Songwriting

This Step relates strongly to the musical skills mentioned at the top of the site.

Songwriting is a very creative focused activity. It describes the process of creating a new piece of art setting its most important musical parameters. Nowadays composing and songwriting are mainly synonyms in the industry although the term composer is more usual in the classical genres and songwriter are mainly creating in popular genres like Pop, Rock or EDM. 

It’s crucial for a good songwriter to know what sound, mood and emotion his song should transport and if that fits to what people like to hear and follow. Having a sixth sense for what’s chart hitting in future is the most important skill you should evolve as a songwriter.

I started creating my first songs at very young age, starting with pure piano pieces as that was my first instrument I learned. The more I get into the music production I started to analyze more of the popular song I heard around me. What is it that make this track works and why does it stand out that much? For me to give me a considered answer I must getting better in understand how music creation works logically. 

You can analyze music in different aspects of creation. The most distinctive parameters are

• Melody
• Harmony
• Rhythm
• Form-Structure.

Melody: To get in to it I had to learn how a melody is build. Learning basic composition methods and forms like motifs formed in a period or as a sentence, motivic and thematic development and transformation was helpful to getting a better understanding of how Phrases come together and finally build a recognizable melody for our ears.

Harmony: Harmonics give our music a special mood or emotion. It somehow is the backbone of our structure together with the Rhythm. Knowing harmonic functions such as tonic, subdominant and dominant which are the most common harmonic functions and how to use them in a song makes it so much easier to get a song where it should go.

Rhythm: Rhythm is a dancer! And really your Rhythm is setting the movement of your song. Should the song make people want to dance to it? Than probably finding a good rhythmic pattern is close to the top on your to-do-list. Be competently in harmonic functionality and know how a 4/4-bar order 3/4-bar of quarter notes can be filled up and how rhythmic can add life to your arrangement. 

Form-Structure: A-B-A-B-C-B – know that kind of analysis? It’s probably the most common arrangement in Pop music. But knowing that your song should have a solid structure and development within the song and how to achieve that is one of the main parts of songwriting. Use the named parameters melody, harmony and rhythm as your building tools to get the structure how you think the song needs.

My Skills

Music Production

Here you deeply go into the technical aspects of music creation. We can break down the production process into 4 big steps:

1. Recording
2. Editing
3. Mixing
4. Mastering

1. Recording: Have finished Songwriting and created a good arrangement? Then It’s time for recording! Usually that happens in a studio because for stunning recordings you generally will need proper acoustics, the right microphones, amps, positioning and so on…Since digital music production is become a standard in the recording industry, overdubbing and homerecording are getting used much more and also sound more and more professional even with budget gear, which make it easier for amateurs to get their songs done without spending much money but keep in mind that you may just want to get a rough recording at home and get it right in the studio for the really best result.

2. Editing: When your records are finished and saved it’s time to clean them up! Try to correct inaccuriaties and polish the most out of the tracks without getting to far in the mixing process. (Re-)Arrangeming, comping, noise reduction, pitch and time editing are some of the most common editing tasks. In modern DAW you get some powerful tools and you comparatively easy can process your material so that it all fit well together.

3. Mixing; After all editing is done, it’s time to form all tracks together so they sound as one unit. Because mixing is so versatile in its possibilities it’s also seen as an art for itself. Mixing is all about BALANCE: Getting the right balance of volume, panning, dynamic, reverb etc. is the key of mixing success. For a mixing engineer it’s crucial to have very in-depth knowledge of instruments, how their sound distributes in the spectrum of frequencies, how to deal with masking problems, phase problems and beware of acoustic influencing in terms of sound modification of your mixing room, ear fatigue after long time hearing to songs, the dynamic perception of different frequencies at different levels…It’s so much to take care and beware of that really many musicians struggle on mixing their music on their own. It’s probably a good idea to get someone professional how already have experience in mixing sound.

4. Mastering: Mastering is the end step of the technical processing chain. After you have a finished mixdown of your track, a mastering engineer is getting on the track and enhance it even more. It’s customary that the song is getting fit to his type of genre in terms of loudness, frequency balancing and stereo imaging. Don’t get to fast on this! Easily you make things worse than better what will ruin the work of all steps you took before. Before finishing the track, it will need to get the appropriate sampling rate of 44,1 kHz and Bit-Depth of 16 bit which is the standard setting for CD but also continues as standard for streaming.

My Skills

Business

Seeing music production as whole, you should have in mind that it takes more than the musical and technical music production itself. In business language we would speak from the real production process in the primarily process. To make sure we make decisions effective and efficient it’s necessary to have a management system which controls and leads all the production steps in order that they fulfill their part to the planned strategy of the business. There is nothing different in the music production business. Business Management at least has these five most important functions:

1. Planning
2. Organizing
3. Staffing
4. Coordinating 
5. Controlling

1. Planning: You have a goal that you want to achieve with your activities, right? It’s better that your activities are seriously planned on how they help getting closer to your aim and get rid of all activities that are just wasting your time and don’t get you any further either. To make yourself a clear plan on what to do and how to do it, is the first step of managing your business and a very important one too!

2. Organizing: Set a plan for your music business? So, let’s get together what you need for your activities. A big part of management organizing is to set up your business organization. To make clear how the daily work process is made creates the fundament of your company. If the structure of your product process tends to be too complex for one person to handle it efficiently, you want to go ahead with step 3.

3. Staffing: To achieve your objectives you may need to plan and control how to get the right people for the right jobs and steps. It’s not effective trying to do everything on your own. Coordinate more steps to the right people will help getting better results in shorter time. 

4. Coordinating: This step requires a lot of communication. You want to control that all your organizing and staffing activities work together well and get their needed information. It’s about right management and placement or replacement of your resources. 

5. Controlling: Finally, after everything is set to perform it’s indispensable to control all your other management functions and to ensure that your operating system works efficiently and effectively. You may want to get performance indicator in your planning phase and comparing them once you have established your plans in your operating system with your real performance. The comparison of target and actual performance makes sure that you follow your plan and initiate needed changes. You will again start with Planning and let the other steps follow.