The next Songwriters Circle month long challenge is due to start on Monday June 4th 2012, if you are interested in joining a small group, working on a series of daily challenges. It’s a course for beginners or experienced songwriters alike, something for everyone that you can work at in your own time. Best results come from putting in at least half an hour each day for the full 30 days.
Spring is a great time of year for new ventures. Maybe getting some more songs written was on your New Year list and just hasn’t happened?
Well, springtime is a time for fresh starts and new beginnings so why not let us help you to get that first new song of 2012 written?
Songwriters Circle is now booking for our April month long Songwriting Challenge course. Every day for the whole of the month we will send you a link to a lesson and a songwriting prompt to help you make this April your most prolific ever. The aim of the challenge is that by the end of the 30 days you will have one song you are really happy with and a whole toolkit to help you next time your songwriting needs a boost. Click here now to buy the June 30 Day Song Challenge 2012 for only £17
Let us help you take those first vital steps to getting your songs written.
The course is ideal for newcomers or old hands as you can work at your own pace and level. It doesn’t matter if you don’t write your own music or play an instrument you can still take part. We work on both lyric writing and ideas for music for your songs. If you aren’t able to write your own music there are thousands of traditional tunes that you can borrow and tweak to make them your own.
You will learn techniques to use when the words just won’t come, ways to kickstart your writing. We know that many people think songs just ‘come’ to them without doing any work but that is a very rare thing. Even when it does happen the song can usually be improved by giving it a little polish.
What about those of you who just feel really stuck? We have ideas and techniques to help you too. Here is just one example:when people who do any kind of writing get stale and stuck there is a really useful concept called ‘dare to be bad’. Come and join us and find out what it means and how it can help your songwriting.
We believe that showing up for 30 minutes every day for a month to concentrate on your songwriting sends powerful messages to your brain and to your inner ‘muse’. It shows that you are serious and that this is something you value. This is also. in part, why we charge money for the course. From our experience you are far more likely to value and complete something if you have paid for it.
One of the best things about the course is sharing ideas and responses with other songwriters. All the lessons have a private shared space for you to respond, comment and to add your works in progress. You will learn how to use free online services to share your work privately and easily with no set up costs.
Andy is there in the community on a regular basis, explaining things, making suggestions and giving feedback on your work, if you want it. Because we limit the number of people on the course there is no need to feel shy or uncomfortable in a big group.
Each week you get a PDF with the lesson, and everyone’s comments, that you can keep and refer to whenever you need to. This resource means that if you want to reuse any of the techniques we cover you will have it all at your fingertips. It is not quite the same as going through the challenge with a group though and people who have done the challenge more than once have found they got something different out of it each time. As you grow and change as a writer it means that you can access the material at a higher level so even experienced songwriters have found it useful.
Click here now to buy the June 30 Day Song Challenge 2012 for only £17
Let us help you take those first vital steps to getting your songs written.
A retrospective post throwing out some of the best resources and links which have been posted on the Songwriters Circle page recently, and topics which have provoked interesting discussion.
Music Business
The Recording Industry is not The Music Industry. Apparently.
MV: Thank you, I’ll read the article later on today.. I’m always interested about any information or advice or opinion about songwriting… I love this Songwriters Circle yo guys created ! Thanks !!!
News
Even people who write songs for others to sing can sometimes become really famous – The Scot who wrote Tina Turner’s comeback hit, What’s Love Got To Do With It, is to be honoured at the Grammys when What’s Love Got to Do With It? Is inducted into the Hall of Fame. – Of course having someone like the Beatles backing your songs might have helped……
THE Scot who wrote Tina Turner’s comeback hit, What’s Love Got To Do With It, is to be honoured at the Grammys – when the song is inducted into the awards’ hall of fame.
Songwriting
“I liked words that weren’t necessarily obvious when you heard them. There are so many records on the radio where you can hear it the first time and you can guess the next rhyme,” Best says. “Often, like with Bryan Adams or something, you knew that if he was walking down the street, he would look at his feet, and it was just like, ‘Ah, geez.’” – article gives a great insight into how he wrote 4 of his quirky songs
By his own admission, David Best isn’t all that great of a singer. As the voice of the Brighton,…
Project
Craig Finn set out to write a song everyday for 6 weeks for his new solo album. He says” I did for the most part. Probably 5-6 a week for six weeks. Some of these songs were really underdeveloped and sometimes not so great but the idea was to put something down on paper and then come back to them and try to improve them.” Could you?
Craig Finn tells us about his time away from The Hold Steady, and the creation of his debut solo album.
AM: I think this kind of discipline would improve my discipline but not my art
CS: Yes I could but I’ve never sat down to deliberately write a song. My music is my life diary and when a song comes it is just there. Think looking at the industry there is to much forced song writing, dull, flavourless and no real meaning. It’s a $ production. Hope you found the right songs for your album. after all, they are yours xo
In this post I want to make a couple of important points about the evolution of a song, using the example of “Never Was To Be” by Daryl P Hall and Andy Roberts
The 30 day song challenge is all about putting the work in, getting ideas flowing, developing technique and prompting the generation of enough good song ideas from which to pick one or two to keep. But now I want to talk about what can happen to a song after the initial period when it may or may not have been considered “finished”.
The song developed from an online collaboration within the Songwriters Circle, which is not an unusual occurrence. Lyricists post their latest writings and musicians will offer to supply the music. Or maybe somebody will strum and hum a tune challenging anybody to come up with a set of lyrics to fit – perhaps less often.
Often when faced with somebody else’s verse in black on white I read it and fail to make sense of it as a structure. When I write my own lyrics, I always have a rudimentary tune in mind, to provide the scaffolding. Then I develop a better tune to fit the verses, maybe add a refrain and change the lyrics to fit the new tune. So my answer to the riddle ‘which comes first, the lyrics or the music’ is kind of both.
Anyway, this time the writing jumped out at me from the screen. I could immediately click with Daryl’s lyrics when posted in the group, with no title. Unlike many which are contributed, I could immediately ‘hear’ the rhythm of a song in this one.
March 2011 Never Was To Be – Podcast version
This video was recorded shortly after setting the lyrics to music.
The words needed to be adjusted a little to fit the tune and to scan consistently. I made a few small changes, and brought the chorus in after verse 2.
Its also a great topic for a song, one which has the potential to touch people’s hearts. And a story which demands attention
The tune is primitive, not terribly original, but pretty and fits the lyrics.
There’s another version on soundcloud from the earliest days which is similar to the video 1. Slightly creaky vocals on this song demo.
January 2012 - Never Was To Be – Live
Ten months later.
I needed to memorise the lyrics well enough for a public performance. This is an important step in itself. Memorising a new song these days involves playing it over and over, maybe 2 or 3 times a day for several days in a row. During this time, some of the words may be clipped or changed slightly.
On replaying Video One and the Soundcloud just now, I was a little surprised to realise just how much the tune has evolved. this is one of the main points of this blog post: Once the lyrics are polished, a tune is finalised and a demo recorded, that isn’t the end of the development of new song. It can carry on changing, improving, maturing, informed by the passing of time and the exposure to new audiences.
Daryl’s lyrics allowed me to get something over to the audience, and feel an immediate response, something which only happens with a few rare songs in just the right circumstances. Other songs may fall down at this point and be consigned to the back catalogue of songs once completed and learned that get forgotten again because they don’t bridge that gap for one reason or another.
So the other point is that in the end, it’s only after having performed a song to a live audience that I can truly confirm that the song works.
Day Six of the Songwriters Circle 30 day Challenge, now open for February Registrations, was all about using a walking pace as a device for maintaining a steady rhythm while composing a new tune to the beat of the footsteps. It’s a technique I evolved years ago, which resulted in Mondura Dam. I mentioned that I was intending to try out the same principle applied to swimming, with no idea whether it would work or not. Well today was my day to visit the swimming pool and I gave it a good bash.
Normally I swim up and down, counting lengths. It’s hard enough not to lose count after a while, and most of the time I’m not thinking of anything else much except being there in water, in the moment, drilling back and fore and occasionally diverting to avoid other swimmers. Swimming has an invigorating effect for hours afterwards, but at the time it’s pure physical exercise with the mind relatively unstimulated, yet not bored either. More of a grounded, meditative state of sort of not thinking.
So today I had to stop the counting entirely, and see if I could think in words and phrases.
It took a little while to tune in to the rhythm of my stroke, it’s obviously slower than walking, but also more complicated with regular breathing in short bursts followed by arm and leg movements that are not quite together, in my case. But once I could hear a tune it stuck with me for the whole hour or so. Unlike when walking, being unable to sing or speak out loud makes it harder to grasp hold of words, and in my mind that also means ideas, because for me, ideas are mostly bound up with language. That doesn’t mean I need to talk out loud when I read or write of course but I usually do hum or sing to myself when playing around with a new tune or pattern for words to fit into, and it certainly makes it easier to commit to memory, which is a big concern.
After half an hour I had two couplets and a possible refrain, that’s all. And even those I was struggling to hang on to. But the endorphins from exercise kicked in and I was feeling happy about it all. Underwater songwriting works! The rhythm stayed with me, and I think it will provide me with an original tune framework that’s going to be interesting to play. The sparse lines I had fought to think up helped me to fix the tune for long enough, so many have been lost otherwise. I didn’t have the foresight to take my notebook or anything with me, so had to wait until I got home before I could jot anything down, and now I’ve made a brief audi memo to self, just in case I forget the tune.
I don’t know if I’ll progress the lyric idea, but I shall definitely develop the music. What I’ll need to do next though, is to go out to a cafe or somewhere by myself one day where’s there’s no guitar and no internet and see if I can write down the bulk of a whole song to fit the tune, then later work it out on the guitar as a complete whole, reworking the lyrics as necessary.
Click here now to buy the 30 Day Song Challenge June 2012 for only £17
Let us help you take those first vital steps to getting your songs written.
Find out more: Songwriters Circle 30 Day Challenge
