http://cheapadviceonmusic.com Tips on Songwriting, Home Recording and Live Sound from the Cheap Advice Guy Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:52:25 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 en Cheap Advice On Music: The Podcast offers tips on Songwriting, Home Recording, and Live Sound. Commentary by the Cheap Advice Guy is interspersed with audio illustrations demonstrating the tips in action. Tips on Songwriting, Home Recording and Live Sound from the Cheap Advice Guy Mark Bendig (The Cheap Advice Guy) music,songwriting,recording no Mark Bendig mbendig@columbus.rr.com http://cheapadviceonmusic.com/2009/08/14/stuck-for-lyrics-use-a-poem/ http://cheapadviceonmusic.com/2009/08/14/stuck-for-lyrics-use-a-poem/#comments Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:00:38 +0000 TheCheapAdviceGuy http://cheapadviceonmusic.com/?p=105 http://cheapadviceonmusic.com/2009/08/14/stuck-for-lyrics-use-a-poem/feed/ If you’d really like to record a shiny new song but you just don’t have any decent lyrics on hand, I say don’t let that stop you. Try borrowing ready-made lyrics from a poem, the more obscure the better. You don’t want people recognizing your source - unless of course you do! I have recorded a setting of Kyrie Eleison, which a few people have heard of, and I have set some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s words to music, and I suppose someone might recognize them. But my favorite experience with setting an obscure poem to music came a few years ago (ahem), when I came across a poem by Ada Smith in a little book of poetry I found on my grandmother’s bookshelf. The poem goes like this. In City Streets Yonder in the heather there’s a bed for sleeping, Drink for one athirst, ripe blackberries to eat; Yonder in the sun the merry hares go leaping, And the pool is clear for travel-wearied feet. Sorely throb my feet, a-tramping London highways, (Ah! the springy moss upon a northern moor!) Through the endless streets, the gloomy squares and byways, Homeless in the City, poor among the poor! London streets are gold - ah, give me leaves a-glinting ‘Midst gray dykes and hedges in the autumn sun! London water’s wine, poured out for all unstinting - God!  For the little brooks that tumble as they run! Oh, my heart is fain to hear the soft wind blowing, Soughing through the fir-tops up on northern fells! Oh, my eye’s an ache to see the brown burns flowing Through the peaty soil and tinkling heather-bells. I know, I know, what’s with the old-fashioned language? But for some reason, when I read the poem it sounded like a set of lyrics to me, with the second verse an obvious choice for a repeating chorus. I used a bouncy, up-tempo melody and somehow got away with loopy lyrics about “merry hares” and “peaty soil”, along with a few strategic word changes. The result, recorded with my brother Gary in 1971, was my own musical version of the poem, which I titled “Homeless In the City” (mp3).  I’ll bet you can do better! Now, there is a lot of poetry to look through at your library, and a lot more online. The trouble is that the great poets everyone’s heard of, like Robert Frost for example, or Allen Ginsberg, didn’t generally write song-like poetry with a regular rhythm and nice rhyming lines. You will probably get better lyrics for singing from more conventional, not to say second-rate, purveyors of the poetic art (like Ada Smith!). If you do want to use something less sing-songy, consider reading parts of the poem over an instrumental backing, William Shatner style. (Or perhaps the verses could be spoken and the choruses sung.) Homeless In the City (A. Smith - M. Bendig) (mp3) Mark Bendig: vocals, guitars Gary Bendig: drums If you’d really like to record a shiny new song but you just don’t have any decent lyrics on hand, I say don’t let that stop you. Try borrowing ready-made lyrics from a poem, the more obscure the better. You don’t want [...] http://cheapadviceonmusic.com/2008/08/08/podcast-exploring-a-multi-effects-box-for-guitar/ http://cheapadviceonmusic.com/2008/08/08/podcast-exploring-a-multi-effects-box-for-guitar/#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:00:35 +0000 TheCheapAdviceGuy http://cheapadviceonmusic.com/?p=67 http://cheapadviceonmusic.com/2008/08/08/podcast-exploring-a-multi-effects-box-for-guitar/feed/ Have you ever considered getting one of those multi-effects boxes to play your guitar through in your studio? If you play guitar and you don’t have one of these units in your studio you are like, so totally missing out! This podcast tries to convince you to buy a multi-effects box, using a Digitech RP100 (pictured) to demonstrate some of the many cool sounds you can get out of one crummy electric guitar (mine, in this case)! Download Podcast (mp3, 7:23, 6.8 MB) [Podcast subscription capability coming soon!] Have you ever considered getting one of those multi-effects boxes to play your guitar through in your studio? If you play guitar and you don’t have one of these units in your studio you are like, so totally missing out! This podcast tries to [...] http://cheapadviceonmusic.com/2008/06/02/spice-up-a-song-with-sound-effects/ http://cheapadviceonmusic.com/2008/06/02/spice-up-a-song-with-sound-effects/#comments Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:28:51 +0000 TheCheapAdviceGuy http://cheapadviceonmusic.com/?p=36 http://cheapadviceonmusic.com/2008/06/02/spice-up-a-song-with-sound-effects/feed/ Most songs we write and record have instruments and/or vocals, but nothing else. Let’s face it, the most exotic sound on most of our recordings is a tambourine. This is not necessarily a Bad Thing. After all, “instruments and/or vocals” takes in a pretty wide range, from Gregorian Chant to Smooth R&B and everything in between! But every now and then, just for the sheer novelty value, you ought to consider using some kind of sound effects in one of your songs. Some songs, like “Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles, are positively filled with scene-setting sound effects. Birds twitter throughout “Blackbird” by the same band. More recently, digital mixmeister Beck and others have combined “found sounds” and other effects with musical samples to create audio collages in their songs. Of course, this is a technique where a little bit can go a long way. There’s no need to overdo it! As a songwriter, you can specify what sound effects will be heard when by adding notations like (alarm clock here) to your lyrics sheet, or at least having a firm idea of what specific effects will be used where as you write the song. In this case, the effects would be considered part of the song. Alternatively, you can wait until you have your Producer hat on and decide whether and where to add sound effects when you mix the song. Here, the effects would be considered part of the arrangement. Name That Sound There are three main sources for sound effects: • Sound effects CDs or websites • TV shows, DVD movies, etc. • Personal recordings With sound effects CDs or websites, you get pre-recorded sounds of all kinds, with many variations, labeled as to subject and duration. You need the sound of a car starting up and driving off? There were a dozen variations of this sound on one CD I found. Need birds, or crickets, or elephants? Again, labeled samples by the dozen can be found on sound effects CDs. And there are whole CDs of rainstorms, jungle sounds, etc., ready for use! Sound effects CDs can be found by the score at your local library - mine, a medium-sized branch, has drawer after drawer full of the things! For me, this beats the websites, which can be awkward to use and usually make you pay for your samples. If you’re in a real hurry, maybe try online, but otherwise just head on down to the library! Another really neat (and cheap) source of sound effects is to record a movie or TV show as you watch it and then lift some of the effects you hear (or dialog - talking is a sound effect too!) by copying them over onto a flash drive or whatever you use to import outside audio into your studio. Finally, one of my favorite sources of sound effects is to record my own. With portable, battery-operated recording devices like the Zoom H4 and others becoming available, it is a simple matter to get CD-quality recordings “on the fly” of anything from your very own rainstorm or your cute pet kitty to the crowd at a football game. A warning, though. Once you start thinking this way, it’s hard to stop. (”I could record an oncoming train! I could record a volcano!”) Sounds I Have Known Let me give you a couple of examples of songs I have written and recorded using sound effects. In “Things Happen Fast” (mp3, chords, lyrics), I wrote the sound effects in as part of the song. I knew all along that I wanted an old-fashioned car horn after the line about an “old Citation” (a kind of car), and a cash register sound after the reference to working at Wal-Mart. I found both of them on sound effect CDs from the library! With “About To Get You” (mp3, chords, lyrics), I was already done with the song when I thought of adding in some sounds I had recorded a few weeks earlier of a plumber drilling holes in my studio ceiling (don’t ask). At the time, I didn’t know what use I would make of the sounds and [...] Most songs we write and record have instruments and/or vocals, but nothing else. Let’s face it, the most exotic sound on most of our recordings is a tambourine. This is not necessarily a Bad Thing. After all, “instruments and/or [...]