'Revelation Dream' Is Available FREE

'Revelation Dream' is available as a free download on Bandcamp

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The Four Sons - Blazing Son

I finally got a Bandcamp site for my music. And I finally got a band name too! 'The Four Sons'

I know there's only one of me... but the album, like most of my music, is heavily inspired by the 60s sound. And I've always loved all of those old bands with names like The Four Tops and The Four Seasons so I figured I'd go with something like that. Besides, just using my screenname (Shanny Boy seemed a little confusing. It sounds more like a rapper's nickname than a rock band/musician.

Then there's the whole "virtual band" aspect. The Blazing Son album was written as a concept album about a band of fictional characters in a fantasy world, so why not just make them the band?

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Scarecrow Video

Here's a new slideshow video for my song Scarecrow. The slideshow is made up of a bunch of paintings I did of the Scarecrow character from the virtual band on Blazing Son

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How To be A Better Songwriter: First Impressions

Have you ever been listening to a song that starts off with some long drone or a quiet background noise that just carries on and on? It sounds like the song is building up to something really great... but it never happens. You keep waiting for the song to start but it never seems to. It drives you crazy and you change the station or skip to the next song, don't you?

That's because it sucks! It's annoying and people don't generally like it. Some people may approach this discussion from an artistic perspective and try to defend the artists with something like "well people just have a short attention span" or something like that... but that's not really true. It just sucks. Plain and simple. And most people won't sit and listen to something they don't like. Don't make excuses.

So when you write your own songs, don't do it! If you like the mellow, ambient, droning sounds to set the mood for your laid-back, mellow song... hurry up and get it out of the way. Trust me - dragging it out isn't gonna change anything. If it doesn't work within the first few seconds, it's not gonna work in the first minute and a half either.

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'Have You Ever Seen The Rain' cover

I haven't posted any of my recent cover songs on here in a while, so here are a few. The first one is this CCR cover.

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How To Be A Better Songwriter: Pick Up The Pace

The last songwriting post I wrote was about how long a lot of unsigned/indie artists' songs are. One of the less obvious reasons for that is the tempo.

A lot of unsigned artists write songs that move so slow it puts you to sleep. Part of that is because the songs are meant to be slower which just ends up being melancholy and boring, but I'm not gonna talk about that specifically here.

I've listened to several songs by indie artists that should be more energetic than they are because the tempo is just a few beats per minute slower than they sound like they should be.

If you're an indie artist and you're familiar with audacity (which you more than likely are) take a .wav file of one of your favorite band's tracks and put it in audacity. Now go to "change speed" and slow it down about 2 or 3 percent. The difference may not seem that big at first, but if you play the two different speeds back to back a few times you should start to notice that the slower track doesn't sound as good. That's because it's not.

Now go through some of the songs you've written and recorded and re-evaluate the BPM and consider speeding it up. You'll probably want to re-record the song, since just speeding it up in audacity can actually change the key of the song and make your voice sound drastically different.

After reading this, keep in mind that most people prefer upbeat songs to sad songs on an average day.

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My 'Revelation' In Music

I wrote this song when I was about 15 years old. It didn't sound like this back then though. I used to just play the rhythm on an acoustic guitar and just sit and play 10 minute versions of it.

I found a bunch of old tapes I recorded back then and realize now, while listening to them, that I must have been really really high when I recorded them. If the me that's writing this met the 15 year old me that made those recordings... I'd probably have to beat the shit out of myself.

16 years later and I've added a bass, drums and some string instruments. I re-wrote all new lyrics (with a few lines from the original) and re-recorded it and I honestly believe it's an amazing song now.

The musical composition is nowhere near as complex as the rest of the stuff I've written over the last few months - especially songs like If There Is A Day or Mr. Frost - but I think it's simplicity is part of it's appeal.

Lyrically, I used the violent imagery of mother nature and a falling civilization to describe the musical flow and vice versa. When I say "everything stops and time stands still" the song goes into a break, and when I say "stars fall out of the sky in madness" the strings come in behind the main rhythm.

Interesting side-note (maybe) - The King Is Dead started out as a remix of this song before I decided to make it a follow-up/sequal and (hopefully) put it on the same album.

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Revelation

This is another song I wrote. This is just a preview of the backing track until I can get the equipment to add the guitar and vocal tracks.

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