Rough to Release

  Wherein we actually talk about songwriting. Let's start with the concept of Spark and Spice. Spark is the idea behind the song. Pop music has traditionally been very frugal with the range of ideas that achieve widespread acceptance. Boy/girl meets boy/girl. Boy/girl loses boy/girl. Boy/girl has unrequited love for boy/girl. Etc etc. I mean, obviously there are other themes in popular music, and certain acts definitely had a much broader range of stories to tell, from the Beatles, to They Might Be Giants, to Radiohead. But take a quick look at the charts and do a count up of the proportion of tracks that are, shall we say, relationship-based. And yet, there are thousands of brilliant songs out there that somehow manage to mine this same vein and still extract new nuggets of gold. How does that work? Well that's where the spice comes in. If spark is the idea, spice is how you turn that into something interesting. And if you're familiar with the old idea that the...

Welcome back Song-writing then.  Perhaps you have that folder I mentioned, or maybe a stack of notebooks, or whatever it is you use to capture your ideas. Now we start the process of turning the ideas into songs - complete, finished songs.  And here is my first rule for completing songs.  Which has nothing to do with songs or music.              Space and permission. What do I mean by that? These two things come together to give you the best chance at writing your best songs. You can ignore them, but you'll make life harder for yourself.   (this is not my room) Space. What I'm talking about here is a physical space where you can focus completely on the job in hand. It might be you're lucky enough to have a dedicated music space in your house, if that's so, take a moment next time you step in there and think about how it feels to cross the threshold? Is it inspiring? Does it give you a little lift just being in ...

  Part 1 Hello and welcome to Rough to Release. My name's Drew Stephenson and I'm a singer-songwriter and home-recordist (that's not a real word) from the UK. In this blog we're going to be looking at how to take your song-writing from a bunch of lyrics and chords to fully worked up demos and releases. We're going to start with the song-writing, including that vital stage of actually finishing, and turning an idea into a song. Then we're going to look at recording or capturing those ideas. We'll talk about what you need to get started and, probably more importantly, how to get the most out of it. We'll also talk about the blurring of lines between writing, recording and producing - which is a theme we'll revisit throughout the series. Next up we'll get into that production concept, how to establish and support a vision, and we'll wrap up with a bit of discussion about mastering and distribution.   So if that sounds like it might be of interes...