Useful Links
A variety of helpful things
Here in the Upper Left Corner of the country, winter came pretty early and looks like it’s settling in for awhile. More snow tonight and this weekend, but fewer really cold nights. Good season to get some things done like arranging songs you want to record or perform (rearranging and then rearranging the rearrrangement has kept me kinda busy for the last few weeks), and phrase them out so anyone you’re planning on recording with (hint: the drummer!) can see where the measures fall. Makes their task so much easier if it’s laid out correctly rather than leaving them guessing. We’ve talked about adding phrasing/timing markings to chord charts before, check the “Retrospective” posts from a few months ago for some tips. Lots of other stuff to do as well. If you’re planning to release through a publishing admin and distributor, make sure you’re crediting all the musicians, producer, studio, engineer properly - basically anyone who helped as part of the production, including a photographer/graphic designer for album art (required for the streaming services) if you’re not doing that yourself. Your publishing admin and distribution service will have lots of guides and checklists to help you prepare for release, I’d encourage you to learn all you can as you get the basic tasks of arranging, rehearsing, recording, mixing and having your mixed tracks/stems mastered finished.
So for today, some links you may find helpful in a number of areas:
Griff Hamlin on not letting the Pentatonic boxes intimidate you
And here Mr. Hamlin gives some tips on changing the key of a lick
Songtown is a website I spend a bit of time with (subscription required) for songwriting insights:
What music publishers look for - if you’re an independent artist you likely have (and should have if you don’t!) a business entity for the purpose of collecting royalties for your songs. In this article, the point isn’t what your publishing business entity (LLC or something) is looking for, but rather the publishers who might represent an artist or group of artists that may be interested in covering your (hopefully copyrighted!) song or songs.
Some thoughts on songwriting - this article is pretty light on content, but it does lead to some interesting questions. Just enough that I’ll probably do a Friday main post on some of the ideas raised. Worth a look and the ideas here may end up being at least a part of future posts on Michael Acoustic.
It often gets pretty easy to take for granted some of the basics of your gear - good insights here from Acoustic Guitar Magazine:
American Songwriter is a magazine and website I subscribe to (along with Acoustic Guitar Magazine), and they emphasize lyric analysis a lot. A sample of that, written by Mr. Dean Fields, who also does analysis of lyrics for just plain folks like me is at the following link, and I almost didn’t include it because it’s for members only (requires a sign-in), so feel free to skip this one unless you’re looking for someplace to really dive in to songwriting. It’s particularly poignant in light of the recent passing of Christine McVie.
One reason I included it anyway is because Mr. Fields happened to be the evaluator (AS offers 3 free song lyric analyses per year for subscribers at a certain level) for the song I’m currently getting ready to record and release. While he had some excellent tips and suggestions and pointed out some things I could be doing much better with, he was really very encouraging about my lyrics (not just nice things said about a subscriber’s efforts, because I’ve seen videos of him absolutely tearing apart some songs that, well, probably should have been - not pleasant for that person), and so I pay attention to the things he writes. It also came at a time of self doubt about my meager abilities and led me to continue writing songs.
Finally, a video from Anthony Cesari who offers a course on songwriting, but also does YouTube videos analyzing songs by well known artists. I’m a huge Counting Crow fan and really like this song:
Usual and probably tiresome by now disclaimer: I don’t receive compensation or promotional consideration from any of the individuals or companies I’ve linked to or written about here, or in any of my SubStack posts.
Regular post tomorrow!
Cheers, and keep playing!
Michael Acoustic