Photo by Adrian F

This is a guest post from Rob Oxoby.

Like anything, songwriting improves as one practices one’s craft. Practicing songwriting can often be a daunting task not only because it seems odd as a concept (What is the difference between practicing songwriting and being creative by actually engaging in the process of songwriting?) but also because it requires admitting that your own songwriting needs improvement.

Many times, once we write something we have a hard time letting it go, admitting that it needs complete rewriting or that may just not be that good to want a live performance or recording. Many years ago, I read somewhere that Charlotte Cafferty (then guitarist of the Go-Go’s) wrote hundreds of songs that never saw life beyond her notebook. She viewed these is not good enough for live performance and use them as examples to learn and practice what worked and what didn’t work.

Personally, for every 10 songs or so I write, one makes it in front of a band; and for every five that I bring to the band, one makes it to a live performance or recording. While this may suggest that I’m extremely prolific or just plain suck at writing, I take a different view: In a sense, all those bad songs I write are practice for the good songs I write.

In any event, admitting that a song you have written requires rewriting/retooling/rejecting can be difficult. Sometimes when I’m just not in the mood to rework my own material, I turn to the work of others. My approach is this: How many times has a song you don’t particularly like gotten stuck in your head? It happens to me all the time. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and one of my kids’ favorite songs is stuck in my head. Sometimes I (inadvertently) hear a song by an artist I don’t like, only to have the song repeat over and over again in my head throughout the day. There must be something about these songs that makes them “stick.” So, I use these songs as material to practice my songwriting. Literally, I take these songs and start rewriting them, taking them apart to figure out what makes them tick and why they are so catchy. At the same time, I’m honing my own skills with melody, harmony and rhythm.

Deconstructing a Hit

When practicing songwriting, it’s useful to think about what it is that makes these songs (perhaps regrettably) so memorable. Is it the melody? Is it the artist’s phrasing? Is it the rhythm or chord progression? As such, rewriting an existing song can serve several important purposes:

1. By dissecting and rewriting an existing song you can learn a great deal about what makes its melody catchy or its rhythm addictive. I often take an existing song and try to change one aspect (e.g., melody rhythm progression) while keeping everything else constant. This allows me to see how, say, the artist phrasing works within a melodic or harmonic structure. Sometimes I keep the melody and try to change the chords or rhythm in order to understand how a seemingly catchy melody can be supercharged by the right rhythm and harmony to create a monster you can’t get out of your head. Through this, you learn what works and what doesn’t for more general songwriting.

2. This type of work also gives you an opportunity to step outside of your genre. Maybe you can take that goofy Carrie Underwood song about cheating and turn it into a mambo? Maybe you can really stretch out an do what these guys did, converting a Brittany Spears song into a fugue. By stepping out of your genre and writing something really different, you open yourself up to new ways of conceptualizing a song. You hear new rhythms and phrases that may spark ideas for your own original material.

3. Finally, by working from an existing song you are not only learning from an example of a “successful” song, but you’re also practicing your own craft. In re-writings say a Beyonce song or something from the soundtrack to bear in the Big Blue House, it’s impossible for you not to interject your own ideas and style. As such, your songwriting, arranging, and your toolkit of songwriting tricks and ideas can only get better.

Rob Oxoby

robbyoxoby@gmail.com

photo by brentbat

Here is another installment in the series on making money with production music libraries.  Today I will offer tips for composing tracks that sell and earn placements on television, films, video games, and other media.  This list of composition tips will help you meet the needs of television producers while setting yourself apart from the competition.

Check out the other articles in this series and subscribe to free email updates or the RSS feed to keep up!

1. Introduction / What are production music libraries?
2. Producing tracks that sell
3. Copyrighting your music
4. Registering with a Performing Rights Organization (PRO)
5. Submitting your songs to production music libraries
6. Leveraging your music placements to gain future music for picture work

10 Music for Picture Composition Tips:

1. Pinpoint a specific mood. Music placements are chosen because they perfectly match the mood of the visual scene they are supporting.  Try to envision how your composition might be used.  Would it be for a rainy day scene?  Winning the big game?  A horror sequence?  A bedroom scene?  Maybe a fast-paced car commercial.  Or a fun-loving kids television show theme song.  Often times, when you pinpoint a specific visual mood for your composition, it will end up being compatible with lots of other common moods that media producers look for.
2. Choose the right instruments. A big part of shaping your composition is in choosing just the right sounds for various parts.  From the start, you might have a general idea of which instruments you want to use.  Go ahead and lay those parts down quickly using MIDI.  Then spend extra time later choosing the perfect instrument.  For example, you know you want a piano.  Start out with a general grand piano patch.  Lay down the part.  Then go back and switch the patch from your typical grand piano sound to a darker, more muted aged piano – if that’s what will serve the composition well.  Here’s an article about effectively using MIDI in your composition flow.
3. Mix and match styles and genres. Music for picture is all about uniqueness and originality while capturing a specfic mood.  The majority of compositions used as background music don’t fall into one specific genre or style.  They mix and match elements from a variety of styles.  You might have an orchestral sequence layered on top of an electronica drum beat.  Or a country song with a soaring lead guitar solo placed within it.  My favorite thing about composing music for picture is the endless possibilities for creativity in song structure, style, and instrumentation.
4. Craft with dynamics. Many visual scenes will require a change in pace.  Incorporate a few different stages of dynamics within your composition to accommodate changes in a visual scene.  Start with a stripped down section, and move into a more full-bodied section.  Or incorporate an alternate arrangement every 8 bars.  Be sure to make these changes quickly – within 10-15 seconds of each other.  Music placements on television tend to last only 30 seconds or less, especially for commercial spots.  Dynamic compositions with a few changes will be more useful to television producers than ones that stick to the same repeated loop for two minutes.
5. Choose names that sell. The name of each composition should reinforce the intended mood.  Choose a name that paints a visual picture in the mind of the person choosing the music.  Most production music libraries are browsed by track name, so you want to create names that jump right out of the list.  Examples of good names are “Ticking Time-Bomb” or “Fields of Passion” or “Stormy Night”.  These are in line with the needs of potential music buyers.  Examples of names that get passed over are “Guitar Song 3″, “Track_8″, “Synth Mod XT”.  These names offer no information about how this track might be used.
6. Cover all the bases. When putting together your collection of music for picture tracks, be sure to cover a wide variety of styles, moods, genres, and potential uses.  You don’t want to limit yourself to only hard-rocking action sequence music.  Or only love-scene ballads.  Try and cover as many bases as possible.  A wider variety of tracks in production music libraries will earn far more placements and potential royalties because they fill a wide variety of needs.
7. Produce a quality mix. You might have composed the most amazing piece, with tons of potential uses on television or film, but if the audio quality and mix is no good, your track will sit on the shelf collecting dust.  Make sure you have a good handle on producing quality mixes out of your music production studio.  That means finding a pleasing balance of EQ, dynamics, panning, volume levels, and overall mastering level.  It’s quite possible to produce perfectly use-able tracks in a home recording set up.  If you’re not experienced with basic audio engineering, you might want to consider hiring someone to mix and master your tracks.
8. Not too short, but not too long. Your tracks should be at least 1 minute long.  2-3 minute tracks are good.  It’s probably not worth the time and effort to produce tracks longer than that, especially if you’re introducing new parts past 2 minutes in.  Most tracks won’t get played that far.  Barely any tracks will be previewed that far.  Plus, music supervisors may cut up your song and loop only the first 10 seconds.  You want to strike a balance between producing a useful length, and not wasting your own time producing tracks that are too long.
9. Watch and learn. While you’re chilling out and watching some television, pay close attention to the background music of the programs you’re watching.  This is where you want your music to be placed.  Take note of the instrumentation, arrangements, dynamics, moods, audio mix, etc.  Watch the commercials!  Don’t flip the channel or skip with your DVR.  Commercials feature background music that is quite interesting and often times very well crafted.  Mixing and matching styles is very common in advertising spots.  Grab musical ideas from the stuff you hear on TV.
10. Find a productive groove. Making money with production music libraries is all about quantity.  The more tracks you have out there, the more potential for placements in broadcast, the larger your royalty checks are.  Get into a working groove for your composition process.  You should be able to quickly knock out a quality music for picture track in just a day or two.  Do that for a month and you should have a solid 20-30 tracks ready to push on production music libraries.  The more your produce, the faster you become at making compositional decisions and mixing and mastering your audio.

Your Thoughts…

Share your production tips for composing music for picture.  What has worked for you?  What hasn’t?

Sometimes a great song can surround and swallow you up in all of its sounds and colors. Using creative instrumentation and serving your song with melodies that fit right into place with one another are a great way to achieve this effect on your listeners.

We often hear a complete melody or phrase without realizing the sound is composed with more than one instrument or voice. The instruments are similar in tone, and their parts blend nicely into one another.

The key is to piece together the different parts in a way that makes room for one another while keeping the flow of the musical phrase intact. That could mean using counter rhythms — one instrument plays while the other is on a rest. Or it could mean playing simultaneously and blending them together using harmonies and varying aggressiveness. Or using mixing techniques — EQ, volume and effects levels. Most likely, you would use a combination of all of these.

How do we accomplish this type of composition? It’s usually not as methodical as I just described above. More often you stumble upon the perfect fusing of parts through jamming with band-mates, layering parts one at a time while self-producing, or fiddling with knobs and faders in the studio.

The most important thing to keep in mind while you’re knee-deep in the writing process, is to let the song dictate what it wants. Keep your focus locked into the groove of this specific phrase and let that be the road map for where to place your notes. Always remember that adding notes to a melody can often be just as important as adding rests. Check out this article describing the importance of using space in songwriting.

This sound is very common in Hip Hop because it’s all about fusing various sampled sounds to form a unique sounding beat.  The samples are often very far apart in sound, tone, and color but when done right, they are crafted in such a way that new musical phrases are born.

Below are a couple of songs where this technique can be heard:

Parallel Universe – Red Hot Chili Peppers
These guys are the funk-rock masters. This song is all about Flea and Frusciante locking in their picking as they match eachother rhythm, but play different notes in harmony.

Ghostwriter – RJD2
You can hear what I’m talking about in just about any track from RJD2, but this one is among my favorites. It’s off the amazing Dead ringer album and it fuses some funky clean electric guitar sounds with a booming horn line creating an instrumental hook with a ton of impact.

Colorbars – Elliot Smith
This off of the amazing Figure 8 album (reviewed here on my other blog). The acoustic guitar outlines the impact notes played by the piano in a beautifully colorful way as it is done all over this album and the rest of Smith’s full-band work.