The Songwriting Workshop - Raw Materials Part I
(Shawn Bradshaw | Posted 2005-02-07)
Writing your own music can be a very enjoyable and fulfilling process. It can also be a very lucrative endeavor if you hone your skills and get your great songs into the right hands. But here in the songwriting workshop we are going to concentrate on the craft of writing rather than the business end of things.
The raw materials that you need to write songs can literally mean the physical things you need; pencil, paper, your instrument etc. Raw materials can also mean some essential musical skills and knowledge; chords, scales, theory information, etc. Last will be the raw materials that you are going to use to construct your songs; melody ideas, lyric fragments, chord progressions, riffs, etc.
What stuff do I need?
Physically you don't need anything if you have a well-developed musical mind and a great memory. Mozart could compose an entire symphony in his head. Then he would just write down what was already composed on paper. For the rest of us, some physical tools will make the job of composing much easier. Not all of these are absolutely necessary, and how many and which ones that you have at your disposal will depend on their usefulness to you, and your budget.
The minimum would be an instrument, pencil and paper, and some sort of recording device. Your instrument is where you are going to test out your melodies and chords. Even if you have a great inner ear, sometimes actually hearing your melodies and chord progressions will help you develop them further. Sometimes just playing a set of chords and humming or singing overtop of them will inspire a song.
You can be a songwriter no matter what instrument you play. By far the most useful instrument for musical composition is the keyboard (piano, synthesizer). No matter what other instrument you play, make piano your 2nd instrument. The piano gives you the ability to test out melodies and chords simultaneously. Guitar is also a very common instrument used in the composition process, especially in rock, blues or country styles.
Once you make the decision to become a composer, great ideas are going to come to you at all times of the day or night. So you should try and have a small portable tape recorder with you at all times. Even without an instrument to play, you have your own built in instrument...your voice. You can hum melodies and riffs, and sing or speak lyric ideas into the recorder so that they will not get lost. Never think that you will remember that great idea later. Chances are you won't, and your hit song will be gone forever.
Sometimes those brainstorming ideas mumbled into a tape recorder will develop quickly into a complete song. But often they will become part of your library of bits and fragments that you will draw upon over your writing lifetime. These are essential raw materials for you to use in songwriting.
Other raw materials that you might want to have on hand would be reference materials. This includes a dictionary, a thesaurus, a rhyming dictionary, theory textbooks, etc. These will be essential in taking your rough brainstorming ideas and crafting and polishing them into your masterpiece.
One of the best songwriting tools available is what you are reading this article on right now, your computer. As with many other tasks, the computer helps you organize material in a way that would not be possible without it. You can type lyric ideas into individually named files and organize them into folders by topic. You can store audio files of riffs, chord progression, bass lines etc. in the same way. Later as you start to put all of the pieces together, your computer can help you make a complete demo of your song. In fact with a little bit of equipment and your home computer you could even record a professional quality final product.
Technology over the last few years has really put professional home recording into a very affordable price range. And with the Internet there is the ability to get your music heard and distributed in a way that was just not possible before. The big business music industry still has a strangle hold on what most people listen to. They control what is played on the radio and music television stations. If your desire is to make the big bucks, then there is where your destiny lies. But that truly is a very small fraction of the music that is available out there. There are a lot of artists that do very well in smaller niche markets.
In "Raw Materials Part 2" we are going to look at some essential music skill that will make your job as a composer much easier. I will not be going into the nitty gritty details of music theory, only giving you some easy practical tool to help you get started with your writing.
© 2005 Shawn Bradshaw
Cyberfret.com
