arrogant people. Humbleness probably won´t translate directly to mediocrity nor to greatness. As arrogance won´t. But from a human standpoint, arrogant people probably attract more negativity than they would otherwise, and this could (or not) have an impact on their personal and professional lives
Entirely subjective is the key word here. Probably a good place to stop this particular tangent.
Mmm - normally because of something else i've heard that's inspired me. Often a combination of things.
I managed to get to a music festival for a bit last weekend and the dance tent/stage was just so great that I came away buzzing with ideas and a feel for the type of music I wanted to create. Also an album i've been listening to recently which has a great feel to it and some great sounds.
So in a word... I find some stuff to copy
.
In the type of music I make, I've gotta say "the groove"
I don't mind genres - they're a useful way of getting a feel for of the key characteristics of a type of music - that works. They help teach you 'the rules'. It's kind of following other people's footsteps who have taken the same journey before you.
Then once you're comfortable you can start going off the beaten track and start bending or breaking the rules - to give things your own flavour.
I'm not trying to invent my own genre. I am interesting in blending a few different influences from a few genre together to make something interesting and 'my own' though.
Because of today's discussion I'll re-mention this awesome songwriting podcast http://www.sodajerker.com
They've interviewed 75 awesome songwriters.Today at work I listened to one they did with Glen Ballard who wrote 'man in the mirror' & co wrote all of Alannis Morrissettes Jagged little Pill album amongst shit loads of other stuff! Anyway having lurked on this thread through out the day I found it interesting that he along with lots of others I've listened to do come across humble,he was asked what the ratio of hit songs to nonhit songs was throughout his career and he said that he's written 10,000 songs and about 400/500 have been recorded!!! That's Cray Cray!! & that in my opinion is why they generally stay so grounded cos of all the times a song they write just goes nowhere...9500 of them!
Admittedly...that's still a shit load of success!! But u get the drift:D
@LostBoy85, this snippet from a book I read years ago (Art & Fear) always fascinated me:
http://kottke.org/09/02/art-and-fear
Very interesting @Richardyot There's definitely a lot of truth in that article.I think as well that for successful songwriters luck has a large role to play & some writers have songs that they're not crazy about do really well while the songs they prefer struggle.I suppose that can be the same for any creative job.
Luck is always a crucial factor in any success. It's so easy to forget that.
I'm not religious, but I really like this quote from Ecclesiastes:
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
I hope u don't mind guys but I'm sneaking my July entry into the start of August.Its just that I worked my tail off to get it finished in time and I literally posted it on the 31st July!! so some of u regulars may have missed it.I will also have a separate August song in a couple of weeks,promise!:D