The Craft and Business Of Songwriting

A great combination of songwriting craft tips intermingled with practical music industry lessons make this a very handy book for the songwriter's bookshelf.

Craft and Business of Songwriting 3rd Edition (Craft & Business of Songwriting)

It contains lots of examples and useful career advice drawn from successful artists in a variety of music genres, from country to hip-hop. An ideal book for beginners who want an overview of the business of being a songwriter.

Writing awesome songs is only part of the work of becoming a successful songwriter in this day and age. It is vital to understand music business concepts, and to manage your career well. This book at least gives you a fighting chance. In addition to dozens of exercises and examples, anecdotes from successful songwriters including Vince Gill, Sheryl Crow, and Paul McCartney are provided. An ideal resource for the insider secrets songwriters need to make them more competitive what is fast becoming a very crowded marketplace.

The author, John Braheny co-founded and directed the Los Angeles Screenwriters Showcase, is also a journalist, teacher, talk show host, and consultant.

Sonar X1 Producer

I've just upgraded from Sonar 8.5 to X1 and i have to say I'm pretty impressed. Some major changes in the interface with the ability to save "screen sets" of screen set ups making it much easier to move through different recording phases.

With this update they've also introduced some nice tabbing features making it far easier to navigate features and just about everything can be dragged and dropped including docking / floating components.

One of the other nice new features is a smart tool that changes functionality depending on it's context. That alone saves the hassle of regularly changing the tool you are using, allowing you to focus far more on the creative aspects of what you do and not what you are going to do it with.

One new feature that's pretty yummy is the ProChannel channel strip that's built into every channel offering quite extensive control.

It seems to be much more stable. I've tried it on Win 7 64-bit and on XP 32. I still find less issues on XP 32.

Some nice advances in the packaged plug ins too wind Dimension Pro getting some needed attention and Beatscape being a very nice addition.

That's all for nnow, more after I've explored it a bit more. So far it's a big thumbs up with some very welcome improvements.

Successful Lyric Writing by Sheila Davis

I thought I'd add some posts looking at the books in my own collection, offering my opinion on each book.

Successful Lyric Writing by Sheila Davis

This is an excellent book for those fairly new to serious lyrics writing. Covering the broad strokes of lyrics writing including theory, principles and common song forms Sheila's book provides a good foundation for those wanting to move from writing from the hip to an increased awareness of what the hell is going on when they write, why one song works better than another and so on.

As a workbook it also contains lots of examples and exercises to work through plus a useful set of definitions and explanations.

There are no rules in songwriting, guidelines yes, but songwriters frequently ignore those guidelines. Where books like this fit into the equation is in helping aspiring songwriters to understand what they trade off when making decisions about song lyrics. Making informed choices is a powerful thing.

Overall I found it an interesting book, a useful reference and definitely a handy book to have in your collection.

Scansion for lyrics writing

I'm thinking on writing an article about using scansion for lyrics writing.

It's a term many lyricists aren't familiar with, yet it can be a very useful tool if you are writing lyrics before the melody, and perhaps are unlikely to have much contact with the music writer. So it's ideally suited to the isolated lyricist.

Basically scansion helps you tidy up the meter of your lyrics so that the meter of the lyrics will be more consistent, with stressed syllables landing in the right place so that the melody works consistently through the song.

It's a tool that originated in poetry writing but when applied to lyrics it's a very useful technique in that realm too.. There's not a lot of info out there on exactly how to apply it to lyrics, so who knows... time to bite the bullet and dive in?

Studio rewiring finished!

Not the top of my list in things to do but at least it enables me to move on to finish some recordings that have been draft recordings for too long!

There's a few new pieces of gear added in, including an upgrade to Sonar X1 Producer to play with. I'm really looking forward to it.

As it stands i have 6 draft recordings to finish, including "Hit and Run", and about 10 completely new songs to begin recording. Add to that lots of lyrics to finish writing.

I do love recording a song for the first time. That transition from idea, through basic arrangement to a fully realized idea. So hopefully soon I'll have some freee tracks to share and some tasters for my upcoming album.

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Hit and Run

Just posted a new lyric for review on Songstuff.com:

Hit and Run

AmpliTube Fender Review

Hi

New in-depth review of AmpliTube Fender.

AmpliTube is a software amplifier simulator, the Fender edition providing amp simulations of fender gear including lots of classic amplifiers, effects racks and stomp boxes. Fender tested all the simulations with the tests they use on the real gear and by side by side comparison...

Read more about AmpliTube Fender.

Cheers

John