Rough to Release

Welcome back to Trollholm and Rough to Release, our series on taking your half-finished ideas and turning them into finished songs.  So far we've assumed that your creative process is you, alone, slaving away by the midnight oil in your artists garret. Or in the train on the morning commute, whatever works for you (according to part 2). But obviously this is not always the case; you might be working as part of a writing group, you might be working with a partner, you might be taking your song ideas to a band to develop into a live show. All of these scenarios bring both advantages and dis-advantages, but there are some consistent points as well. Let's have a look... As part of a band In my (limited) experience, bands tend to be run either as dictatorships or communes. Under the dictator, the band leader tends to bring the songs and sets the rules about how they'll be played. If it's a benevolent dictatorship they will allow the other players control of their parts and a...

  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...