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Hi everyone,
We're going to be blogging this year's festival at the main site. Here's the link!
Some lovely quotes here. The only assertion I’d disagree with is ’songwriting can’t be taught’, of course 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jan/28/music-perfect-pop-song-pulp
“A pop song does, however, follow certain rules. It is generally around three to four minutes, has a verse and a chorus, and uses a bed of chords to support a melody, with words that convey some sort of sentiment that an audience can relate to.”
Although the ‘magic’ element is certainly true - it’s a beautiful thing, as Jarvis acknowledges;
“The beauty of songwriting is that any human being can do it,” he says. “And they learned how to do it their way. One minute someone was sitting in the living room, having a cup of coffee. The next they picked up the guitar and wrote something from nothing. That’s a miraculous event. That’s what keeps me going”.
I suppose that’s the point of the songwriting teaching at SWF - the tutors only really guide people around the technique - starting by covering (or occasionally stretching!) the above-mentioned ‘rules’, and then helping the writer to tackle the bad habits - melodic rat-runs, rhyme traps, lack of imagery, over-abstraction, verboseness etc. But what is remarkable - and rather beautiful - is that however much guidance a writer gets from the tutor, the song is still authentically the writer’s own. It’s that personal quality that everyone brings to their songs, regardless of musical skill or songwriting experience.
Some of our writers have expressed to us a fear that if they work with a tutor - or collaborator - any editing or trimming will somehow kill the authenticity of the song, making it less ‘real’ or ‘true’ because the ideas have been trimmed, edited or adapted along the way. But this fear always seems to evaporate when the song is completed. It’s connected, I’m sure, with that natural protectiveness that all writers have of their first idea - the assumption that it must be the best one simply because it arrived first. Perhaps this is because when we hear a well-written song it gives us the impression, as listeners, that it ‘comes from the heart’ regardless of how many hours the writer spent painstakingly crafting every last syllable. That emotional immediacy (of great songs) is an intoxicating trap for us as songwriters, because it can lure us into feeling that we should apply it to the creative process. Or maybe we should?!!!
There’s a really simple maxim that Andy always says when he’s teaching the MA Songwriting - the more songs you write, the easier it gets…
Our entry - what do you think?
Here’s the UK’s Eurovision entry for 2009, written by Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Diane Warren (lyrics). Any comments on the song and the songwriting technique? And yes, Jade does miss that last note by a good half a semitone, but hey - that’s not the songwriters’ fault.
I’m sure lots of our community will remember the recent Satriani/Coldplay case.
To summarise the story for those who don’t, Coldplay’s ‘Viva La Vida’ bore melodic and harmonic similarities to an instrumental composition called If I Could Fly by Joe Satriani.
Musically, here’s a summary of the context of the case.
Coldplay’s song uses a 4-chord loop that goes
||: Db | Eb | Ab | Fm :||
(IV - V - I - vi in the key of Ab major)
And the ‘Rule the World’ melody line starts on a C natural - the major third of the home key, creating an interesting major-7th sound to the first chord.
Satriani’s piece (the relevant passage can be heard here and starts at 0:50) uses a not dissimilar harmonic loop, and a melody that also starts on that major third (creating an interesting E minor 9th chord):
||: Em | A | Dmaj7 | Bm :||
(ii - V - I - vi in the key of D major)
Put them both in the key of C and simplify the chords to make the maths easier, and you get two similar chord loops
Coldplay - ||: F | G | C | Am :||
Satriani - ||: Dm | G | C | Am :||
So what, you say? You can’t copyright a chord loop, especially not one that’s been used thousands of times already? Well, the harmonic context is only part of the story. A very quick listen to the tune, starting on that ‘quirky’ major third note (E natural in this transposed version) reveals a marked similarity - an exact match for the first three notes, rhythmically, contextually and melodically.
Coldplay themselves eventually responded publicly on their website, denying it all as a coincidence. Satriani had apparently planned to serve the papers live during last night’s Grammys, but backed off from this for reasons unclear. Disappointingly, some of the more entertaining mashups that YouTube users created have now been taken down; the best ones used some digital pitch and tempo mapping to make the similarities clear. This one is rather well-done, albeit poor quality technically.
Coincidence or plagiarism? To answer this question we need to know - how likely is it that two songwriters could come up with this exact melodic/harmonic combination? Effectively this is a collision between the infinite monkeys theorem and our own knowledge, as songwriters, of what goes on creatively when one devises melodic material over chord loops (I’m willing to bet that this is how both pieces were written - sounds like loop-based writing to me).
I have my own view, but won’t reveal it just yet - I’m interested to see if there is a weight of opinion from songwriters. Over to you - please comment… now!
Hi everyone,
We have a lovely new site available, which will eventually replace this blog. Check it out, register for a free account and let us have your comments...
http://www.uksongwritingfestival.com
All best,
SWF team
Dates are now confirmed as 17-21 August 2009. Booking opens January 2009. If you have any questions please post them on the forum. More soon!
SWF Studio producer Davey Ray Moor has been hard at work finalising the mixes from the SWF Studio option. Here at last are the fruits of his labours.
For those participants who want a download version of these, Emmanuelle will be sending out a link to all SWF Studio people sometime in mid-September.
[Joe Bennett writes]
I occasionally get asked, by undergraduate students, Festival songwriters, and songwriting teachers what software and hardware I use to project lyrics and play back songs for analysis during songwriting lectures. Sometimes the question actually hijacks lectures and diverts us from discussing the actual song, so I'm going to write this blog post about it, so next time someone asks, I can just send them this link and get on with talking about songwriting!
This is unapologetically nerdy and exhaustive, because the people who ask about this sort of thing often want lots of technical detail.
The hardware
During lectures I have my Mac laptop with me - it's a standard Mac Powerbook running OSX and iTunes. This is connected to a VGA projector (see photo) and a mini-jack audio cable connects the Mac to whatever sound system we're using (in the photo example we used a small mixing desk on the table, routed into the theatre PA system in the ceiling).
The library
My iTunes library is around 6000 MP3s that I've collected over the years from various sources. The computer is always live on the 'net, so if someone in the lecture class wants to discuss a song I don't have, I just spend the £0.79 then and there and buy it online.
Because I'm sometimes running a PowerPoint or web browser simultaneously, I like to be able to play and pause iTunes remotely in the background. Sometimes I use the Apple remote for this, but most of the time I prefer to use a background application called Synergy, which is a simple iTunes controller that provides play, pause, next track functions etc, using function keys.
Lyrics and MP3s - the background
We all know that despite many years of attempts by rights owners to prevent fans publishing song lyrics online, it's possible to locate the lyrics to almost any song on the 'net. But using a web browser to do this live in a lecture is inelegant, and distracts the class from the song. So I combine two techniques - MP3 lyric metatags and lyric widgets.
So once the lyric is found on the 'net and then pasted into the MP3's iTunes lyric info window, it's there in the file forever, right there on my hard drive. This works for MP3s and also protected AAC files bought from the iTunes Music Store.
So far so good, but that's still a lot of hassle, especially if I'm running seat-of-the-pants lectures like this year's SWF (where I asked every member of the audience to write down a choice of song for analysis, then downloaded them live in the classroom). And it's also not very useful to bring up the Apple-I info window, because the font size isn't big enough for the class to see on a projector.
The widgets!
In 2005 I discovered Mac OSX lyrics widgets. These are small applications that run in the background using Apple's OSX Dashboard (i.e. they work with any Mac). There are several, but they all do essentially the same thing - display lyrics attractively on screen from the iTunes lyric data. But that's not all. If they don't find any lyric data, they automatically search the 'net for the lyric, and then extract the text from the lyrics sites they interrogate, and paste it into the MP3 for you. All this happens live, in the background, meaning I can download a song (legally, of course) and then have the lyric embedded in it within less than 10 seconds.
I use several widgets, running concurrently, because they all search slightly different lyric sites. I've found that if one widget doesn't find the lyric, another one will, and then the first one will simply pull the data from the MP3 itself (which will have been embedded automatically by whichever widget found the lyric online first). My current ones are;
Sing That iTune, Fire, Harmonic and the defunct but easy-to-find PearLyrics.
Icing on the cake - hot corners
Mac users will know that OSX supports hot corners. So I set up the Mac so that every time I move the mouse pointer to the top left of the screen, it launches Dashboard. Having previously set things up so that the lyrics widgets are always running, this means, in a lecture, all I have to do is play an MP3, sweep the mouse to the top left of the screen, and the lyrics appear!
But there's more...
This setup works great for lectures, but sometimes we're discussing tempo. We can usually find the chords and key of a song (just by having an acoustic guitar to hand), and we can see its form usually from looking at the lyric and listening to the playback, but finding the tempo was always a bit fiddly, using a metronome there in the lecture.
To state the obvious, the UK Songwriting Festival is about songwriting. Specifically, it's about songwriting as opposed to performance and arrangement. We often use the metaphor of a picture frame - the arrangement and performance are the frame; the song is the picture. A song is transferable to a different performer (i.e. a cover version); a song can be arranged/interpreted in different ways (instrumentation, tempo, groove/feel, arrangement etc).
But even though these boundaries are self-evident musically, it's still very difficult to keep the song in focus when evaluating or analysing new work. After a new song has been shared in a playback session, we ask for feedback from other five or six songwriters in the group - they are, after all, the new song's first ever audience. (It often helps if we initially prevent the songwriter themselves from responding verbally, because of course they won't be able to explain or justify their creative decisions when the song is performed or broadcast – the 'I-won't-be-there-when-you-cross-the-road' principle.)
This demonstrates an important principle - that listeners do not differentiate between the picture and the frame. An obvious example would be the meaninglessness of a Coldplay or Keane lyric. But although these particular types of lyric make little sense without a lot of inference from the listener, individual couplets work well enough in isolation. Most importantly, the phrases 'sing well' - lots of open vowels and great scansion. So although we have no idea why Noel Gallagher tells us 'Sally Can Wait' (and no information about who Sally is) in Oasis' Don't Look Back in Anger, it feels really good to sing these big vowels - especially over the melody to Manfred Mann's Pretty Flamingo (which is lifted pretty much verbatim in the chorus). Incidentally, the obvious and deliberate reference to Lennon's 'Imagine' in the piano intro to the Oasis track is an arrangement artefact, not a songwriting one. So in a publishing dispute with Oasis where Manfred Mann or Lennon's lawyers were looking at Don't Look Back in Anger, I'd be backing the Manfreds every time - because of the nine or so melody notes that are common to both choruses.
It always seems a shame to me if a technically poor singer or guitarist writes a great song but the audience can't see the picture for the frame. Which is why the studio sessions and House Band performances are such an integral part of SWF. We try to give the song its very best opportunity to 'survive', ensuring that the songwriter's skill (crafting form, melody, harmony and lyric) is not eclipsed by any technical shortcomings in the performance.
