Editor’s note: We’re always happy to promote awesome events like this one here on Serve The Song.  We’re not limited to just New York City.  If you know of a quality up-coming event happening in your city, drop us a line with all the details!

DubSpot & Ableton present the

Live 8 U.S. Sessions Tour: New York City

on Saturday, June 27 – Sunday, June 28, 2009

Ableton Live 8, Akai APC40 : 8 Workshops, 8 U.S. Cities…
with very special guests Scientist and Richie Hawtin


From www.dubspot.com/pages/abletontour.jsp:

Dubspot’s Live 8 US Sessions tour is coming home. After a successful maiden voyage to San Fransisco last month, we are preparing our home-field advantage stop for the weekend of June 27th and 28th. Join us for a unique series of interactive workshops, Q&As and live performances from a diverse pool of talented artists, instructors and established musicians. Experience five ‘sessions’ daily, each specially designed to developed and enhance a diverse range of your production and performance abilities. Our tour will showcase just how far-reaching the capabilities of Live 8 are, and why it is the most advanced piece of music software on the planet.  Come learn from Ableton Live experts & veteran producers and who will be coming together to help take your skills to another level…

Here’s a video from last month’s workshop in San Franscisco:

Here’s a Word doc containing all the information you need about the Workshops.

• Recording Your Indie Album: a Pre-Production Checklist
• The DIY Guide To Singing In The Studio
• What to Do Before You Record Your Song Demo
• The Differences Between Songwriting in New York City & Nashville

The Workshop

Cliff Goldmacher Music Production Presents

“Stripping Down Your Demos & Getting Them Cut”

Wednesday, June 10th
6:00pm – 8:00pm
@ BMI in New York

320 West 57th Street  map

This workshop is for songwriters who would like to streamline the demo process, keep their demo budgets in check and maximize the return on their investment. The workshop also provides multiple examples of stripped-down demos that have gone on to become major label cuts.

The workshop covers:

• Pre-production
• Studio/engineer selection
• Hiring/working with producers, session musicians & vocalists
• Explanation of the guitar/piano & vocal recording
• Demo examples/tricks of the trade
• Tips for song pitching/submission

Cliff Goldmacher Bio

Cliff Goldmacher is an engineer, producer and owner of recording studios in both Nashville and New York City. A multi-instrumentalist, Cliff has recorded, played on and produced thousands of demos for major and independent publishers, brand new songwriters and Grammy winners. The demos Cliff has recorded have ended up as major label cuts, in feature films and on television.

Cliff has worked as a staff songwriter for Nashville’s Wrensong Music Publishing. His songwriting collaborators include multi-platinum selling artists Chris Barron (Lead singer of the Spin Doctors) and Lisa Loeb. Cliff’s songs have been cut by major label artists in genres ranging from country to jazz and classical crossover.

As a teacher/instructor, Cliff has served as a panelist on engineering at the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchandisers) convention and teaches workshops for BMI, ASCAP, The Songwriter’s Guild of America and the Nashville Songwriter’s Association International. Cliff is also an editorial contributor to EQ Magazine and ProSound News along with numberous online websites and blogs.

“The demos Cliff produces don’t just sound great, they also do an excellent job of selling the song whether they’re simple guitar/vocals or full band productions.”
-Leslie Roberts (A&R Manager, Sony/BMG Records)

“Cliff Goldmacher is one of the most professional and talented musicians/songwriters/demo makers I know. His ability to both engineer and play on tracks as well as organize, edit and even harmonize is impressive. He can take a song from a basic one instrument, one voice work tape and turn it into a mini-record faster and better than anyone I’ve seen. I highly recommend him!”
-Dean Miller (former Capitol Records recording artist/Head of Creative at Bluewater Music Publishing)

RSVP

Call BMI at 212.586.2000 or email mortiz@bmi.com.

photos by mudpig and joshunter

This is our first guest article here at Serve The Song.  It was written by Cliff Goldmacher, a songwriter/producer with recording studios in both New York City and Nashville. Along with teaching workshops for songwriters around the country, he’s a regular contributor to EQ Magazine.

As a recently transplanted songwriter from Nashville to New York City, I’ve had the chance to observe, up close, the approaches to songwriting and the songwriting communities in both cities.  While there are of course many similarities, there are also quite a few differences. By the way, I feel I should mention that the following observations are really more my impressions than hard facts.

Differences Within the Similarities

In this article, I’ll start with a similarity between New York and Nashville as it’s readily apparent and then explain how, within that similarity, one city differs from the other.  One of the first similarities is that both cities have huge songwriting populations.  The depth and breadth of talent in both places encompass many more genres that the obvious country music for Nashville and pop and rock music for New York.  There are great pop writers in the suburbs of Nashville and extremely accomplished country songwriters living in Greenwich Village.

In response to the need for country demos for New Yorkers, I’ve actually started a service where using streaming audio and both my New York and Nashville studios, I’m making country demos for New York songwriters using my Nashville studio, session musicians and singers while we listen in real time and full-fidelity from New York.  For more info click here.

Finding the Songwriters

One difference between the two songwriting communities is how easy they are to locate.  Because Nashville’s artistic community is predominantly made up of singers, songwriters and musicians, it’s much easier to find the music/songwriting community there.  New York, on the other hand, has a wonderful songwriter population, but it’s mixed in with the countless other artists and creative types that live there and is thus less obvious.  In other words, it takes a little more effort to find the songwriters in New York, but believe me, they’re there.

Before moving from Nashville to New York, I’d taken several writing trips a year up to New York and, by a process or trial and error, I found a core group of NYC songwriters that became my go to people on every trip.  This way, when I eventually moved to New York, I felt like I was instantly part of the community even though I had to discover it little by little.   I highly recommend this approach for anyone considering a move to New York as it eases the transition and makes the entire process much less overwhelming.

Cowriting

Although both New York and Nashville have large numbers of songwriters, cowriting is much more a part of the day to day routine in Nashville.  It’s not unusual for a Nashville writer to have five cowriting appointments in a week where they meet with a different cowriter every day in a publishing company office on Music Row.  This happens for several reasons.  First of all, as a hired staff songwriter for a Nashville publishing company, you are given a yearly quota of songs that you need to fulfill. The more songs you write,  the more quickly you’ll fulfill your quota.  Publishers make a real effort to connect songwriters they think will work well together and go as far as to set up cowriting appointments for their writers.  As a result, it’s fairly common in Nashville to be set up on a “blind date” cowrite. Secondly, even though you’re only credited with half a song for a cowrite, it’s easier to motivate yourself to write if you’ve got someone to collaborate with.  The act of scheduling appointments and being expected to show up significantly eases the stress of having to create on a schedule.  This approach seems odd to a lot of New York writers who are either artists themselves and used to writing with their own bands or are songwriters used to working with artists whose schedules are much less predictable.

Lyrics

Staying with the generality that you’re writing country in Nashville and pop or rock in New York,  I’ve noticed  that the rules of lyric-writing between these genres and cities differ significantly.  In Nashville, the story is king.  This means that the lyric has to make perfect sense, the images are concrete and the story has a logical flow from beginning to end.  There’s not a lot of room for poetic, impressionistic lyrics that don’t have the arc of a story.  New York, on the other hand, while it certainly has its share of great songwriter/storytellers,  has a broader tolerance in its pop and rock genres for words that “feel” and “sound” good together.  Please don’t misunderstand.  It takes just as much skill to write a great pop lyric where the words convey the emotion of the song and carry the nuances of the melody as it does to write a great story in a country song, but it’s a different skill set.  I’ve found that switching from one approach to the other can be creatively liberating and quite a bit of fun.  Also, it’s interesting to see how one city’s lyrical approach can bleed into the other’s.  In this way,  you can end up with country lyrics where the words in the story sound good next to each other or pop lyrics with the arc of a story to them.

Labels

Speaking of artists, another similarity in the two cities is that they are both home to major record labels and their signed artists.  This alone attracts a huge number of songwriters to both cities.  The difference here is that country music artists are still largely dependent upon outside songs for their projects.  In New York, bands tend to write their own material and it is less common for these artists to go looking for outside songs.  Occasionally songwriters will be paired with these bands/artists in New York allowing the writers to end up with cuts on these acts.  Of course, all of these distinctions are lessening as more country artists write  and cowrite their albums as well.

You Can’t Lose

At the end of the day, both communities are great places to work and create.  Ironically, after living in Nashville, working as a staff songwriter and writing for the country market for twelve years, my first cut was with a New York writer and was recorded by an Irish tenor on Universal Records named Ronan Tynan.  In my opinion, it was the blend of our New York and Nashville songwriting sensibilities that came together to create that song.  What I mean by this is that somewhere between the soaring melody more suited to pop and the lyric which had more of a country attention to detail, we came up with a classical crossover song.  So, if you’re a Nashville writer thinking about working in New York (or vice versa) I’d highly recommend it.  Sometimes it’s the differences that create the best art.

Cliff Goldmacher
Cliff Goldmacher Music Production
www.cliffgoldmacher.com
cliff@cliffgoldmacher.com
Phone: 615.320.7233
Biography