New album!

You probably have noticed that there haven’t been any new posts here in quite a while. That’s life for you. I was away from recording for quite a while pursuing other interests, but now I’m back.

Yes, I’m back and there’s a new Postal Blue record in the works. This may look like the same post as the last, but a lot has happened between then and now, and this time the album is actually going to be finished and released and it’s going to be great. So as I was saying two years ago, it’s a full-length, and it’s on Plastilina Records. Release date is not set yet, but it’s still several months away since we’re still working on pre-production.

I’ll be writing extensively about the whole process here, and I’ll make sure to post some sound samples and exclusive previews of some of the song demos for the album. Stay tuned.

New album coming up and a fantastic CD Sale!

There’s a new Postal Blue CD coming out soon, and this time it’s a full-length. It’s going to be released by Cloudberry Records’ sister label Plastilina around February 2009, in beautifully designed digipack, artwork by talented and trustworthy Krister Bladh who did the artwork for the recent Postal Blue single (on its way to selling out already).

I couldn’t be happier right now as the new CD has been receiving rave reviews, and I’m finally gaining some momentum regarding my songwriting and actual releases. I’m still a bit stressed over the whole process, as it’s been a while since I’ve written a batch of songs with the pressure of a release in sight.

Another piece of news is that pretty soon all of the Postal Blue catalogue will be available for purchase on the main digital download sellers.

Oh, and, last but not least, Humblebee Recordings is holding a huge sale, and you can get our Road to Happiness CD-EP for a mere $2 plus shipping. Yes, that’s right, $2. There’s a few copies left to go, and Kyle needs to clear space for new Humblebee releases. Click here to buy.

The Daily Practice of Songwriting

The only way for you to learn how to write songs is to actually do it. It’s painfully obvious but it’s true.

Whatever your goals are, don’t wait, do it.

You don’t need to be a master in any aspect of songwriting to actually start writing your songs. I haven’t mastered any part of the music-making process, and yet I keep ploughing. I’m getting better, and a few people fortunately appreciate my efforts, so you might as well do it already or just give up. Ask Bob Dylan if he thinks he’s mastered lyric writing. I bet he’ll say he’s still got a lot to learn. Ask Harry Nilsson if he thinks he’s already learned all there is to learn about songwriting. You can’t, as he’s dead, but he’d probably say NO.

If you need something to read to inspire you or to just get you going, there’s a nifty book by Jimmy Webb (the guy who wrote ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’ and ‘Galveston’) called Tunesmith. It has chapters on lyric-writing and chord progressions. I haven’t used much of his advice yet, as I’ve always done it all by instinct, but for this next release I’m starting to work on I’m making an effort to do everything better, and try some of his pointers.

Songs don’t materialize out of thin air at first, but they will, sort of, after you get enough practice in. As the cliché goes, art is 95% perspiration and 5% inspiration. After you hone your skills enough, gems will flow from your pen every now and then without you even knowing or trying.

Daily sessions of improvisation are a great tool to improve your skills. For quite a while, I did daily sessions where I’d try and improvise little songs with tape rolling (it was actually on my computer, but “tape rolling” sounds so much cooler). They were just bits of improvised guitar playing with ad lib lyrics or lalalas that I’d record. I’d do as many of those as I could each day. Later I’d go back, and listen to those recordings. I’d play around with some of them a bit more until they were finished while others I’d keep for later (the really crappy ones I’d discard). Many good songs came out of those sessions, and I found out it’s a brilliant way to hone your songwriting skills.

However, I also found out I generally get much better results when I come up with an idea and work it from start to finish in as little time as I can, preferrably in the same session.

With my latest cd, that’s what I did. All those songs were written and recorded in a single session each. From chord progression to basic bass and drums arrangements plus some keyboard parts, they were all done “a la prima”, including basic vocal melodies. Only lyrics and some “embellishments” were added later.

I found out that all I need to start cranking out tunes is really to get some momentum going. If you practice enough, you learn how to pick out the good bits. You don’t have to be afraid of trying. If it doesn’t work, throw it out. If it works, get it finished as quickly as possible so you can assess it while it’s still fresh in your mind, and you won’t have second thoughts about changing it.

New Postal Blue CD

Wake up, kids! There’s a new Postal Blue CD coming out this week.

It’s a 3″ CD with 3 songs on Cloudberry Records, and you can get it by sending $5 (shipping included)  via paypal to shop at cloudberryrecords.com.

You can hear one of the songs by clicking here.

Here’s how it looks:

I’m back now after a long hiatus, and I’m going back to recording. I’ll see you in a few days.

Home studio homework

Fotoromanza

This week’s song is an old one. It was recorded a number of years ago (in 1999, I think) for a Shelflife Records comp. It’s one of the first songs where we dabbled with bossa nova and Brazilian music influences.

As for the title of this post, I, as countless other musicians, have a home studio, and I, as countless other musicians, have been doing it the wrong way from the start, when it comes to acoustic treatment.

Yes, it’s embarrassing to admit, but I’ll have to go on record to say that my studio is less than optimum when it comes to acoustic treatment. There’s zero soundproofing, and I’ve mixed three records in a very small room with nothing in the way of sound deflectors and absorbers. Don’t do that!

Seriously, I’ve done it out of ignorance and laziness. Soundproofing can be expensive, but acoustic treatment can be done cheaply, and there are no excuses not to do anything about it.

Very few lucky people can afford the luxury of building their studio from scratch. If you’re one of them, all you need is a book like this, and you’re set. You can also hang around the Recording Studio Design Forum to learn a lot about the subject BEFORE you start building.

However, if you’re retrofitting an existing room into a recording/mixing room, there a few things you should worry about, and I’ll only hint at things here, and perhaps save you from a lot of aggravation. Don’t ask me technical questions, just go and do your homework. Research.

I’m moving into a new home soon, and I’m planning on doing a number of things to my new studio. I’ve decided not to do anything to my current “studio” (really, calling this small closet-like room is an offense to real studios), mainly because I’m moving away, and also because it’s way too small to even do anything to it. Yes, I COULD do something to improve it, but, as I said, I’m moving, so I won’t do anything for now.

Anyway, a few pointers as to what you should worry about in your MIXING room (recording room acoustics is not as crucial as mixing room acoustics, and if you recording in the same space you’re mixing in, it’s only one room you’ll have to treat anyway).

One of the problems in my room is that two of the walls have different surfaces. One is all glass while the other is concrete with a curtain hanging over it. I could reduce the issues by putting up curtains on the glass side too. Walls facing each other should have the same kinds of surfaces, even if you place absorbers and diffusers on them you should set them up so there’s one facing each other. What you’re worried about here is standing waves that emphasize particular frequencies, so diffusers are a must if you have parallel walls. If you’re building, you can avoid this by design a room with nonparallel walls.

Another issue with my room is that it’s square. Yes, I know, big no no. The front wall is way too close to the back wall. Your front wall needs to be far away enough from the back wall so that your ears can differentiate between sound you’re hearing directly from your nearfield monitors and sound reflected from the back of the room. When it’s too close, it all gets jumbled together by the brain, and it’s detrimental to your perception.

One way to help this situation is to place absorbers on the back wall. The side walls and the ceiling should be treated the same way, if they’re too close to your ears. The ideal solution for the ceiling is to build a slant into it, making it lower in the front, and higher in the back, so the sound coming from the monitors is reflected to the back of the room.

Another big issue especially with small rooms is bass buildup in the corners of the room. You can solve this easily by building bass traps. If your monitors are somewhat near to the corners of your room, you should look into placing bass traps in those corners. I have been to studios before and after the installation of bass traps, and I can tell you it makes a lot of difference.

So far we have seen that my recording/mixing room has all the flaws imaginable, and I have done nothing right about it except for accidentally placing shelves full of books on the back wall (they act as diffusers rather than absorbers, but they help a little anyway).

There’s a lot of info all over the internet about all this, and there’s no excuse for anyone to work in a completely messed up environment like I’ve been doing. My life could have been a lot easier all this time if only I had done a few things to improve the situation. Don’t be like me, and do something about it.

I’m On My Way Home…

Ok, so I’ve been kept from blogging this week, and I’ve actually taken the chance to avoid recording anything too. Yeah, how stupid is that. I haven’t done much musically these days except for learning a bunch of songs on guitar. I’m teaching myself to play fingerpicking acoustic guitar. Youtube has been of much help, as there are plenty of great musicians who post videos of their playing there. You can just do a search on a song you want to learn, and up comes a demo of it.

So far I’ve learned a bunch of Beatles, Beach Boys and some good old bossa nova. I’ve also taken the time to learn a bunch of Prefab Sprout songs by ear. Not as hard as I expected, especially if you tune your guitar down a half-step in many cases.

As an update to my laptop situation, I’ve sent it to the shop, and I should get it back next Wednesday. I’ll try and post a new song the day I get it back. In case anyone’s wondering, it cost me about R$650 which is about $400. Ouch. I could have bought a new guitar or something with that money. Or a bunch of books and records. Oh, well…

Tragedy

Someone “miraculously” broke my laptop’s screen today. I won’t tell who nor how, but it wasn’t me, and I’m VERY pissed off. Furthermore, it will cost me half as much the price of a new one to fix it. So, until I’m able to scrape a few hundred bucks to fix this thing, this blog is on hold. I might be able to post from work, but uploading music will be a PITA, since file hosting sites are banned there.

I’ll see what I can do.

It’s All About The Music

Today’s song is:

Still Blue

I’m changing the structure around here this week. The weekly song will be getting the main spotlight, coming before everything else. I noticed that many people are reading the posts, but not downloading the music, and this blog is, above all, about the MUSIC, MY music.

Anyway, I was supposed to discuss song structure this week, so I’ll go a little into that.

Most pop music is basically a variation of the intro/verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge-middle eigth/chorus/outro. You may see variations like intro/verse/verse/chorus/verse/chorus/solo/chorus/outro and others, but it’s basically the same. Most pop songs that seem on the surface to stray from this *rule*, in deeper analysis, are a variation of the same thing.

It’s nothing set in stone, at least not to me. You can write your songs without thinking of anything like that, as I personally do. It’s only as an afterthought that I analyse whether my songs have intros and bridges and fancy stuff like that. I’m getting more into doing it on purpose now because I’m actually studying other people’s songwriting styles and their songs’ structures.

If you’re writing pop music, I’d advise you pay special attention to your chorus parts. I don’t. And that’s something I’m trying to change. There’s nothing like a catchy chorus to give a song some afterlife in the memories of listeners.

Writing music has always been a very intuitive process for me, and I’ve never gone further than thinking “this sounds good, I need something else to go with it” when composing. It doesn’t have to be this or any other way. It can be whatever works for you. I’ve been doing it that way, but I’m trying to do it with a bit more method now, pondering song structures and the overall effect the song will have on listeners.

I’ve always been more concerned with pleasing myself when writing, but if I’m going to actually subject other people to what I write, I might as well be a little accomodating. To many that may sound like selling out, but I think of it as being a good host. I’m inviting people into my imagination when I let them hear my music, and I might as well offer them a chair during the visit. A reasonably comfy one is the probably ideal. Neither a box for people to sit on nor a fluffy sofa. Just make sure they don’t fall sleep.

Now have a sit.

Home Recording Is Changing Music

Home recording has already changed the music industry. I thank God for that everyday.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, someone like me would never be able to release a record due to incredibly expensive studio rates.

Nearly twenty years ago, when I first started making music, studio rates were around $20-50 per hour. It usually got very expensive very fast to make an album when at least 10 hours are needed to record and mix a single song.

This, as everybody knows, and I won’t bore you any further by rehashing all the news stories of yesterday, is not the case anymore.

What I’m getting at here is not that nowadays you can actually record a whole album in your bedroom for spare change, but that you can actually become a better songwriter because of all that.

Having the possibility of immediately recording an idea, then adding drums, then all the other instruments plus the kitchen sink, is very useful. At least to me.

If you are a Beethoven (or Brian Wilson) style genius who can hear a hundred different arrangement possibilities and structure a whole song without even playing a note, it might not make that much of a difference. But if you’re a less than naturally gifted songwriter with scant musical knowledge, you can rest assured that this IS a great advance.

Not only can I record a rough sketch of my song, and make dozens of tentative overdubs and accompaniments, I can also edit my song to my heart’s content. With modern computer recording platforms, I can switch a song’s structure around as I like. Add a couple more repetitions here, cut short the chorus there, it’s amazing.

That in itself is enough to not only make a songwriter’s life easier, but it can also increase one’s output by making everything more immediate.

Of course it can also work the other way, and make one lazier. I can see how having all that available at arm’s reach is probably keeping many from actually working on their playing and/or studying music. But the positive aspects far outweigh the negative, I hope.

Anyway, here’s a song that will be in our upcoming CD on Cloudberry Records. Again, it’s a demo recording with scratch vocals and a rough mix. Comments, as usual, are very much welcome.

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You Should Keep It To Yourself

So You Wanna Be a Rock’n’Roll Star

*Disclaimer*

Before we continue my songwriting saga, I must first warn you that I’m not and I don’t pretend to be a master songwriter. I’m still learning, and constantly trying to improve. What I’m trying to do here is to share what I have learned already from experience, and hope that it will be useful to someone.

*End of disclaimer*

So here we go.

If you want to be a songwriter, you need to learn how to play at least one instrument to accompany yourself, especially if you have aspirations as a singer/songwriter kind of artist.

I suggest you learn both the guitar AND the piano. Although any instrument with polyphonic capability that you can play and sing at the same time will do.

I picked the guitar first, since I was a big rock fan, and it looked much cooler than sitting behind the piano like a dork (or so I thought at the time – I was a teenager, for Chrissake).

Later I decided I needed to learn how to play at least some piano in order to make my life easier, as I usually record a bunch of tracks using midi on my computer. I came to like it a lot, though, even if I still suck at it.

I’d have done it the other way around if I could go back now, and if a piano wasn’t so expensive.

I found it MUCH easier to learn the piano than the guitar, maybe because I’d been making music for many years already. Your mileage may vary, of course.

From the point of view of someone who is not naturally musically gifted, one huge advantage of piano and keyboards in general to me is that you can just press the keys, and they will make a sound. No need to grow callouses or get your left hand (if you’re right-handed) much stronger than your right one. You can play with only one hand, dammit. 😉

Anyway, at the risk of sounding like your dad here, learning the piano first is what I think would have been much better for myself. I’d probably have been forced to learn music notation if I had learned the piano first (I only learned it a few years ago), because you don’t NEED any of that formal stuff to play the electric geetar, do ya? You don’t need it to play pop music, it’s true, but it’s VERY useful.

Ok, so you have a guitar or a piano, a teacher or a good book (I personally like the ones that come with CDs) , now you can start learning how to play.

I’ll see you back in six months.

…fast forward to six months from now…

Now that you have some basic skills on an instrument, you can start writing your own songs. Of course you can write songs without having any music knowledge whatsoever, you just have to do it. It’s just much easier if you can play something. That being said, there have been singers/songwriters who didn’t and don’t play any instruments, like Morrissey, for example.

If you intend to sing your own material, you might need some singing training, since not everyone is American Idol material. If you think that you do need it, the best option is to hire a coach. If you can’t afford it, you may try, again, getting a book, preferrably with a CD. The only one I have is this. I can’t compare it to any others, because it’s the only one I have. It did help me a lot, and I wish I’d bought it 10 years earlier. I still have a long way to go to be a good singer, but I’m getting decent at it at least.

Again, taking singing lessons is not mandatory at all, you can do whatever you want as long as you write your damn songs, I’m just trying to make your life easier (or harder, depending on your point of view), just like your dad would.

Since I’m playing this whole songwriting series by ear, I’ve written two posts already, but they’re in reverse order. Now that you have some basic music knowledge, you can go back to last week’s post, and see how I write my own stuff. Maybe there’s something that can be useful to you.

Next week I’ll discuss topics like basic song structure and chord progressions. I’ll even get to the fun part of dissecting specific songs so you can see what each part actually is and what makes some songs work, in my opinion, at least.

Now back to the weekly song post. This time I’m uploading a song that’s going to be on my next single, coming out next May 1st on Cloudberry Records. This is not the actual single version, I still need to finish recording some bits and mixing it. But it’s at least halfway there. I’d love for you to comment on it, and on this whole songwriting business.

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Laughing and Crying