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STRATEGY FOR THE DAY: step up to the plate

I've been rushing around like crazy this last week. I gave a songwriting workshop at Santa Monica Music Center and had a very sharp group who asked good questions. I don't generally take students under 14 years old - at that age I figure they can understand song structure - but I had been asked to make an exception for an 8-year-old who takes piano lessons from one of the instructors at the Music Center. They told me she was musically precocious and I thought, well, this could be interesting. She was a real treat - both precocious and a genuine, funny, wiggly, honest, uninhibited 8-year-old! At one point in the class I have everyone create song titles based on a list of words they were given. Up till this point, I think the 8-year-old was pretty bored but she definitely woke up for this one! She started coming up with song titles - good ones! dozens of them! - and I couldn't get her to stop. I lost track after she filled a few pages in her notebook and had to tell her to just keep writing them down so I could get on with teaching. I used one of the titles ("Hello Hope") to demonstrate how to expand a title into a lyric. She loved the attention and it turned out to be the basis of a very good song (when she's old enough to understand it).

I taught a class at the University of California at Irvine on Thursday evening. This was a songwriting business workshop that I haven't given before so there was some prep time involved. Having learned a lot from the regular songwriting workshop, i planned this one better and managed to fit all of the info into 3 hours. I'm STILL trying to figure out how to do that in the regular workshop. There's just too much I want to share with people.

One of my students was interested in Kanye West so I spent some time listening to him, noticing the sparse yet phat production on tracks like "School Spirit." What a cut! A groove that blends standard drum samples with created percussion sounds - white noise instead of brushes, for instance. A great vox sample in the background - like there might be a church down the street and around the corner. A real interesting use of harmonizer - the pitch is raised to cartoon character heights on some lead vocal samples - and a great, great rap over it all. The engineering is gorgeous. How do they fill all that space with so little???? I gotta figure out how to do this less-is-more thing.

I bought a small Mackie mixer on ebay and rearranged my studio yesterday. What a job! More later.

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Read A Brief History Of Love Songs by Robin Frederick at the Sound Experience Music web site.

Copyright 2005 Robin Frederick. All rights reserved.