Karl Straub Songwriting: SPEECH AND RHYTHM

Saturday, January 31, 2009

SPEECH AND RHYTHM

I've been thinking a lot lately about how the rhythm of speech is connected to the rhythms in song melody. I'm not ready right now to talk about this topic, but here's a clip put together by Henry Hey, a guy who has obviously thought about it a lot more than I have.

Henry Hey, a jazz pianist (among other things) has a few more youtube clips, and a myspace page. www.myspace.com/henryhey I love that his influences include Ravel, Dvorak, and Dr. Teeth.
Big thanks to colleague Eric Brace for sending me this amazing item. I hope to find time to study it, and yammer about it later, but in the meantime enjoy!

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MY PHILOSOPHY ABOUT SONGWRITING

Songwriting is a craft. I admire people who can express their emotions honestly; it's not always easy to do. However, being honest about how you feel and writing a good song are not necessarily the same thing. There are many skills and concepts involved with writing songs; it's really a pretty complex activity. Even people who manage to do it intuitively with success are unlikely to consistently write top-notch material. Most of the best untrained rock writers, for example, tend to write their best stuff in their twenties and then their work dries up. There are exceptions, but I look at it this way-- if you think you have the kind of talent that John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix had, and that Bob Dylan has, then by all means keep doing what feels comfortable and ignore my advice. If you're a lesser mortal like me, I'd suggest that learning some compositional techniques, music theory, etc. can't possibly make your writing worse. It will involve a lot of work, though, because creating is hard work. I've met quite a few musical geniuses; all of them work very hard at what they do.

It may help to remember this: songwriting involves, among other things, melody, chords, lyrics, rhythms, structure. A two-minute song includes a lot of different elements, and getting them all to work together is not easy, it never has been easy, and it never is going to be easy. Maybe once in a while you get lucky, or inspired, but you don't have to wait around to hit the lottery-- you can get to work right now, today, if you have a little bit of training. There are countless amateur and professional songwriters out there; most of them have little or no knowledge of the craft. It doesn't hurt to have a leg up, if you want to get noticed in that massive ocean of songwriters. Even a little bit of training gives you an edge, and makes you more likely to be the best writer you can be.

Lack of free time means it's taking me forever to get all the material up here that I want to; but if you have a question or an idea for an article topic please email me at karlstraub@hotmail.com. If you're interested in my songwriting classes, I'd love to hear from you.

Karl Straub Songwriting

Saturday, January 31, 2009

SPEECH AND RHYTHM

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