Category Archives: Songwriting

Songwriting SOS

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Recently I was getting ready for a trip to Japan and was looking for something to read on the plane. After failing to find anything interesting at the local bookstore, I decided to go through what I already had at home. I ended up grabbing this issue of Sound on Sound from 2011 and I am glad that I did.

In it there is a brilliant article about music theory as it relates to songwriting/production. Here are some of the highlights for me:

• Try using chords from the relative minor/major
• Try using chords from the parallel key (e.g. move from chords in C major to chords in C minor)
• Temporarily switch to harmonic minor
• Use modes as different starting points. E.g. A Dorian where the A Minor chord becomes the i chord and everything is built on the notes from A Dorian (#6)
• Inversions – try different chord voicings, try voice leading as you move from chord to chord
• Schoenberg’s “chart of the regions”/parallel major/minor keys and closely related keys

• Key change to a semitone above while on the V chord
• Adding a new bass note below a triad to create an extended chord, e.g. Ab/F to make F minor 7
• Change the harmonic function of a chord. E.g. Am could be the root of Am or chord ii in G or it could be chord iii in F (see chord wheel for options)
• Modulate up a Semitone
• Can go to any parallel key for any chord in the progression
• Shared notes – e.g. sustain a note, “A”, as you switch other notes from other chords (Ace, dfA, fAc, etc)
• Play the pentatonic scale of the IV chord against the I chord. E.g. E Major Pent against A Major or F Major Pent against a progression in C Dorian

Thanks to Kate Ockenden and Sound On Sound for the great article!

Where you least expect it…

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As mentioned in a previous post I feel that inspiration can happen anywhere and from just about anything, if we are open to it.

I had been wanting to write a new instrumental song for a while. I wanted it to be melodic, powerful and totally unique from what I had done before. I imagined it as being done and had the thought that before I knew it I’d have something cool. A little while later this magazine showed up:

At first I didn’t notice anything special or unusual about the magazine. It was nicely designed and well written but nothing stood out to me. Right before I was about to put it into recycling the orange tape on the back of the guitar headstock caught my eye:

I realized that it was probably the tuning of the guitar, a tuning that I had never used before. I grabbed my guitar, set it to the pitches indicated and within a couple hours had two new songs that were totally unique from anything I had done before. All from something that I was about to throw away.

I love it when stuff like this happens but looking back at it now makes me wonder just how often this type of thing could be happening. Where the seeds of what I want could be right in front of me and I just don’t see it.

Hans Zimmer

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Last year I took the Hans Zimmer Film Scoring course on Masterclass.com and really enjoyed it. While there wasn’t too much technical information in this class it had plenty in the way of mindset and approach that Hans used in various real world situations, which helped him to become one of the most prolific and successful film composers of our time.

I particularly enjoyed doing the assignments, creating compositions based on specific limitations/requirements. My Music Sketch #55 “Perception” was based on the following assignment:

“Think about one of your favorite directors. Find an interview in which he/she talks about the making of one of his/her lms. Use this as a jumping o point to create your own version of a score that’s informed by how the director talks about their intentions behind the film. How can you translate the director’s approach to telling the story into a score that helps serve that narrative?”

The director I chose was Terry Gilliam and the movie interview was about his film 12 Monkeys. The key point I got from the conversation (which inspired the song) was this:

“We seem to be inundated with information. It’s hard to know what the real stuff is, which is the stuff that counts, I think that the hardest thing in modern society is to know what to listen to and what not to.”

Start with the End

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“Start with the End in Mind” was a phrase that I heard from time to time over the years. I thought it sounded good but I had no idea just how useful it could be when applied. It wasn’t until I started working on the Music Sketches project at the end of 2016/beginning of 2017 that I found out first hand what it could mean.

Up until then, writing songs had been a difficult and arduous experience. I was lucky if I got one whole song together in a given year. Then I tried applying this idea of starting with the end in mind, as if the song was already done and that the process was easy and (dare I say) fun. I just focused on the idea and feeling of what it would be like if I had already finished the song. Before I knew it I would have a new idea which would lead to another new idea to another and so on. Within a few months I had over 50 song ideas recorded. These were full song ideas with chord progressions, melodies, grooves, hooks and sometimes lyrics and vocal parts all recorded and posted on YouTube.

It was a huge realization for me, that all those years I had been the starting with an end of difficulty, confusion and futility. Good to know.

Creativity

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I love making new songs. I love the feeling of getting a new idea and imagining where it can go. Often I’ll get next inspired through studying a scale or chord voicing. It can be one or two notes that triggers something in my mind that that will later blossom into a fully formed song. The biggest factor in this process is in me being open to “hearing” the idea in the first place. It’s almost like having a net out in the water to catch fish, but this net is in my mind, open to catch ideas.