The Musical Trinity: Songwriting

This is the re-posting of an article that I wrote posted on hypebot.com last fall...Enjoy part 2 while I continue writing new articles for your consumption!


When you listen to a song that you haven’t heard before, what is it that draws your attention?  Is it the beat that gets you moving?  Is it the lyrics tugging at your heart strings?  Is it the arrangement and interplay of the instruments?  A great song has a bit of all of these elements, but what can set a song apart from the rest often involves the hidden science and art of the audio engineer helping to put those pieces together.  

With the diversity in music today we can all find something that draws our attention.  What I want to look at is how the Musical Trinity of engineering, songwriting, and arrangement creates those songs that linger with us.  

Songwriting

Songwriting is a completely subjective thing to people.  So while I could write about the formulaic ideas that can create a hit song, you could also just think of yourself at the age of 14 and write to that kid and you’ll probably reach the same point.  The key with songwriting is to draw your listener into the song by giving them something they can relate to, effectively creating an emotional attachment. 

Nick Hornby once wrote about songwriting in his book “High Fidelity” (and John Cusack embodied it) that we listen to thousands upon thousands of songs about love and heartbreak.  So why is it that the most common theme across ALL musical platforms is misery over lost love?  Because it is something that everyone goes through, something that everyone can relate to, and something that is a fundamental human understanding as we go through life.  That topic brings together more people than anything else.  Seems like a bold statement to make, but how many of us turn on music for at least an hour a day?  Next time you’re listening to the songs blaring through your speakers or headphones count how many of them carry the underlying theme of love or heartbreak.  Yes, I am including the types of songs that include lyrics like “finding my bitches in this club” – momentary love is still love – call me a romantic if you will, but it still counts. 

Beyond the lyrics, songwriting involves having the basic fundamental chords that will move with the song.  As you develop the structure of a song make sure that the chords that are chosen convey the message you wish to express.  Do you want dissonance in your song to express tension or sadness?  Do you want more upbeat sounding tones?  Then stick to major chord structures.

The last piece of songwriting goes with tempo and feel.  If you’re writing a song designed to get people up and dancing in a club on a Saturday night, you’re not going to want it to be slow.  The same would be true for the style of song.  If the base of fans that you’re trying to reach out to listens to country, giving your songs a reggae feel probably won’t draw them in.  Knowing what kind of audience you’re trying to reach can help you tailor the feel of the song and tone of the song to maximize exposure.  It can also help you determine instrumentation, which leads us to…

The Musical Trinity: Engineering

A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to have this 3 part series run on hypebot.com.  As I have been absent for a little while, I thought we'd kick off the new year of posts by re-running them and getting back to the basis for what this blog is all about.


When you listen to a song that you haven’t heard before, what is it that draws your attention?  Is it the beat that gets you moving?  Is it the lyrics tugging at your heart strings?  Is it the arrangement and interplay of the instruments?  A great song has a bit of all of these elements, but what can set a song apart from the rest often involves the hidden science and art of the audio engineer helping to put those pieces together. 

With the diversity in music today we can all find something that draws our attention.  What I want to look at is how the Musical Trinity of engineering, songwriting, and arrangement creates those songs that linger with us. 

Engineering

Some people hear “engineering” as a dirty word when it comes to music; they start to think about the dreaded auto-tune and how someone has manipulated the recordings to make flawed artists sound like premiere musicians.   Sadly, this has become more commonplace with the more famous artists as they want to have that absolute perfection to the recording.  But what about the up-and-comers?  They can’t all afford the studio time or the necessary equipment to put out that top notch production.  This has created an interesting gap between the self-produced albums and the label productions.  Is one production better than the other?  Sure, you can hear a better fidelity with a label production but that doesn’t take anything away from the quality of the self-produced albums.  The key thing to look for when listening to the production of an album is balance.  Having that discerning ear to notice where instruments are placed in space, to notice if they all sound like they are playing in the same room, to be able to close your eyes and actually picture it, as if you are sitting in front of this group watching them perform. 

The idea behind a modern recording studio is to record the sounds as closely as possible so as to not hear any of the environment around them.  During the production and mixing of the album, the engineer will help to create the room that those sounds should be placed in.  The engineer creates that width so we hear something from the far left to the distant right.

A lot of inexperienced engineers, though, forget that we don’t just hear in 2 dimensions when we’re listening.  This means that they tend to forget to take depth into account.  When we listen to a concert are all of the musicians right at the front of the stage, hitting us at the same volume?   No, of course they’re not.  The drummer is usually towards the back of the stage, the singer is front and center, and the guitars and bass will be sitting between the two.  We hear with depth, we recognize that a sound is far away or right in front of us.  (If you want to know more about that look up the Doppler Effect.)  

It’s that principle of placing instruments in a three dimensional field that is the foundation of balance in a recording.  I say the foundation because once you’ve figured out where in the environment you are placing the instruments, you have to look at the listening environment and ask yourself the following question:  if a sound is directly in front of me or far off, how much ambient noise or reflections in the room will I hear?  That question tells you how much reverb and delay to use so that all the instruments will sound like they are playing together.