The Writer's Corner

Hi everyone!

In this installment I thought it might be fun to blog about a project while it is in progress. I might interject some other issues along the way, but over the next 4-5 weeks I’d like to relate to you my process of working on a specific project and let you see/hear the various aspects as they evolve – for better or worse!

Background to the project, Part I:

Every year, the department that I am assigned to at Berklee College of Music (Contemporary Writing and Production) stages an all faculty concert for students to attend. This means that the writing and playing is all done by faculty here at the college. The main reason for doing this is to show students that we can DO what we teach – that is compose, arrange, orchestrate etc (or at least that is our hope!). This year the concert will be on Tuesday night, October 27th at 8:15PM, at the Berklee Performance Center. It will be recorded live with state of the art digital equipment.

I normally take the opportunity to be a part of these concerts because they give me an opportunity to write music that a client might not normally request. Also, the players in the band are usually people I know and deeply respect so the outcome is usually quite good – at least from the playing end

Background to the project, Part II:

This past summer, knowing that this concert would be coming up, I sat down and wrote a song. There was no particular inspiration other than that I wanted to write something “inside” that was fairly diatonic in nature. The beauty of this particular session of writing was that it took less than two hours to write – some days the music just flows out. More often than not though it is like “pulling teeth without anesthesia!” I put together a quick demo of it with bass, piano and drums in Logic Pro to get a better idea of horizontally what I had just written.

A related side story:

A number of years ago, also for one of these above mentioned concerts, I wrote a song for my son. It is called, “The Man.” He’s now 13. An mp3 is posted below. He was 8 or 9 at the time and I was beginning to observe that he was moving away from that “little boy” image. As every parent knows, this is a bittersweet time because as much as you want your kids to grow up and be independent people – you don’t. This is probably because it also means that YOU, the parent, are getting older (and teenagers can be hell!).

The Man

My daughter, knowing that I wrote a song for her brother, of course wants me to write a song for her too. She thinks it should be called, “The Girl!” (she’s now 9).

Back to Background to the Project, Part II:

As it turned out, while I was listening to that early demo my daughter happened to be nearby and declared that this particular song was “nice” and that it should be called, you guessed it, “The Girl.”
I don’t know….I just wasn’t thinking of THAT title when I wrote it. I’ll keep it in mind though.

Below are links to the first lead sheet that I created for “Song With No Name,” and a rough audio representation of it. On the lead sheet, the large letters denote the form (A, A1, B, C, A, A1). You’ll note that the “A1″ and “A” sections are very similar but are different enough to be considered different section.

Original Lead Sheet

Here is a simple melody only MIDI file:
Un-named song Melody

Here is a MIDI file with melody, harmony and a simple bass line:
Un-named song rev

There is lots more to come! Feel free to comment and a ask any questions you may have.

Until next time,

Jerry

Hi everyone, I hope your 2009 is off to a great start!

Believe it or not, my main professional “resolution” for 2009 (after more score study!) is to work more with this blog. There are a lot of great minds out there and I want to learn as much as I can from you as well! Seems simple right? Here goes:

When I first started writing much in the 1970’s a musician’s job was still reasonably well defined. If you were a songwriter you wrote songs. If you needed a lyricist, you found someone that specialized in that aspect. If you needed an arranger to put the song together, you hired one of those too. The song probably needs to be recorded so you would find an engineer, a producer and the players to play the music (if you weren’t in a self contained band). These are all specific roles that musicians filled. This certainly was the tail end of the old “studio system” where everyone went to “work” everyday and just played, wrote or recorded what was planned for that day. Music historians would probably say that the “golden age” of the studio system was over with by this time, but certainly there was still plenty of evidence of it (go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_system for more info).

Fast forward to 2009. The business is quite different now and the more YOU can do for a client (and do it well and on time), the better your chances of working with said client – one stop shopping! This leads me to the following:

When studying to be a very competent musician (not to mention a great musician), how do you balance the realities of the business of music (“jack of all trades”) with trying to be a better player, a better engineer or a better writer?

I find this in my own classrooms here at Berklee. I know as an educator and a professional writer that to be good at any ONE aspect of the music industry you have to submerse yourself in that one aspect for awhile. Practice, practice, practice, right? Devote yourself 100% right?

Well…..how do you devote yourself 100% to learning orchestration (or playing or production/engineering or songwriting etc), when you feel you need to also spend 100% of your time learning these other aspects – not to mention staying on top of (and simply learning for the first time) various pieces of software?

Any thoughts on how you approach this very real issue?

All the best!

Jerry