Tag: Songwriting

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Songwriting Tools for Increased Creativity

sslogoMany of the people who visit our site are songwriters looking for high quality backing rhythms for their original music. This is fantastic and I, of course, encourage that.

If you are one of those songwriters, you no doubt know that it’s not as easy as it looks. There are times when you’re looking for literally anything to inspire you. Other times you just can’t seem to find the right word(s) to rhyme and make the song sound like it should.

I’ve found a series of tools that may be able to help you. They are called…

The Superior Songwriting Package external_link

(Rhyming Software, Creativity Pack, and mini-recording studio)

  • 8 week, Money-back guarantee
  • Cutting edge method of how to flesh out your song ideas
  • Practical exercises designed to increase your vocabulary
  • Awesome exercises that have been engineered to get more ideas coming to the front of your brain, so that you can keep that creative flow going, without experiencing the frustrations of song writers block!
  • Outstanding online software that aids songwriting
  • Other brain exercises to boost those creative neurons!

click-here-button

Here’s what “Songwriting Success – The Ultimate Guide To Writing And Selling Your Songs” has inside:

  • I’m going to teach you everything you need to know about writing a song – from the very basics right through to the “complicated” stuff (I’ve put the word ‘complicated’ into inverted commas because, really, even the “complicated” stuff is still a relative cake-walk!)
  • Everything you need to know about becoming a professional songwriter is contained within this book.
  • So really, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a good ear for music, an unshakeable sense of rhythm, a way with words and lyrics, or just the feeling that you might be good at this: by the time you’ve finished reading the sections of this book that apply to you, you’ll be ready to start making money off your songwriting ideas.
  • We’re going to look at the creative and the business side of things: from the actual how-to-get-a-good-idea right through to marketing your stuff to industry insiders.
  • Discover how songwriting can earn you a living. I give you a run down of the songwriting process and all the things you’ll be involved in as a professional songwriter from writing music and lyrics to composing and marketing.
  • You’ll learn what is actually in a song in my detailed chapter on “The Basics and Complexities of Structure”
  • The one fatal mistake that you cannot afford to make when including rhyme in your songs.
  • Find out all the nitty-gritty secrets that you definitely WILL need to write songs that are successful, marketable, saleable, and chart topping… all the things you want your songs to be!
  • Discover the four absolute most-important traits and abilities of a successful songwriter.
  • Lyrics in DETAIL. You’re going to learn all about lyrical (word-based) tools that you can place conveniently throughout your song to jazz it up and make it sound really polished and smooth.
  • and more…

Superior Songwriting

click-here-button satisfaction

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3 Different ways You can use MIDI Drums for songwriting

MIDI Songwriting
MIDI Songwriting

Here are three quick ways.
1. In the beginning – It can start out as simple as just looping one of the drum tracks and singing a couple of lines of your newest song over and over again. The drums give you a great sense of rhythm and if you use your imagination, you can actually hear other musical parts being played along with you.

I use this technique a-lot in my songwriting. I am able to come up with a more ‘pure’ melody that way. Playing the piano while I sing is great, but it limits where I can go melodically especially during the ‘birth’ of a song. Also, later on when I’m stuck on a song and can’t seem to come up with any interesting background parts, I’ll strip it back down to just the drum track and melody line. For some reason, this really helps in creating interesting features to the music, like horn hits, or harmonic runs, or creative musical breaks. I would suggest that every songwriter try this. It’s so easy, and it will give you a new perspective on your music.

2. The middle – When I have a song that is basically done musically, I like to go in and replace the drum track with a different rhythm style. In fact I often try the song with 10 or 15 different alternate beats. This is a great practice…. but one that can’t easily be done if you used a live drummer for your recordings (unless they’re good with a metronome). When you do this, the songs take on a whole different feel. After listening to several rhythm tracks, I’ll choose the one that I think is the best and the song now has a new groove.

3. The end – I have several songs that are headed for the recording studio shortly. When I go in to record the songs, my piano tracks are already finished. I record them via MIDI on my home computer while playing to one of these looped drum tracks. The drums keep me exactly on tempo and give me a great sense of rhythm to play off of. So when I go into the studio, I hand the engineer my floppy disk (That’s right ‘floppy’ – why waste a whole CD on files that are so small?) and he pulls them up on his system. He’s got a ton of sampled grand pianos that he can route my MIDI tracks through. So now instead of paying him $130.00US for 2 hours of recording time, I have a prefect piano track that took about 3 minutes of studio time. And the tracks are in perfect time sync. because I played them to a looped midi drum track that is rhythmically perfect

I hope you will try some of these techniques on your own. And let me know if you have success with them. Also, any other suggestions that you might have, please send them to me.

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How to make a bass line using MIDI drum files

Bass Guitar
Bass Guitar

I received an email recently from Jembailey in the U.K. where he suggests using the following method to create a bass line by using multiple drum files together. This idea is great if you don’t play bass and are stuck for ideas.

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– Bass Lines

“What I do is take two drum beats from the same genre. I use one of the beats for the background drums and the other beat I route through a different midi channel set up with a good sounding bass instrument. The result will obviously be a cacophony. However you can usually pick out an interesting pattern, often it’s from what would have been the kick drum, snare and hi-hats.”

“If you begin to prune the pattern, starting with the events higher up the key edit screen (I use Cubase) you can quite easily find yourself with the beginnings of a serviceable bass line.

“Obviously it’s necessary to lengthen a lot of the events, and often vary the velocity a bit, but once you’ve got eight bars or so you can loop it and then introduce variations. A tom tom roll makes a good descending run, or you can reverse the order of the notes and have it ascend. If you already have other parts written some transposition may be in order, you don’t want everything in the same key that the kick drum is assigned to.

“Rob – Thanks for the files, I’ve got a studio project coming up and will be looking to your MIDI Drum Files for the specific files I need.”

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Thanks Jembailey for your excellent suggestions.

If you also have any suggestions that might be helpful for other MIDI file users, please let us know. If it’s helpful, we may use your suggestions in one of our posts.