Cheap Advice On Music

Does your lyrical well ever run dry? Do you find yourself casting about for an idea, a notion, an opening line - anything to help you kick off a new set of lyrics? I have that happen a lot. If I just write down “whatever comes to me” without a specific idea or starting point, it tends to come out sounding like the same “talking points” (singing points?) I’ve been writing about for the last 30 years!

One good source for new lyrical ideas is the things people say in movies or on TV (or in movies on TV). Here’s something that I’ve tried that might work for you. Pick a movie, any movie, although for some reason the older ones (40s and 50s) tend to work better for this - maybe people talked different back then or something. Anyway, put in the DVD and watch the movie, with a pencil and pad at the ready. Write down everything anyone says that sounds like it might be a line in a song. There will be lots!

You should have at least 25 or 30 lines once the movie’s over. Check and see whether some of them seem to go together, or even already rhyme. See if there’s one that can be the opening line of the song, setting the tone for what it’s about. (The song need not follow the story of the movie, of course - that’s a different kind of project!)

Give this idea a try sometime - you never know what you’ll come up with!

[An expanded version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook Cheap Advice On Songwriting.]

So your band is playing three sets, with two 10- or 15-minute breaks to chat up the fans and visit the loo. What is coming through your PA during the breaks? Before you start playing? After? Probably nothing. This gives the club or restaurant owner (or party host) a chance to turn on their jukebox, or AM radio, or whatever they’ve got hooked to their in-house speakers, and play whatever tripe they want to. Their choice of interim music becomes part of your show.

So take control! Hook up a CD player to the PA and play what you want people to hear when you’re not onstage - stuff that goes with what your band plays - stuff that makes you sound good. (For example, don’t include any original versions of songs you are planning to mangle in your next set!)

There’s no need to drag along a regular CD player like you would use with your home stereo. Any portable unit (even the tiny ones) will be fine, as long as it has a headphone jack! Warning: you may have to devise a Rube Goldberg style set of adapters to get from 1/8″ stereo to TRS (or TS) mono, like I did. (Don’t forget to combine the stereo channels into mono at some point.) And use a fresh set of batteries every time!

[An expanded version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook, Cheap Advice On Live Sound.]

If you have a set of electronic drums, you know how many sounds there are available for each kind of drum. My Yamaha DTX system has dozens of options each for the snare, the cymbals, the high-hat (open hit, closed hit, and pedal closure), and so on. The thing is, there is no limit on which sound can be mapped to which pad, meaning that you don’t have to assign snare sounds to the snare pad, tom sounds to the tom pads, etc. Anything can be anything!

One song I wrote preceded each verse with a snappy “ba-da-BAP” fill, with the “BAP” on the 4-beat just before the verse started. The “ba-da” was to be sixteenth notes on the kick. Um, sorry, I just can’t reliably hit the kick that fast in time. Now what? Once I realized I wasn’t using the floor tom pad anywhere in the song, I remapped it to the same sound and settings as the kick pad. Then I simply played the tricky fill with sticks on the floor tom and snare pads. But it sounds like I’m really fast on the kick!

[A longer version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook, Cheap Advice On Home Recording.]

Many songs start off with some sort of “intro” segment. Others jump straight into the first verse. But there are always a few that start with a prolog, an introductory segment that is often slower or with a different musical texture from the rest of the song. An example from the Ancient Days would be “Do You Want To Know A Secret” by the Beatles, with its “You’ll never know how much I really love you” opening. More recently, the neo-pop girl group The Pipettes used a prolog in their song “It Hurts To See You Dance So Well.” Maybe you can think of additional examples.

So, have you ever written a song with a prolog? Maybe you ought to give it a try! One possibility is to graft a prolog onto the front of a song you’ve already written. In fact, it is usually easier to write a prolog after you have the rest of the song in hand anyway, since then you know what you are “setting up.”

One of the best things about having a prolog in a song is that you get to have two nifty beginnings instead of just one! The second beginning, where you start the actual song, can be especially dramatic if the prolog ends with a pregnant pause….then bang! in comes the verse.

[A longer version of this tip appears in my eBook, Cheap Advice On Songwriting.]

I have found that if I can come up with a good title, I can usually come up with a good song to go with it. I think it’s because having a specific title establishes the general subject of the song, freeing me of the “option glut” problem that arises when the new lyrics can be about anything at all. If I’m lucky enough to think of a title like “He Doesn’t Know Her (Like I Do),” as I once did, the song practically writes itself!

There are many sources of possible titles besides staring into space and dreaming them up. One little-known but productive approach is to simply steal the title of some book and use that! You can test this out by strolling through the “Fiction and Literature” section next time you are in Barnes & Noble and scanning the titles of the books. I’d be surprised if you didn’t find at least a few really good prospects!

Of course, you can find endless lists of titles online too, at Amazon or FictionDB or various other places. Here are a few titles I found online under “Romance”:

* A Little Bit Wicked
* Midnight Eyes
* The Trouble With Love
* Love Under Cover

See what I mean? Every one of those titles puts promising melodies into my mind. You too, I’ll bet!

[An expanded version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook Cheap Advice On Songwriting.]

At a live show, there are three things that instantly brand a band as a group of newbies: (1) frequent feedback, (2) feeble vocal levels, and (3) talking to the sound man through the PA. All of these problems will be noticed by the audience, but to me problem (3) is perhaps the most egregious. Having a band member say “I need more of me in the monitors, Dude” at full voice through the main speakers is like, so totally unpro.

With a little planning, this scenario can be avoided. One way out is to develop a set of inconspicuous hand signals, like those used by sports teams. Ninety-five percent of the time, the message to be communicated has to do with the stage monitors. Someone, or something, is too quiet, or too loud. Signals are needed for which vocal or instrument to fix, and whether the level needs to go up or down.

A second possibility is to use one of the cables in the snake to run a signal from an otherwise unused microphone onstage to a small amplifier at the sound man’s position, creating a one-way intercom. (The band I work with uses one of these.) Finally, if the sound man happens to be monitoring the mix in headphones, a quiet whisper up close to a mic (perhaps during applause) will be heard clearly in the phones and not at all by the audience. (Weird, but it works!)

[An expanded version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook, Cheap Advice on Live Sound.]

We know that musical creativity has a lot to do with our mood, the mindspace we are in when we are writing or recording a song. We also know that the visual environment within which we work has a big influence on our mood. So, with these facts in mind, take a look at your own home studio. Does it look like a stimulating yet relaxing environment that will release the imagination? Or does it look like a corner of a cinder-block basement with a bare light bulb overhead?

Two ways to instantly create a mellower mood in your studio both have to do with lighting:

• Make it dimmer
• Use a colored light bulb

Harsh, overly-bright light is a real mood killer. Other than maybe when reading lyrics, I find I don’t need all that much light to work. Are you the same? Try turning off as many lights as possible, and use lower-wattage bulbs in the ones you leave on. Emphasize indirect lighting. No bare bulbs, please!

In my home studio, I always have a red (or blue) floodlight aimed at the ceiling in a corner, in addition to regular (if dim) white bulbs near the recorder, keyboard, etc. The floodlight suffuses the room with a colored glow that I find conducive to creativity. Maybe the same will work for you!

[An expanded version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook, Cheap Advice On Home Recording.]

Normally, each of my songs is strictly a “standalone” unit, music and lyrics-wise. Each one is in a little world all its own. If I make a CD of my recent favorites, the songs on the resulting “album” have nothing in common other than having been recorded in my studio. These days, the emphasis is increasingly on individual songs rather than whole albums, so this approach makes sense.

As a songwriter, though, I find it significantly more stimulating and enjoyable to write and record a set of songs pursuing a common theme or story, in the tradition of “Tommy” by The Who, “The Wall” by Pink Floyd, or more recently Green Day’s “American Idiot.” It might seem that this would “hem you in” and restrict your songwriting options, but I have found that I can be more creative and write better songs when I have a specific story to tell.

Your set of songs could number four or twenty, whatever works. I wrote a five-song set about an alien abduction. I have also written or co-written longer sets of songs based on a Bowery Boys movie and the life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Maybe there is something like these ideas that would resonate with you and inspire you to write and record your very own concept album!

[An expanded version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook, Cheap Advice On Songwriting.]