Music, Money And Fame

Me having fun on stage with Lazarus Mode - Photo by
Gary Beresford of Snapped Photography

There’s heaps of reasons to start playing music. Some people want to be rich, some people want to be famous. Some do it to get girls (or boys), some do it to relax, or get pumped up or to be happy or sad. Some just want to create something that’s awesome.

Needless to say, if you’re in the music industry for money, you’re going to be disappointed. There ain’t much money in music. Fame is few and far between too, with only an extremely small percentage of musicians making it into the mainstream,

This is where a lot of new original bands and musicians get caught out. They feel that music will be their gateway to being a rock star and that’s what’s on their minds. It’s this same frame of mind that prevents them from such dreams.

The Rock Star Paradigm

It’s kind of funny when you hear the biggest musicians in the world talk about how they got famous. It’s usually the same thing every time, “I just love playing music, I spend my time writing and having fun playing in bands. I never expected to be famous or make any money out of it, it just happens”.

A line similar that seems to appear in almost every musical biography I’ve ever read (and I read a lot). Whether it’s just the musician being modest or it’s a stone cold truth, it seems that it’s the key to being successful in your music career.

And it makes sense. If you think about it, the people who buy music and make a person famous, they’re not stupid. Potential fans can spot a phoney from a mile away. If you’re in it just for the money and the fame, people aren’t going to wanna know about you. 

People want someone who’s genuine. People want to imagine someone who’s spent their whole lives locked in their basement crafting the greatest musical piece of all time. They want someone who travels the world picking up experience and knowledge and heartbreak and crafting it into a magical piece of art for the world to see.

They don’t want to know about someone who’s paid thousands of dollars to a producer to turn them into a rockstar because they think it would be cool. Fans tend to want the music they listen to to be made by super humans who possess a skill that they don’t have.

The Competition

Another thing to consider is that there are literally millions of artists out there trying to do the exact same thing you are. Some of them aren’t going to be as good as you, but most of them are going to be a lot better than you.

This can be a pretty depressing thought. You need only to go to YouTube to find someone who can absolutely wipe the floor with you in whatever it is that you’re trying to do. There’s always going to be someone better than you… unless you are the best at that thing. If so, congrats.

Even if you are really, really good at what you do, you need money to get started. You need gear, you need to get recordings done, you need to pay for advertising, you need to get yourself out there. Then, maybe, someone will notice you. But that’s just the beginning.

Say you get to a point where you manage to score a record deal. Job done, right? Wrong! A record deal is pretty much the equivalent to a bank loan that you can use to record, press, distribute and advertise your music. 

In this day and age of streaming media, there’s no way you’re going to make that money back, so then you’ll owe the record company money for the rest of your musical career. So you’re better off self funding your music and being able to keep control of it.

So Why Bother?

This is the big question, isn’t it? If you can’t be famous or rich or make it big, then why even try making music? You’d be better off as an accountant or lawyer or even stacking shelves at the local supermarket.

That’s the whole point. Music is supposed to be fun. In fact, taking away the money and fame aspect really brings the original meaning and soul back into what we love doing. If you’ve got fame and fortune and girls on a boat on your mind, it’s likely the music will have less soul.

If you’re making the music you love, it will make you happy. If you sit and home and create a piece of art that improves your life just by playing or listening back to it, then you’re a successful musician. Even if you are playing covers and that brings you joy, that’s the best thing you can ask for.

The best part is that if you’ve created something that you truly love, chances are that other people will love it too. It’s a big win win. And if you’re having fun performing, people will want to see you have fun because that kind of joy is contagious. 

I remember back when I was in my first band, we would fret over which venues we played and how we performed and if people would buy our songs and our image. All of these things are important to a degree, but it all got in the way of our enjoyment and was detrimental.

One day we all finally decided that we would never make money or be famous and that we shouldn’t even try. From that day on, the music was a lot more fun. Practice, gigs and every other aspect of our music became a joy to do, rather than a job.

If you can’t see the point in making music without money or fame, maybe music isn’t for you.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments section below.

Making The Most Of Your Plugins

Early in my days of recording, I noticed the lead vocal was very dull in a mix I was trying to do. At this time I didn’t have many plugins, and mostly relied on the stock EQs, compressors, etc. that came with Pro Tools.

At this time I knew the main concepts of recording and mixing, however I didn’t have many tricks up my sleeve, but I was starting to rack them up one by one. So I wasn’t quite sure what to do about this dull vocal.

Making My Custom Exciter

Obviously my first thought was to use an EQ to add some high end. This fixed little bits of the vocal but I found that the highs would push through way too much at some points and still be very dull and muddy at other points.

In my quick search online, I found an article suggesting that I add an exciter to help brighten up a track. I looked up what an exciter was and another article suggested that it would compress the high end of the sound source and boost that up.

Because I didn’t have an exciter plugin at the time, I figured I’d make my own.

So I sent the vocal to an aux track. Then I added a high pass filter and pushed it way up to around 3-4kHz. I then put in a compressor, dialled in a fast attack, fast release, high ratio and set the threshold so that it was just tickling the quietest vocal parts, meaning that the loudest parts were getting well and truly squished.

When I slowly brought the plugin in alongside the original vocal channel I noticed a massive difference in the tone. Suddenly the vocal had a beautiful sense of life and air that it hadn’t had before.

Now, there are enhancers that have this kind of effect as standard, but I didn’t know much about them. There are also multiband compressors/limiters that do this too, but many of them are costly and can also be quite CPU hungry.

My version is extremely versatile in comparison to many of these plugins too, as you have all the setting of both the EQ and compressor at your fingertips. And you can change which compressors/EQs you want to use. Or you can throw a distortion or chorus in the middle to change the sound a bit.

After I got the sound on the vocal I wanted, I made another Aux track for the drum overheads and copied the plugins across. Suddenly the cymbals and snare came to life and, with a few tweaks here and there, I got a bright and beautiful drum sound.

I then did the same thing with the guitars, keys, and many other instruments with varying levels of success in the sonic results. This was very exciting for me because I felt that I’d created a whole new set of plugins out of the free stock plugins. And they were MY sound.

I still often use this technique on many of my tracks.

Bring Back That Stock Reverb

This technique of altering the sounds you have at hand is extremely helpful when it comes to delays and reverbs. Finding the right delay and reverb sounds can be quite a time consuming and costly task, but it doesn’t have to be.

Many times I have trawled through each of my reverb plugins, checking each and every convolution reverb, trying to find the one that sounds the same as I have in my head. Every time I would find one that was “close enough” but not quite hit the spot.

If you do the same, try instead picking the most stock standard reverb that you have (this technique only works if you use an auxiliary reverb channel). Pick a basic setting, something like hall or plate, whatever gets the basic vibe of what you’re after.

Now put an EQ plugin before the reverb. Put in a low pass and high pass filter in and shift them around until you get a sound that works for you. Why not try adding a bell frequency in the midrange and boost and cut it, sweeping it around until you find a sound that sounds right for your track.

It’s important to note that because you’ve placed your EQ before the reverb, you’re affecting the sound going into the reverb. Now you can put another EQ after the reverb and play with that for even more versatility. Suddenly your standard, basic reverb has a whole new dimension of sounds.

Vintage, Warm Tape Delay

There are a million Delay plugins out there and many that boast a warm tape sound. These plugins usually have a nice vintage interface look and a price tag to accompany. Sometimes they come with some fairly cool modulation effects as well.

Before you go and start shelling out all your hard earned cash on all these delays to get your songs sounding tip top, let’s have a look at what these plugins are actually doing. Most of the time there are some fairly basic processes going on that give the plugins these desirable sounds.

If you want to make the sound a bit warmer, try putting a low pass filter on the delay aux. If you want the sound a bit more “lo-fi”, put a low and high pass and bring them right in so you get a telephone sound and then compress it. Try adding a distortion sound and see what that does.

For those modulation tones, try your stock chorus, flanger or phaser and see what that does to your delay tone. It could be just what the doctor ordered. Suddenly you’ve got more sounds than you’d have if you paid for that expensive tape delay emulator. Plus, you’ll probably get the sound you wanted quicker than if you searched through heaps of different delays.

All Your Modulation Plugins

These same ideas can be used on chorus’, flangers, phasers and heaps of other types of plugins. You can easily use stock plugins to change the flavour of pretty much any modulation plugin that you want to use.

With sounds that you’re running parallel, you have to make sure that you have delay compensation so that you don’t get any dodgy phasing issues, so make sure that you have that feature enabled.

Adding a distortion before or after a chorus sound and then blending it lightly with the original track can add a type of tone that adds a whole new dimension to your sound. And the best part is that a lot of these kind of sounds have never been heard before. Some will be completely original.

So next time you feel like you need a whole bunch of new plugins to get some great sounds happening, just remember that you may not be using the plugins that you have to their full potential just yet. 

I think some of the best sounds have come from the creative use of the plugins or equipment that is at hand. Don’t forget that the basic plugins that come with your DAW are more often than not of a very high quality.

Good luck and happy mixing!

If you have an comments or questions, feel free to let me know in the comments section below.

All Apologies Guitar Exercise

Hey guys! Today I wanted to share with you a bit of an exercise based on the main riff from Nirvana’s “All Apologies”.

It’s a great riff, however the original is in drop Db, which makes it a bit difficult if you’re playing the rest of your set in standard tuning.

When figuring out a way to play this is in standard tuning, I came up with this version of the riff. It’s actually a really cool picking exercise for the right hand that has an emphasis on alternative picking and some string skipping.

Here’s the tab for it:

As with all new riffs, try to play this only as fast as is comfortable. Once you’ve got the riff perfected at a slow speed, bring it up in tempo bit by bit. If you have access to a metronome, I recommend you use it to make sure your timing is spot on.

This is a great riff for your right hand coordination and accuracy. It isn’t exactly the same notes as the original song, but the main vibe is there and it sounds pretty good. If you’re a singer/guitarist, try putting vocals on top of it as well for some extra challenge.

I hope you get something out of this exercise and it leads you to improving your craft that little bit more.

Until next time, have a good one!

Mixing "Weather The Storm" pt. 8 - Mastering

Hey everyone! This is the eighth and final video/blog in my mixing series on “Weather The Storm”. If you missed any of the previous videos, check out these links:

Part 1 - Setting up the Session

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-setting-up-session.html

Part 2 - Balance

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-2-balance_12.html

Part 3 - Mix Bus Processing

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-3-mix-bus.html

Part 4 - EQ

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt4-eq.html

Part 5 - Compression

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt4-eq_30.html

Part 6 - Delay And Reverb

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2016/01/mixing-weather-storm-pt-6-reverb-and.html

Part 7 - Tweaking

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2016/01/mixing-weather-storm-pt-7-tweaking.html

In this last video, we’ll be taking the mix from the mixing stage to the mastering stage and getting it ready to release.

How Is It Being Mastered?

There are a few ways to go about the mastering process of your production. You can choose to send it to someone else for mastering, you can run the track off and deal with the stereo file in your own mastering session, or you can just master it in the mixing session.

Each of these has it’s own advantages and disadvantages.

If you choose to send your mix to someone else to master, they might be able to add a fresh perspective to the final product and might be extremely skilled at mastering/have some top notch gear. The downside is that this might cost you some cash… or heaps of cash depending on who you get to do it.

If you run off the track to master in a new session you might be freeing up some much needed computer power to run the processing. Many mastering plugins can take up a lot of processing power. The downside to this is that you might have some tweaks in the mix that you want to fix and may forever spend your time changing between sessions and running off mixes.

Finally, you can just do the mastering in the mix session. This, until recently, was looked down upon because computers lacked processing power. Also, many people made the mastering process seem like an unachievable conquest that was not within reach of mere mortals. But mastering is becoming more and more accepted by home engineers.

However you choose to master your product, it is important to go through this process to save you many headaches down the track. 

Mastering In The Mix

Because we chose to do quite a bit of mix bus processing earlier in the mix, most of our mastering processing is already done, only needing a little tweak here and there. The final process to add is the mastering limiter.

I used the Maxim limiter that comes with Pro Tools. This is a very basic limiter that sounds pretty good. With only a couple of tweaks to the ceiling and release time, I could bring down the threshold until I reached a level that was comparable to our reference track. Easy!

Not So Fast!

Once the mastering limiter is put in, some significant changes happen to the mix. And these need to be rectified. They are mostly very subtle changes, but if left untouched, might leave your mix sounding very different to how you envisioned it when you finished your mix.

The first thing I noticed when I brought the limiter down was that I lost a lot of my snare. This is very common and many mastering engineers will ask for a copy of your snare track when mastering to put more in if it drops out too much.

If you remember in the mixes, the snare poked through the mix a lot… probably too much. As soon as we put the limiter on, the transient at the start of the snare is brought down and it quickly gets pushed back into the mix.

So you just have to make the necessary adjustments to get the snare brought back up in the mix. I ended up pushing it up by about 3.5dB, which is quite a big move, but that’s what it needed. The kick also needed a bit of a boost.

Another thing that needed a change was the mix bus EQ. I ended up pushing up the low end quite a bit and taking a bit more out of the low mids to keep the low end nice and punchy. 

There were other small changes, but those listed above are the main ones. If I didn’t run this mix with the limiter and sent the stereo file to someone to get mastered, many of those issues would go overlooked. Sure, mastering engineers have ways and means to make things punch better, but it’s better to knock it out at the easy point in the mix I think.

Final Words

So, I went through the videos and checked how long it took to get to where we are now. Including quite a bit of talking time, it’s taken a total of 1 hour and 40 minutes to take this mix from the very beginning of starting the session, to a finished master. I reckon that’s pretty good. 

Obviously there’s a lot more that can be done with this mix and there’s a bit I’d probably do a little bit differently if I was starting again. Having said that, I’m really happy with how the mix turned out in such a short amount of time. There wouldn’t be too much I’d change, and that’s because we focussed on the most important aspects of the mix first.

I sound a bit like a broken record, but I really think it’s important to put your mixing moves into perspective. You have to decide if what you’re doing is going to be noticeable in terms of the mix, and if so, is it going to matter.

I have spent ages on a solo’d Hi Hat track, tweaking it until it sounded perfect, only to pull it out completely because I was getting enough Hi Hat through the overhead mics. That was wasted time that could have been avoided if I’d taken care of the balance first and only addressed the parts of the mix the stood out to me. 

That’s about it for this mix, I look forward to sharing another project with you guys in the future.

If you have any questions or comments on anything you’ve seen in the process of this mix, please feel free to put them in the comments section below.

Mixing "Weather The Storm" pt. 7 - Tweaking

G’day ladies and gents. We’re coming close to the end here with the seventh video in my series on mixing the track, “Weather The Storm”. Check out the links below to catch up on all the rest of the videos that brought us to this point.

Part 1 - Setting up the Session
http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-setting-up-session.html

Part 2 - Balance
http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-2-balance_12.html

Part 3 - Mix Bus Processing
http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-3-mix-bus.html

Part 4 - EQ
http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt4-eq.html

Part 5 - Compression
http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt4-eq_30.html

Part 6 - Delay And Reverb
http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2016/01/mixing-weather-storm-pt-6-reverb-and.html

In this video I’m going to be doing the final tweaking of the track. So I’ll be pulling some automation moves, muting parts that I don’t think need to be there and just doing the final touches so that I can master this track and release it.


Attack The Most Important Things First

In this video, I’ve really only done the important things, but that’s a good lesson. When you listen through the track for the final mix, try as hard as you can to not be looking for things to change. Instead, try to enjoy the track and if something stands out to you, then fix it.

This is a great way to ensure that you’re spending your time fixing the things that are the most important to making a great mix. Chances are that if you hear something wrong while enjoying the track, your audience will hear the same thing. The tiny little things are less important, and though it’s the little things that make a great mix, you shouldn’t be working on them in place of the big, noticeable stuff.

As with all the other videos in this session, I was thinking about time. I wanted to get the best mix that I could in the shortest time possible. Partly this was to show you guys how quickly a good mix can come together, and partly because it wouldn’t make for good videos having me sit there for hours on end.


Back to Balance

You’ll notice that the majority of the changes that I made in this video were volume related. This goes back to what I said in the second video that balance is the most important thing in a mix. You can have the most immaculately EQ’d compressed and affected tracks, but if the balance is out, it’ll all sound wrong.

However, in this video I was using automation to fix balances out. In the second video, in which I used the volume faders to get the overall balance of the track how I wanted, I had to use automation here to tweak the different sections of the song.

These volume moves usually weren’t too drastic, mostly bumping up or down about 3dB to either tame sections that were a bit too loud, or bring out the parts that were getting lost in the mix.

Usually these were vocal related changes because they tended to pop out too much or hard to understand. I also brought down the intro to the track so that the beat kicked in a bit harder and also pushed up the guitars in a section to give the track a little more movement.

The other part of balance is the panning. Again, these were fairly simple changes, but ones that needed to be made. In one section the vocals were arranged on tracks that I’d panned, but it didn’t make sense (main parts were panned centre and right, and the other vocal panned left), so I just swapped the parts around on the tracks so that they made a bit more sense.


Unwanted Noises

Another thing I did was a couple of mutes. These were fairly simple as well. There was a sound just before one of the vocal lines that came up in two of the channels. I simply muted those sounds as well as one vocal part which I didn’t really like the sound of.

There is quite a bit of background noise in the vocal tracks throughout the track. Sometimes I would go through and manually cut out all the sounds that aren’t vocal parts. They didn’t really bother me on this track and I couldn’t hear them when they weren’t solo’d.

Again, because we are trying to focus only on the most important parts of the mix, those bits were negligible. You can spend ages going through and cutting out every little bit of track that shouldn’t be there. but you really have to ask if it’s going to make a difference in the end, or if that difference would be worth it.

Some people use gates on vocal channels for this reason, but I feel like you have to be pretty careful when setting up a gate, as they can sometimes cut out the sounds you want to keep and can also introduce some strange stuttering. I would almost always prefer to do that kind of thing manually.


Icing On The Cake

The only other changes were purely just the little things that I thought could benefit the track. I put a stereo widener on the Rhythm guitar track to make the guitar, and song, sound a bit more huge.

I also automated some delays so that they came up at the ends of some of the pivotal lines. Very simple stuff but can be quite effective.

I also gave one of the channels an artistic panning so that a repeated lines changes sides each time. This was something that I felt the part needed to give it a little movement and make it stand out in the mix a bit. Automating panning is a great way to bring a section to life and draw the listener's attention to it.


That’s it for this part. I hope you guys learned something that you can use in your own mixes. Until next time, have a good one!

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know in the section below and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

Mixing "Weather The Storm" pt. 6 - Reverb and Delay

G’day guys! This is my sixth video in my series on mixing “Weather The Storm”. If you missed the other videos, you can check them out in the links below.

Part 1 - Setting up the Session

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-setting-up-session.html

Part 2 - Balance

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-2-balance_12.html

Part 3 - Mix Bus Processing

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt-3-mix-bus.html

Part 4 - EQ

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt4-eq.html

Part 5 - Compression

http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/mixing-weather-storm-pt4-eq_30.html

In this video I’m going to be adding a bit of reverb and delay to give the track a bit more sparkle. These are just subtle effects that will be added to give the track a sense of space. Many mixing engineers like to go very heavy handed on reverb, but I feel that less is more in this sense.

Creating a space

I like to use reverb in two different ways. The first way is the most important, and that is to create a virtual space for your listener to be in. The second way is more of an effect for individual instruments, but I want to focus on the space creation for this blog.

When I’m mixing a project, I like create a virtual space that the listener is in. In a perfect world, you should be able to close your eyes and imagine that the music is happening around you. You should be able to picture where the sounds are coming from and visualise where you are.

This kind of effect is hard to accomplish if you have a different reverb effect on each channel. If you want to create the virtual space, the sounds within that space should be bouncing off the same walls. This is why I like to use one universal reverb sound for all of the channels.

On this particular track, this was a bit harder to do because the guitar and keys sounds already had reverb on the tracks, and quite a lot of it. But I could do this with the vocals and the drum sounds, and I think it worked quite well.

I like to pick a fairly medium reverb with not too much length. I’d rather a sound that’s a bit more realistic, as opposed the those big 80s gated sounds. I try to pick a reverb sound that makes me feel like I’m in the room with the instruments. For this one I used a medium size plate on Pro Tool’s D-verb plugin.

Put Yourself In That Space

So many times I’ve heard songs where the lead vocal is drowned in reverb and it usually makes the space sound a little weird. Imagine for a second that you’re sitting in a room with a band playing just to you.

I’d think that the drummer would be at the back of the room. The bass player would be just in front of him, maybe slightly to the side. There’d be the guitars and/or keys players scattered left and right, half way up the room. Finally, the singer would be right up in my face, singing at me, trying to make me listen to what they were saying.

Now imagine what that would sound like in terms of reverb levels. The drums, being far back, would have the most reverb. Guitars, bass and keys would have a medium amount of reverb, and so would the backing vocals that they’re singing. The lead singer would have the least, as he/she would be right up close to me.

If you replicate this scenario in your mixing, that’s the kind of space you will create. The more reverb you add to a sound, the further away that sound feels. So, if you’re adding heaps and heaps of reverb to the lead singer, they’re going to sound like they’re sitting at the back of the room, behind the other instruments.

This may be the sound that you’re looking for, but 9 times out of 10, I like to have the singer up front, in my face, trying to make me listen to what they’re saying.

Setting the Delay

I used a very simple sense of delay in this track. Just a ¼ note delay over the main vocals set to a very low level. If I was to be automating the delays, I’d probably bump them up at points and bring them down at other points, but i wanted a sound that wasn’t too distracting and just gave a nice sheen over the sound.

I put the delay up a little bit more on one of the vocal channels because I felt it needed something a little extra.

EQing your Effects Channels

This is very important, and many people don’t bother to do this. In fact I only just started doing this over the last couple of years, but I feel like it’s one of the best things you can do to your effects channels to make them sound good.

It just involves putting an EQ before your effect. Many people like to put the EQ after their delay or reverb, but I feel that the things you’re EQing out can still find their ways into the other frequencies that you’re keeping and drag them down.

You can go fairly in depth with creating an EQ curve for your channel, but I usually just put in a high and low cut filter. Put these in and drag them up and down until you feel like you only have the necessary information left being effected. 

Reverbs are notorious for adding a tonne of low end, muddy sound. Taking these frequencies out of the input of your reverb ensures that you have a nice clean reverb that doesn’t sound like you’ve just dragged your mix through the mud. As I mentioned in other videos, low end builds up very quickly in a mix, making your track sound dull and muddy. Low end in reverb is one of the worst culprits of that.

I also took out some of the sizzling high frequencies as they were a bit too much as well. You can play around with EQ setting for ages, finding a sound that works for you on any given song. Definitely worth the time.

With the delay, I went a bit more drastic with the EQ until I had an almost Telephone type sound going on. This is because I only really wanted a hint of the delay shining through the mix. So, again, taking out those unnecessary highs and lows means that I get the effect I want without filling the mix with unnecessary frequencies.

I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial, I hope there were some things you learned about reverb and delay and I hope you use these techniques in your own mixes.

Have a good one guys, you’ll hear from me soon.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to put them down in the comments section below.

Recording my EP: Progress Report 1

So, this is a bit of an update on the recording of my EP. I did a blog a couple of weeks ago that outlined my plans for what I was going to do and how I was going to go about it. Check it out here: http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/ep-recording-plan.html

I wanted to try a style of writing that meant that I was wasting as little time as possible and trying to get my EP done ASAP. I am notorious for spending way way too long on projects, so I really wanted to tackle this in a way that I was going to get things done.

Each song in an hour

The first part of my plan was to only spend an hour writing each song. I set out a competition a couple of months ago that was to write 7 songs in 7 days and only spent one hour on the writing process. You can see that blog here: http://lockyberesford.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/songwriting-when-theres-no-inspiration.html

This was a great challenge and it really got me into a writing frame of mind. The idea behind it is that you finish the song that you started as soon as possible and then move on. If the song isn’t good, then you throw it away and you’ve only spent a little bit of your life on it… plus you’ve learnt something. And if it’s good, you’ve only spent an hour of your life on it and you’ve got a song.

So, I expanded this idea into the writing of my EP. The plan is to write 20 songs at the start, spending only an hour on each one, and then once finished all of them, listen back through the songs and pick the 10 best songs. Then spend another hour or so fixing up these tracks a bit with a fresh ear. Once all that’s done, pick the 5 best songs that work together well to use on the EP. Do some pre-production for those and then hit the recording studio.

Now, a little bit down the track, I’ve finished part 1! I’ve written my 20 songs. This was really interesting because I saw my writing style change over the time I was writing these tracks. Some tracks came together very quickly towards the end. 

Practicing writing these songs quickly meant that I started getting a lot better at coming up with parts that were needed to finish the song. Also, the parts that I put in were getting better and better.

I feel like I am coming up with the same amount of original song ideas as I was before, but now I’m quickly using these ideas and turning them into songs a lot quicker and a lot more efficiently. In this way, some of those good ideas aren’t forgotten or used in songs that aren’t as good.

The important part about finishing a track in an hour is that you get rid of all the unnecessary things that distract you from writing a song. It’s also a good idea to put yourself into the right frame of mind. When I sit down to write a song, I like to turn off all distractions. Put the phone on aeorplane mode, have all your writing and recording equipment ready and close your door to what’s going on outside. This is pure songwriting time.

Picking the Best 10 Songs

This was easy on some counts and hard on others. I ended up liking more songs than I thought I would. I had to think about what I wanted the EP to sound like and get rid of some tracks that I thought were good but wouldn’t fit in with the sound I was going for.

One thing that I didn’t think would end up happening is that I put a couple of the tracks aside in another pile that I thought would suit a different instrumentation.

My idea for this EP is to have mainly acoustic guitar and vocals dominating the sound and use piano, percussion, electric guitar and some strings to fill out the songs that need it, depending on what I felt was necessary. I’m avoiding a drum kit driven, rock n roll production… for this EP at least.

Some of the tracks that I had there would really suit a drum kit and some heavy guitars, so instead of throwing them out, I decided I’d put them aside and either record them on their own or make an EP of similar sounding tracks later down the line.

Admittedly, there were some songs that I had written that were just complete rubbish and will never see the light of day again, but at least I know that now. If anything, during this process, I’ve learnt a lot about songwriting and how to get a decent track done quickly.

Stage 2 - After The First Cull

Now I’ve gotta go through the tracks that I’ve picked and spend a little more time with them. I have all the basics down but I want to change up some of the lyrics for parts that I don’t particularly like and make sure my chord progressions are sounding alright.

I also want to get an idea of where the tempo should be for each track. Sometimes this means being a little faster than what I did the original demo at, and sometimes it’s a little slower. I have a tendency to play things a little too slow when recording, especially if it’s already quite a slow song.

So I’ll pick a new tempo and record the track again with the minor adjustments made. I am also looking at the arrangement of the track to make sure that it can’t be any better. The good thing about not having listened to these tracks since I wrote them, is that I’m coming in with fresh ears and am not feeling so attached to them.

I can pick out, on the first listen, what I think needs to go, and what I think sounds really good. Doing these changes in only an hour again means that I, once again, am wasting little time on the things that don’t matter and focusing only on what’s really important. 

There’s a chance that any of these songs could be thrown out during the next cull so it’s good not to waste time on the small stuff. 

I didn’t think I’d be doing this but I’ve also started adding little ideas of extra instruments to these tracks during this second demoing phase. I am consciously trying not to look for things that should be added, but if something comes to mind that I think “wow, that would be really cool” I add it in to see how it sounds. 

All in all, things are going really well and I’m excited to be finally recording my first EP as a solo artist. Hopefully there’ll be many more to come. 

HOT TIP: There’s a FaceBook group called “Song A Week 2016” in which each member writes a song each week to put to the community and they discuss songwriting techniques and it’s a really good, music loving community. I’ll be taking part in that.

I invite you all to try out this method of writing songs and if you have any questions, comments or music you want me to check out, let me know in the comments below.