Songwriting

Songwriting Start To Finish

Songwriting is an art and a skill that can require input to complete lyric writing, orchestrate, develop themes, hooks, bridges record and finish your project.

Song Co-writing

Working with a song idea can require outside input. If you have a lyric or a lyric with just a vocal track I can work with your ideas to develop verses, bridges choruses, harmonies and all the surrounding bed tracks to make it into a song. I have included an example of just that: one of my young students artists came to me with lyrics and an smartphone vocal with no instrumentation at all that we developed first into piano segments. Once she was happy with what I had come up with I developed full band bed tracks with an intro, verses, a chorus with a catchy hook melody, a bridge and ending. This will show you the process of not only how I work, but how I worked to develop a song that represents the feeling that you had when you originally wrote the lyrics and the original melody.

Recording

If your song is ready to record my studio is a 18 channel studio recording at 24 bit 96khz with digital effects to mix down and prepare for any medium.

Orchestrating

As a skilled arranger and orchestrator familiar with all styles of music I can help develop music for your ideas.

Video

Once your song is finished a video should be shot so it can be released on social media for exposure. This is now the way music is marketed. Period. Your song could take off and/or could be noticed by an artist looking for new material for their upcoming album project.

Protection

I am a member of the Songwriters Association of Canada. It only costs $50/yr to join, then $15 registration and $5/song to register it for protection in the SOCAN songwriters vault. You can also copywrite it with the Government of Canada for another $50.

Songwriting Co-writing Example

This song came to me from my piano/vocal student Elizabeth Studt early last summer. She was 16 and had been taking piano lessons since she was 12 but had only been taking vocal lessons for a short time. She literally slipped a page of lyrics on my desktop and emailed me this song with no backup from a smartphone. I am going to show you every step so you can see how it was put together. Here's the original lyrics and the voice clip

So here's what I had to work with. She's kinda laid out the chorus which is now a verse and listen to the original voice clip below.

So I started. Here's me singing what is supposed to be the chorus Feb 8 2018

So now I have a chorus with harmony and a bridge

Now let's orchestrate it. Wanted to make it sparse so no high hat, cabasa and bass drum only bring in snare on chorus

Not happy with bridge so here's the new bridge

Finally have the format. New bridge is funky C9 chord with vocal overlay and congas feels much better. Liz made me chop the second verse because the words didn't fit and it was a bit long so the arrangement became: Intro verse1 2xchorus 2nd verse 4xchorus bridge with semitone transpose halfway thru because that's what she did in her original demo w/vocal overlay and then 8xchorus with vocal overlay and my tip to Quincy Jones with the nice chord at the end. This song is registered at SAC Songvault and Copyright with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. Also my Digital Performer MIDI digital audio editing software has notation software built in so I created a 49 page score with the song title, both our names as co-writers and put in the lyrics for both the melody as well as chorus and bridge backround vocal lyrics. I wrote all of the music but this was a co-writing project. She came every week for lessons where I would show her my ideas and come up with new ones and make recordings and send them to her to review and think about. Yes I wrote all the music and built the arrangements but in the end she approved everything I did and I did my best to figure out what she would want and make it happen, and you can hear the great song we wrote

Second Song

This is from me to show that writing songs doesn't always have to be made for primetime, doesn't need the hook, it's just the way musicians communicate. A very good friend of mine who I've known since I was a kid growing up every summer at our cottage on Cameron Lake Fenelon Falls, her mother passed away and I wanted to write a song for her, her family and sisters. So this is a song that kinda captures lots of my musical life as I reflected and wrote this in one afternoon, I was a child soprano at 5 in the Anglican church and I love playing organ music so it started there.