February 7, 2011 – As you may have noticed, my posting hasn’t been as regular as usual. In fact, I haven’t even had a chance to check out the changes that were completed last week on the collaboration project!

There are some pretty big changes happening in my life right now, and some of it is music related. Even though I’m easing back into a music schedule, it’s hard to find time to actually write. Finding an appropriate time to work on writing has always been a problem for me. How do you find time to write music? Do you schedule regular Saturday afternoons? Do you work on it evenings after your day job? In between baby feedings?

December 29th, 2010 – Hey everyone, hope your holidays are going well. With all the hubbub these past few weeks, I haven’t had much time to write music. The other day however, I got to record a bit with some friends which was a refreshing change from my normal work week. Yesterday, I sat down to polish a couple of my own songs, and it got me thinking about the phrase “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus!” (I often get cerebral with songwriting when I’m not in a particularly inspired mood).

I’m sure that if you’ve ever read tips on songwriting, they often suggest getting to the meat-and-potatoes of the song as soon as possible. Usually this means getting to the song’s title lyrics, or it could mean the chorus. Whether it’s a memorable lyric or musical phrase or sound, the idea is to grab the listener as soon as you can or risk losing their interest.

Of course, this advice really only applies for those who are trying to write hit songs. If you want to write songs for other people, the easier it is to sell it, the better. If you are writing songs to express yourself (the best situation to be in IMO), then ignore all of this and write from the heart.

Gary Ewer has posted a blog article (linked below) that examines the top 10 songs in the Billboard Hot 100. He breaks down when both the title of the song first appears in the lyrics, and when the chorus first appears. His examination seems to show that having your song title and/or chorus occur early does help a song’s initial popularity.

Is “Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus” Fact or Myth?

December 9, 2010 – Ok, we are a go! Participation for this project is closed, and I’ve sent out invitations to the Dropbox account to everyone who showed interest. If you missed out on this project, we’ll get you on the next one. Hopefully this will all work out awesome, and will be the start of a cool collaborative community.

First off, I want to really thank you guys for your enthusiasm. I started this site a couple years ago, wanting to get a musical dialogue going. I wasn’t really sure how I was going to do that but I hope this project will be where it all ramps up.

Alright, enough with the sappy stuff, and down to the meat and potatoes of how I think this will go down. I’ve uploaded the starting loop into the Dropbox folder. It is a glockenspiel melody I recorded last week. In the course of this project, you are allowed to do whatever you want to it. I’ve CC-licensed it under Non-Commercial so if you want to use it for something else as long as you don’t sell it, I’m cool with that. I’d appreciate the attribution though.

Since I’ve never done anything like this before, the way this works may change as we see how everyone reacts. To make this truly collaborative, everyone will have a specific task in relation to this song. Whether that is laying down a drum or bass line, or mixing the track, tasks will be delegated by me. If you want to fill a specific roll, please let me know in the comments and I’ll try my best to accomodate. Please keep in mind that I still may not be able to give you the task you want. The list of tasks will change as the song begins to take shape. I will attempt to manage the project and keep everything in check, but I want you guys to feel free to cut loose.

Off the table currently are drums and mixing. The former claimed by Travis and the latter by Jon. Of course, the starting loop is also taken…after all I already recorded and uploaded it. For those who will be writing and recording melodies or filling in, you are able to do whatever you want as long as you respect the work of those who came before. In other words, feel free to create, but don’t bury others’ work.

As suggested by Jon over at AudioGeekZine, we will be working in Reaper. Reaper is a cross platform DAW that is available with full functionality even in the trial version. You can find it at www.Reaper.fm. If you need to pull the project into your own DAW to leverage your tools, go ahead, but be sure to export what you’ve done and re-import it into Reaper for the next person who works on the song.

If you are not part of the mixing team, please do not mix the track for the next person and especially do not “print” the mix so that it cannot be undone. As well, please keep the effects to a minimum unless it is a part of the sound you’re adding. Not everyone will have the same effects which will undo your work. If you must use an effect for a certain sound, please keep the original version without effects (muted of course) and “print” a version with the effect recorded on it.

As everything progresses, I will post updates on how the song sounds at every stage, probably using Soundcloud. This allows everyone to see what everyone else is doing, and also serves as a chronological timeline, which I think will be pretty cool in the end.

I’m very interested to see how this all turns out. When I produce music, I usually do everything from the songwriting all the way to the final mix. It never gets done the same way, or in the same order. With all the different ways we all create music, it will be interesting to see how our talents and weaknesses will fit together.

Ok, so the loop is out there. The first person to work on the track will be Travis Whitmore. I realize that the loops is simple and short, but I’m hoping his drums will bring a feel that the rest of the song can be built on. I expect the drum work will be short, and will only be played over the initial loop. After that, the song can be built, and we’ll bring Travis back near the end of the writing to flesh out the drums with all the other instruments.

So far the following people other than myself are in this project:

Darren Levy
Travis Whitmore
Jon Tidey
Jamal from True Brew Records
Dan Foley
Mr. Fresh
Bryan from the ImaginationConsultant
TC Helentjaris
Moveair
Andreas
CD
Paul Schaeffer
Doug

For all those listed, please confirm your interest in the comments, and if I missed any of you in the Dropbox invitation, please let me know. Also, let me know what your preference is to work on.

I would like this track to be accessible to people who aren’t music nerds like us, so while it doesn’t have to be commercial, it would cool if it wasn’t too out there in the end. I’m also going to provide a theme that we should think about as we get to our tasks. The theme will be music you would enjoy listening to while driving. Could be a plane, train, or automobile; whatever works for you.

Ok, the track is now in Travis’ hands. Who wants to work on melodies next? Let me know in the comments. Goooooooo team!

Collaboration Project Loop for KeyOfGrey.com by keyofgrey

Update Jan. 17, 2011 – Here is what the project sounds like as of 1/10/2011. Sounds great so far guys! Jan 10 Rough Mix of Collab Project by keyofgrey

November 18th, 2010 – So several of you have expressed interest in the collaboration project, and those that I have contact info for through your comments have been added to the shared DropBox folder. If anyone else wants to be part of the project, please comment on this post and enter your contact info in the form (email addresses won’t be shown publicly). Also, please tell everyone about this project as the more people we have, the better it’ll be.

After reading the comments on the last post about the project, I realized that I may not have been clear about what I had in mind. Originally I had thought that we would all submit samples into a shared directory and then everyone would create their own song from the same sample pool. At the end, we would share what we had all created.

I discussed this a bit with Travis from SilverLakeStudio, and Jon over at AudioGeekZine (who just had a beautiful baby girl so head over to his site and send him well-wishes) and they thought that instead we might create one song together with tasks separated to each interested person. I think that this is what many of you had thought I meant, and this is certainly more in keeping with the collaborative spirit. However, I’m not sure how this will work logistically as certain tasks are linear and cannot be done in tandem with others. For example, someone responsible for mixing cannot begin work before the song has been produced.

We would also need to make sure that everyone had their tasks done on time, and that no one bailed on the project. Because of this difficulty, I hadn’t considered this type of project. I’m thinking that perhaps we can start with the “common sample pool” project, see how that goes, and then try out the real collaborative project. What do you guys think? I could really use the feedback to decide where to go with this! Oh, and before I forget, I really appreciate the interest everyone has shown. Let’s get this thing going!

October 28, 2010 – Sorry for the post hiatus, I was quite busy getting engaged (yay!). Today I want to talk a bit about songwriting with other songwriters.

A couple nights ago, I had the opportunity to attend a small songwriting session with two likeminded individuals. As a guy who mostly sits in his studio, writing solo, it was inspiring. Joe Gilder has talked about just getting the song done, but I’m a super procrastinator and it’s pretty hard to finish them without having a hard deadline or being accountable to anyone else.

I’m sure I’m not alone in having dozens if not hundreds of song ideas I’m not sure what to do with. Just playing a few chords out of those songs that night opened up possibilities with the other songwriters that I would not have come up with myself.

Sometimes it’s hard to let your ideas go into the cloud. Songwriting can be very personal and sharing your ideas with others is a tough process. Nights like I just experienced remind me that much more good can come with others than from hording ideas that never come to fruition.

Technology has made it easier than ever to do everything by yourself, but sometimes focusing too far inward stifles creativity. Even if you always write and produce for yourself, I recommend collaborating with others and seeing what comes of it. I’m pretty sure that if you’re all motivated to create great music, the end result will be stronger than what you could come up with yourself. A great side effect is that having the ideas of multiple people might mean that the song resonates with a broader audience. Your collaborators have different sensibilities and skills coming in, which will round out your own.

In that vein, I’m thinking of creating a little collaborative project. Everyone who wanted to be part of it would supply some sounds, and we would all create a short song using only the sounds in that pool. At the end, we’ll all post up our songs (maybe on a Soundcloud page) and we can hear what others came up with using the same building blocks. I think it’ll be a lot of fun. Would you guys be interested in something like that?

Photo courtesy of Oliver Chesler

September 26th, 2010 – You may have noticed that I haven’t written in a week. I probably should have posted up a “on vacation” notice…oh well. I just got back from San Francisco/LA and I picked up a Native Instruments Maschine so check back for a review on that soon.

I also chose this week to install the Seagate Momentus XT I posted about a while back. I decided to do a clean install of my operating system which means that I’m finally on Snow Leopard. This also means that I have no excuse to move up to Logic 9, which I’m installing as I write this.

Since this is going to take a while, I thought I’d write about producer-songwriters. When you hear that term, you might think of such artists as Timberland, The Neptunes, David Foster, Butch Walker, and any other number of very successful producers who also co-write many of the songs that they produce. In the old days, a producer was the person who put together the songwriters and performers (not always the same people), and took care of the money side. Today, while this is still part of a producer’s job, many producers are expected to add to the creative process.

This secret sauce could mean as little as suggesting that a chorus be repeated once more, or as much as complete songwriting, producing, and mixing. I would imagine that many of us that are toiling away at home, are doing everything ourselves, so we would fall under the category of producer-songwriters.

One thing that sets us DIYers apart from contracted professionals (for example, in house producers), is that we can say no; you’re your own boss and are the only one that answers to the consequences. It may mean turning away good money, but you have the power to do what you want.

Let me explain why this is important. When I started working in music, I was an in house songwriter-producer. Since I had bosses, I had to write for, and record whatever and for whoever I was scheduled for. While some clients were awesome to work with, some were not. Over time, the “were nots” dragged me down and I started to dislike work. About that time, the owners had a falling out and the studio closed down anyways.

Don’t get me wrong. The time spent there wasn’t bad; in fact, I learned tonnes, and my skill level progressed much faster than if I had been left on my own. However, now that I’ve experienced that environment, I’m not eager to go back. I, like many of you, have a regular job that pays my bills so I have the luxury of choosing who I want to work with. This also means that I can work on projects that won’t necessarily make any money, but are creatively rewarding.

I know that hitting it big is an alluring goal, however I would argue that creating music that feeds your soul is more important. These may not necessarily be mutually exclusive, and everyone perceives this relationship differently. All that I’m saying is to sit back and consider where you are now, and where you want to be.

September 15th, 2010 – I am not a professional skateboader, snowboarder, or mountain biker, however living in Vancouver, I come to know and hang out with a few athletes. I have never been in contention for pro-level status but even I can tell when an athlete has good flow.

Have you ever watched videos of athletes that seem really smooth and link everything they do into one continuous stream of talent? It’s pretty obvious when watching a snowboarder ride powder, but even basketball players exhibit this. At the highest levels of achievement, that flow translates into a certain confidence and smoothness that helps individuals excel.

In music, I try to capture the same feeling. While there are usually distinct parts (verse, chorus, bridge, etc) in a song, I try to get a good flow going. Everything must make sense, and there shouldn’t be any extraneous “fat” that hinders the song.

It may seem a bit weird to think about music having the same type of flow as top athletes possess but I’m convinced that they’re one and the same. Music with good flow is direct and to the point; there isn’t anything that distracts from the message. It progresses confidently and smoothly. This doesn’t mean that every song has to be minimalist, but if an element doesn’t add anything, it doesn’t need to be there.

The concept of flow can be applied when writing a song, producing it, or recording and mixing it. When recording and producing the song, consider if an instrument really needs to be there, or if a melody is appropriate for that section. When mixing a song, think about whether that horn needs a reverb as an insert and as a send. Conversely, maybe something needs to be added to make the song flow properly. Perhaps a glitchy looped sample, building to a synched rhythmic gate (as I heard in a Wolfgang Gartner song today) is just the buildup that’s needed.

I realize that flow is a pretty esoteric idea to apply musically. I believe, however, that it’s the key to music resonating with as many people as possible. Flow is something that is felt without necessarily being obvious, and it helps make music feel right.

September 1st, 2010 – You may not be able to live out your childhood dream of being aboard a spaceship (at least not for a few more years), but you can at least get your music played on a spaceship. It’s at least something right? NASA is holding a contest (only available to US citizens I’m afraid), to get your song played during the final missions of the Space Shuttle. Listeners vote up your original music and the top two songs will get played on the mission. It’s pretty steep odds of getting into the coveted 2 spots, maybe comparable to getting into the space program itself. Still, it would be pretty awesome to have that on your resume.

NASA’s Space Rock

Photo courtesy of Kimble Young

August 8th, 2010 – If you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time (which I assume you have been since you’re reading this), you’ll no doubt be familiar with the phenomenon of rickrolling. Internet meme aside, I just read a Sound on Sound article on the creation of that song, from the songwriting, to the production, and finally to the engineering stage. It’s a good read. Also, although I love the song, I hate being rickrolled.

Classic Tracks: Rick Astley ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’

August 6th, 2010 – I love TED presentations; I could waste all day watching them (and have). The talk below by Matt Ridley is about “idea sex”. While the sexification of the subject matter is a little iffy, I do agree with collaboration being a key factor in our personal evolution.

For musician/songwriter/producers, collaboration is an important part of expanding your own abilities. This may seem like an oxymoron, but working with someone else who has different skills and comes from a different background, will stretch you out of your comfort zone and help you develop a new repertoire.

Not only will you be exposed to a wide variety of sensibilities while being around different people, just being around people who share the same goal as you will inspire you. Not to mention the productivity that comes with bouncing ideas off of one another. The rapid development of ideas is a huge advantage of working with partners.

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and find people to make music with!

When Ideas Have Sex via Lifehacker