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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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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How To Become A Better Songwriter

Before I begin I have to get this out of the way: Most music sucks. There's no sense in making it worse, so stop.

I've been listening to my recently created Last.fm radio station and as an unsigned indie artist, most (read all) of the similar artists that get played on my station are the same. *NOTE* I don't choose who the "similar" artists are on Last.fm - they do all of that. So when I listen to the radio station, I'm hearing all of these bands for the first time. And most of them suck.

The first thing I've noticed is that most of the songs are well over five minutes long. I don't have a single song that I've recorded that's five minutes long. Because that's too long. There is a reason why radio stations don't play a lot of long songs, and it's the same reason most big labels don't usually let their artists put out long tracks as their lead singles. That reason is simple: People have a very short attention span.

If you're writing a song that's five or six minutes long you better change things up a lot. I mean Stairway To Heaven a lot, or Paranoid Android a lot. When people sit and listen to the same riff playing over and over it becomes more annoying than anything else - especially if it's not a very good riff (and most indie songs don't feature a lot of great riffs)

The radio stations don't want their listeners to change the station because the same song has been playing for ten minutes. They also don't want to play a single song and then have to go to commercial break because the song took forever.

It doesn't really matter weather you're talking about an FM radio station or an internet radio... people's short patience for songs that drag out doesn't change, so keep it short and simple please.

I could go on forever about this (which would be ironic) but there's a football game on! And besides, if you don't get it by now I can't help you.

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