Impose yourself a deadline when writing a song

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today I would like to explore a topic that has been on my mind since long time, which concerns how long to be working on a song.
I have been mumbling about this question because the first conclusion could be "as long as necessary: sometimes a piece of art can take years to complete", but then I've seen situations like a friend of mine sending me the demo of a great song, then, 2 months after another demo with same the song radically changed, and then again after 2 months and so on... Eventually 2 years later the band broke up, they never finished that song and the latest iteration was way worse than the original one.
They had just come to hate the song and lost completely any objectivity about it.

The conclusion is that yes, it's important to refine all the details of the song like it's a painting, as much as needed (yes, even if you do the rawest punk rock), but it's equally important that the first intuition, the first burst of creativity when we write a song usually is the least mediated by our reason, and usually it's the best part, so it's probably a good idea of writing down and preserving these more "inspired" parts and to limit the "craftmasnhip" side as little as possible, only to fill the gaps between the quick ideas, otherwise we will come up with an overcooked piece of music that taste like nothing.

The aim should be to get to know the right time to "let a song go", meaning to consider it finished and publish it, so we can focus on other songs, and this is sometimes a hard task for a perfectionist, therefore some songwriter came up with the idea of setting yourself a deadline: "I'm going to work on this song for (for example) 4 sessions, and one month from now I will consider it finished".

This can be a good exercise: one can actually work on the song for example on the weekends for one month, and keep the other days of the week for listening to it with fresh ears, in order to understand what is there to correct, or whether the song is bad and needs to be scrapped, and then at the end of the month the song should have received enough "debug" to take a final form.
If the final form is still not 100% satisfying, it's time to demolish the song, salvage the usable riffs and put them in the warehouse in case we need to complete another song.
For someone the 1 month deadline can be even too long, so they can prefer a 15 days deadline, or a 7 days one, it all really depends on you and your creative output.

One final note: we have talked about deadlines for individual songs but this doesn't mean that we can be working on 2, 5, 10 songs at the same time, each one with its own specific deadlines!

Did you ever try this technique? Let us know in the comments below!

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Ep, Demo, Single, Lp, Full Lenght, Mixtape, Split, live album, box sets, what are they?

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are going to see a small glossary with the definitions of words that often are used in the music environment but that not always are so easy to explain: here's your cheatsheet.

Demo: a self produced record to be used for promotional purposes, which can have any number of tracks, but on average it features 2 to 4 songs. 

Single: a recording of 1 to 3 tracks, with a runtime of less than 10 minutes which contains the main song and one or more B sides. It was very popular in the past, as it was used for radio airplay purposes. Today the concept of single is more tied to the release of a video in the streaming platforms.

EP: it means "extended play", and it usually features 4 to 6 tracks, with a runtime of less than 30 minutes.

LP/Full Lenght Album: "long play" is referred usually to vinyl records, "full lenght" is for the other supports, and it features any number of tracks, with a runtime longer than 30 minutes (but there can be also exceptions, for example Slayer's Reign in Blood is an LP that lasts 28 minutes).

Split: it could be, according to the duration, either an EP or a Full Lenght, but it consists into two or more bands putting their songs together in the same record in order to split the production and distribution expenses and to promote themselves to each other's audience. If there is a different artist for each song, that it's a Compilation.

Mixtape: a serie of recordings (it doesn't matter the number of tracks) usually released for free for promotional purposes, which does not necessarily contain only original material but also covers, remixes, B-sides and so on (for some reason mixtapes are used mainly in rap and hip-hop though).

Live album: the recording of a live performance, usually of songs previously released in studio version.

Greatest Hits/Box sets: collections of previously released songs, usually united with some rare or unreleased bonus material, such as medleys, a cappella versions, alternate lyric versions, live, covers, acoustic version, remixes and so on.

I hope this was helpful!

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A-side and B-side in albums and singles

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to elaborate more on our songwriting articles specifying something about the perfect composition of a tracklist (click here for the original article), as my friend Zoltan suggested.

A-sides and B-sides are a thing of the past: they come from a time in which the physical support for music came with 2 sides (vinyls and cassettes) because there wasn't enough room to store one whole album all in one side.

Why is this relevant still today? Because, historically, quoting Wikipedia: "The A-side usually featured the recording that the artist, producer, or record company intended to receive the initial promotional effort and radio airplay, to hopefully become a hit record". Basically the producers wanted the radio hosts to listen to the best songs first, and then, only if they wanted, to deepen the knowledge of the artist by flipping the side and listening to the other material.

This rule applied mostly when talking to singles: the artist would relase a single, which is a record with the main song to be promoted for radio and tv airplay, and on the flipside there would be another song or two considered by the label as "less catchy" but usually part of the same recording session.

When talking about full lenght records instead the situation is slightly different: it's true that usually the album presents its best shots in the first side, but the second side, which usually contains the same amount of songs, needs to be perceived with similar dynamics: it wouldn't have sense to put 5 fast songs in the a-side and 5 slow ballads in the b-side, the b-side needs to have some good song too, and a good mix in dynamics to keep the listener engaged until the end.

One final mention goes to the rare "double A side", a single in which both sides are considered to be the song to be promoted (for example in the case of Queen's Bycicle Race/Fat Bottomed Girls single).

Today, in an age in which the concept of "side" doesn't have meaning anymore, we say "B-side" to refer to something that the artist or the label consider secundary, and it's usually some bonus songs like live versions, alternate versions, demo versions and so on, which are used to enrich certain particular editions of a record.

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Songwriting tips: how to write a good song - part 3/3

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Moving on with the construction of our song we have arrived to the moment of the arrangement, a word that means a universe and that we can summarize as "the dressing for our dish of pasta": we can leave the pasta completely without anything, or add just a bit of oil and salt, or we can go crazy with the most complex sauces and dressings, to the point that the pasta doesn't even have its original taste anymore.
All of these choices are completely legitimate, and the arrangement will turn out to be almost a reflection of our psychology, of what we actually want to express beyond the lyrics and beyond the pre-costituted conventions in terms of lenght, structure or chord progressions.
The musical variations that we will impress to the main melody (this is the basic definition of arrangement) will make the song minimal or baroque, will transmit to the listener feelings of happiness or sadness, thrill or relaxation.
Click here to know more about arrangements with our in-depth article.

The concept of choosing, giving an imprint, which is typical of when structuring and arranging a song, is the core value also of creating the tracklist of our record: the sequence of the songs it's a flow that must leave the listener wanting always for more, the various moods needs to be alternated and the record, if we want to make a classic that is listened from the beginning to the end without pauses, needs to follow certain proven rules in terms of distribution of the various dynamics (for example it doesn't make sense to put all the slow songs one after the other and then all the fast ones, because people would get probably bored).
Nailing the perfect tracklist is like dressing up, it's all about trying to draw the attention of the people on the parts that we know are good while "hiding" a bit the parts that we are least proud of, and this can be done also by predicting the parts in which the attention of the listener is higher and when it can be lower, or his/her ear fatiguing, assuming that he's listening to the album from the beginning to the end.
This and other informations can be found in our article about how to build the perfect tracklist for our record.

The final suggestion of this article is something that adds up to the building of the perfect tracklist for our record: building the perfect live setlist.
Once our album is ready and the band is all fired up to take it live, it's important also here to spend some minute in deciding the perfect setlist for the gig, since the live public follows dynamics that are different from someone who listens to the album from the bed, therefore we shouldn't just repeat the same tracklist of the record.
The audience live usually comes to be more entertained, so we need to keep the setlist on an average a bit more energetic, and to be able to regain the attention of the crowd if we see it's declining: Click here to read our article with 5 tips on how to compose the perfect setlist for your live gig!

I hope this was helpful!


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Songwriting tips: how to write a good song - part 2/3

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So far I have assumed we're writing a song based on the melody, but the inspiration can easily start also from the lyrics: in any case (unless we're writing an instrumental song), sooner or later we will have to focus on whatever the singer will have to sing, and this to some is the easiest part, while to others it can be excruciating.

Writing song lyrics is directly related to the comunication abilities of the songwriter: singing is like writing a poetry, it starts with the basic communication skills but it has much more freedom than writing a normal text, and it's one of those cases in which breaking the language rules is allowed.
Nevertheless writing EFFECTIVE lyrics it's an art that it's been refined since literally millennia, and through the time the artists have developed some good common practices that can still today be used successfully: click here to read 6 tips to write better song lyrics.

Another staple of a song is the riff.
When we hear the word riff the first thing that may come into our mind is usually a classic rock riff, like an AC/DC one, and without any doubt rock, metal, punk etc are all riff based types of music in which the guitar plays a part that repeats and on top of which the lyrics are built, but we can say riff by extension also when talking about other genres of music, for example electronic music or rap, referring to the part of the base which repeats (sometimes it's directly a percussion loop).
Nailing the "riff" is fundamental, because this part will probably repeat in the song much more often than any vocal part, therefore it needs to be cool, fresh and not annoying to the ear.
If you want to know what I mean, check out the 10 best Rock/Metal riffs of all times.

Until now we have talked about "writing" in an ample way, but how do we actually put down the music we're working on?
There are basically 3 ways:
1) by recording it (click here to learn how to record a song).
2) by using musical notation, which means using the classic music sheets with staff.
3) by using tablatures.

A tablature is a way of writing music on paper (or also in MIDI if we're using a computer) which replicates the fretboard of a guitar or a bass, so you can choose the number of strings and then you can write on each string which fret to press.
Written like this it sounds very limiting, but in the recent years music written with tablatures has become very popular, because it's easier than notation, and because with the use of modern softwares it's possible to write music accurately for any instrument and to export it also as MIDI, so you can read it and listen to it at the same time.
A free software that can be used to write tablatures is TUXGUITAR, click here for a dedicated article.


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Songwriting tips: how to write a good song - part 1/3

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we start another of our omnicomprehensive articles for the "start from here" serie in which we will gather the best songrwiting articles written so far for this blog.

How to write a song?
Asked this way the question makes little sense, because all must start from the inspiration, from having something to say.
What this article is about is how to take an idea, a concept, a message of any kind (it doesn't have to be necessarily something too complex of phylosophic, it could be as straightforward as "I love you") and turn it into a song, analyzing some inspiration sources and giving some tip on to improve it and make it more effective.

Let's start from the basics: we need an idea. If you have stumbled upon this article, it means that probably this idea is not quite there yet, but don't worry: you just need to tune your antennas to the right frequencies to be able to hear in your inner ear some melody that does not exist yet, but that is already there, up in the air, waiting for someone to find it and turn it into actual music.
This is a theory that many artists believe (for example John Frusciante of Red Hot Chili Pepper): the one that the artist is just a "medium" that can hear or see something the others cannot and that his/her role is just to make material something that is already there in another plan, but whether you believe it or not, you need to get your ideas going, and not always this is easy: click here to read 5 ideas to make your music creativity running.

Now that you have some song stub, such as a chorus, a riff, some phrase for a verse, it's time to start putting together the pieces of the puzzle.
Building the structure of a song is an art that involves taste, a bit of knowledge of psychoacoustics, industry standards, hard choices and summarizing capability.
To find out how the songwriting professionists reason when putting together a song, check out this article with the most famous song structures in modern music.

Once we have a more or less stable structure that doesn't have boring parts, it's time to focus on what usually is the focal point of the song: the Chorus.
Usually the first part of the song before the chorus is a buildup, like a petting that grows of intensity until it reaches the climax, and if we want the climax to be memorable, the chorus needs to have something that stands out from the rest and remains in the mind of the listener, which could be lyrics, sound, a change in dynamics (the song is quiet and the chorus is loud or vice versa), or anything else: click here to read 5 songwriter tips to make your chorus more effective.


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Pan automation, how to use it and why it matters

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
Today we are going to elaborate more about the topic of panning (click here for the basic article).

Let's start from this assumption: if a mix is 100% stereo all the time, then it's never really stereo.
What does it mean?
That also the space disposition of the mix elements it's part of the arrangement, and we should use it to our advantage, to create dynamics and excitement in our songs as much as with all the other tools.

The use of pan as an arrangement tool is often heard in pop productions, when in the verse the arrangement is minimalistic and the song opens up during the chorus: more vocal lines adds up, maybe more instruments or a distorted guitar, the drums becomes more explosive.

Let's start with this example: we have in our song an acoustic drumkit, and the overheads are two mono tracks which takes more or less the whole drumset, but especially the cymbals.
We can create a pan automation track (in Studio One is particularly easy because it suggests you right away 2 default automation tracks: Pan and Volume) for each of the 2 OH tracks and keep them quite narrow during the verse (40% left one and the other 40% right, for example, or even less), then when the chorus hits we can make them 80% on each side, and same we can do with the left and right guitar tracks.

To create an automation we need to click in the pencil tool and create in the line a point where the setting of the pan needs to change: we draw it at 80% during the chorus, then we draw it back at 40% during the verse, in our example.

Does it work? Does it create some appreciable change? If we want we can try moving slightly also other stereo elements of our mix to create some extra dynamism, but, as always, let's not overdo, otherwise the final results can get a bit confusing.

In order to succeed with a song is we don't need a ton of moves, but some strategic, well thought arrangement element that is noticeable and understandable.

I hope this was helpful!


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10 best rock/metal riffs of all times

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we are talking about one of the most subjective topics ever: the 10 best riffs of all times.
The criteria are not only obviously my tastes, but their impact in the world of rock and heavy metal, how much they contributed to make electric guitar popular in the history of music, and we will also try to break down a bit what makes them so memorable


10) Ozzy Osbourne: Crazy Train. This riff embodies the soul of '80s hard rock: it's fast, very melodic and happy, but at the same time heavy and catchy. It represents perfectly a time of guitar heroes (like Rhandy Rhoads, who wrote it), excesses and incredible live performances, and makes a very solid base in which Ozzy created his iconic vocal line. Still today it's extremely fun to play and countless bands copied its style.

9) Nirvana: Smells like Teen Spirit. This riff instead brought the grunge movement to mainstream.
It's very simple and has a certain hard rock vibe, but it's an incredible shopping window for the Nirvana music proposal, which is very personal with all its imperfections and the dark vibe. This is one of the songs that contributed the most in changing the tastes of the young audience from the '80s rock.

8) Rammstein: Mein Teil. This German band is another of those bands (like many on this list) with such a strong personality that it's hard to define in a specific genre, it literally brought to light a certain type of metal mixed with EDM (choice extremely courageous), and this riff is so groovy and well structured that is really hard not to nod your head while listening to it.

7) Iron Maiden: The Number of the Beast. Few bands contributed in making popular guitar music like Iron Maiden. The band offers a beautiful hard rock/classic metal by almost 40 years with incredible success, awesome choruses and solos, and they are one of the few bands with 3 guitar players. This song has one of the most memorable riffs ever written in metal.

6) Guns n'Roses: Welcome to the Jungle. Guns n'Roses took  the'70s hard rock lesson of Aerosmith and modernized it in the '80s, with a short first stint made only of 3 albums (if we don't consider the cover one) that had such a strong impact to make it one of the biggest rock bands of all times. This is the opener of their first album, Appetite for Destruction, and the riff is so catchy and the chorus is so effective, that it still sound fresh and actual today. A timeless classic.

5) Rage Against the Machine: Killing in the name. A band that took the sound of the '70 (especially the low gain, single-string riffs of Led Zeppelin) and mixed it with rap, an incredibly groovy rhythm section and lyrics infused with social protest.
This band became a cult in the '90s and still today their influence can be heard in contemporary music.

4) Korn: Freak on a Leash. Korn (together with very few other contemporary bands) redefined the heavy music from the end of the '90s to the beginning of the 2000: the minor, decadent atmospheres of grunge were slowly fading away, leaving place to the same type of young rage, but seen from a different point of view. The guitar tone is huge and with extremely low tunings, the vocals flirt with rap music, and the drum beat is funky and groovy. Their style brought new life to heavy music.

3) Metallica: Enter Sandman. Metallica is the biggest metal bands of all times, and is a band that not only invented thrash metal, but kept on changing skin through its long career exploring several genres, from doom (Devil's Dance) to country (Low man's Lyric). Enter Sandman is the opener of their self titled album, an album which had incredible commercial success but that had let down the most hardcore fans due to their opening to a more radio-friendly type of metal. Nevertheless Enter Sandman is still today one of the most iconic metal riffs ever written, and helped the band breaking the boundaries of the metal community.

2) Deep Purple: Smoke on the water. Smoke on the water starts with a riff that still today is studied by guitarists all over the world in their first lessons, because it's so known (even from those who doesn't know the band) that it's basically a standard. Its chord progression on the beat of the drum defined a whole generation, and helped Deep Purple becoming one of the most successful rock bands of all times.

1) Ac Dc: Highway to Hell. This song takes the first spot because Ac Dc is not only a band. It's an archetype. It's the archetype of '70s hard rock in its purest form, simple, straightforward, melodic, groovy, bluesy and timeless. The band in its 50 years of career never really evolved from its roots and also this contributed in creating their trademark, nevertheless it's undeniable that today Ac Dc songs aged much better than most of the other rock songs, because somehow this formula and this sound still sounds actual.

Do you agree with our list?
Let us know what do you think!


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5 Songwriting Tips to make your chorus more effective

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today I have gathered together some interesting tips on how to create a chorus that would work for our song, regardless for the genre (obviously these ideas needs to be worked and adapted according to the style).

It's important to say that this is not some sort of marketing technique, I don't believe in creating music or any form of art as one would create an industrial product; these are just ideas that have proven to be successful from where to start if we are crafting a song, but the most important requirements, the idea, the inspiration, are up to you.

1) A strong message: a chorus is called like that because, ideally, it would be the part of the song that recurs more often and that encourage people to sing it as a choir, therefore the message works better when it's simple, straightforward and capable of grabbing the attention of the listener.
There are several ways to obtain the attention of a listener: to use a very easy phrase, to use a question, to use terms that calls for a vocalization (for example the "woooh" in Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer"), or using an interesting word or a short phrase that makes the audience think.

2) Buildup and dynamics: As I have already mentioned in my other songwriting articles (use the meta tag to visualize them all), dynamics are crucial. To make a chorus really stand out it's important to put it at the right place in the song, so that the song is dynamic.
To make a song dynamic there must be alternation between quieter parts and louder parts, parts in which the drum beat is less strong and parts in which it's more in the spotlight, and more importantly for the chorus placement, there must be a buildup. In order to make a chorus effective there must be a pre-chorus that prepares the listener to the best part of the song like a wave: first there is the backwash, then the wave comes with full force.

3) Frequencies and tempo of the chorus: ideally, unless we are experimenting in the opposite direction (loud chorus and pre-chorus and super quiet chorus), the chorus is the part in which all the frequencies of the song explodes, so for example it is where, if a singer was singing the verse on a lower octave, he passes to the higher one.
Similarly as per the voice, we can set up the arrangement of the song to make sure the "hook" (the part of the song that grabs the attention of the listener) is in the chorus by using the frequencies that the human ear is programmed to prioritize, the ones of the human voice (around 2/2.5khz), by adding instruments (piano, strings, synths and so on) with octaves that gravitate also around that area.
On the other hand, in the other parts of the song, we can make the opposite: leave room for lower octaves, or, alternatively, we can use only thin sounds during verse and pre-chorus and let the mid-low end part of the song drop only during the chorus.
Finally, some famous producer likes to add 1 or 2 bpm to the chorus tempo: they say it's practically unnoticeable, but it gives the chorus an additional sense of upbeat that makes it even more energetic.

4) Choose the emotions to transmit: this suggestion is interesting because it applies to many forms of art, from writing a book or making a film, to composing a song;
it's important to have clear in mind the emotions we want to provoke in the listener.
You wouldn't like to see a comedy film that halfway, out of the blue, becomes a scary horror, and the same concept applies to a song: you need to have clear in mind whether you want to talk about something happy, melancholic, angry, and let the song soak into this mood, so that you will carry your feelings through the song (and the song will be more authentic), and at the same time the listener will connects more to it and it will resonate with his soul.

5) Chord progressions and alternation: many memorable songs have a theme that repeats during the various parts in different forms, but to make the song not repetitive it's important to spice things up: if the verse is fast and full of chord changes, a chorus with few slow open chords can bring balance to the song, or on the other hand a song with a slow verse can double its speed during the chorus to add energy and an uptempo feel to it. Don't be afraid to mix and match, to take the chords of one part and change their position to give the song continuity and variety, and, final suggestion: never stop creating.


I hope this was helpful!


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5 ideas to get your music creativity running

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
It's been a while since our latest songwriting article, maybe I had some songwriter's block myself, so I started thinking: what could be some effective way to win back some inspiration?
Here's some tip I think may be useful:


- Mix things up: try to look at your music from a different point of view; if you are a singer that writes starting from a vocal line try to start from a guitar riff, or from a drum beat. If you are only a guitarist try using a different guitar, with different sound features, or a different amp, stompbox etc. If you are a mix engineer try to ditch your daw, your favourite plugins and get out of your comfort zone: change daw, change plugins, start from zero just following the rules and your knowledge, all these small changes will help you seeing things from a different perspective.

- Take a pause: creativity is not (luckily) a "use it or lose it" skill, either you have it or you don't.
Sometimes we expect the creative flow to be constant, like water from a tap, through all our life and we get scared when it is not flowing ALL THE TIME.
Sometimes it stops because we have other things in our mind, or because we want to put these ideas into practice at a faster pace than they come. Let the ideas arrive slowly, don't push them, even if it takes months: every attempt in forcing them will result in uninspired, procedural music.

- Try to draw inspiration from other media: music is only one of the many forms the human creativity can be expressed: go to an art exposition, read a book (believe it or not the world is freaking full of AMAZING ones), go to cinema, explore the best videogames and you will notice that all these inputs will pour new mojo in your half empty musical ideas glass.

- Listen to a completely different genre of music: I know, all you want is to listen and play true norwegian satanic black metal, but, guess what, music doesn't end there, and you shouldn't take every other genere with diffidence.
Choose one or two genres at the complete opposite of what you are currently listening to and deep dive into them: try to understand them, to find out why people listens to them, what are the feelings those musicians wants to express with their music, you will find out the reasons WHY that music is being played, and you will find out that usually they are good reasons, and this experience will give you a fresh perspective also towards what you are currently loving.

- Change your environment: what we have around us influences our creativity and our perception of reality. Sometimes if everything around us is always the same we can end up with the same ideas, the same colours in our palette. I am not saying to move to another house, but maybe taking walks to different parts of the city, hanging out (or jamming) with someone different or having a vacation to some place different can literally make new ideas bloom into our mind.


I hope this was helpful!


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Free guitar tablature and notation software: Tuxguitar

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
Today we are going to talk about a free, open source songwriting tool: TuxGuitar!

Tuxguitar is a notation, tablature writing and songwriting tool, similar to the more famous Guitar Pro, but free and open source.
The software lets the user write in staff format (the one for classical music) and in tablature format (for guitars and bass), letting us choose tuning, number of strings and so on, and it features a real time midi engine that allows multitrack playback, so that the user can write also complex, multi instrument songs, using a variety of General Midi sounds (drums, classical guitar, distorted guitar, orchestra and so on).

The software lets us visualize a guitar keyboard or a regular keyboard and see the notes played in real time, import and export midis, and export the music sheet in a variety of formats, from to ascii, to pdf, letting us also import Guitar Pro files (but not the latest version ones).

I come from a generation of musicians that still likes to share the songs with the other band members by writing a drum track with a VstI and tracking on top of it the guitar and bass parts, and handing them also the tabs exported via pdf with this tool (here is a guide on how to make rough mixes super fast), but there is a new generation of guitarists that writes songs directly on these notation tools and hands the files to the other band members in order to give them directly the tabs and notations of all the instruments, using the integrated sequencer to create a song structure by copying and pasting the various song parts.
For some of these guys using a software like Tuxguitar is faster, more complete and easier to share, and probably it is the most rational solution.

Recording the guitar and bass tracks, on the other hand, gives us a clearer vision of what we can do and what we cannot, and the risk of not recording real instruments is to write parts that are completely beyond the musicians skills, so it's important always to keep in mind the band members when writing their part, or letting them write the part on their own.

Finally it's important to add that a drum track exported in midi format from Tuxguitar can be imported in any Daw and used with a Drum VstI, if someone feels more comfortable in writing it with the notation tool instead of the piano roll.

Thumbs up!


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5 Tips on how to choose a live setlist for your band

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today, following our article about how to create an album setlist, we are checking out some tips on how to build the most effective live setlist possible for our gig.


1) Lenght: as a first aspect we need to take in consideration the lenght. A 30 minutes setlist requires a different strategy than a 60 or a 90minutes one. For a short one we can push a little bit more on the impact side, if we have only 30 minutes it could be an idea to try to leave a strong impression playing only the most effective song we have. From a 60 minutes up setlist instead we need to start taking into consideration other aspects that we will analyze in the next points: fatigue, attention, dynamics, extra musical performances.

2) Fatigue: we are not robots, so playing a long setlist with high energy songs, especially in genres which are highly demanding in terms of physical performance as extreme metal or hardcore can result (especially for touring bands) in a not sustainable result, in the long run. This means we need to keep in mind that every couple of very fast songs for example the drummer might need a slower one to recover some energy, or the singer might need to start the concert with songs that are not extremely demanding in order to let his voice warm up properly before hitting that high pitch note in that song, or he or she might need a quieter song after a very tiring one to give his (or her) vocal cords some rest.

3) Attention: the attention of the audience is fundamental, and to keep the crowd interested in what is happening on stage should be the main task of the band. Usually the band, when it has some experience, knows more or less which songs are more effective (for example they have a particularly catchy hook or beautiful lyrics), which ones are less direct and maybe are enjoyed more when the listener already knows them from the record, and so on.
The band should choose a setlist that can blend together the songs keeping the crowd interested, considering that if you play a song that is very interesting opr known and that keeps the crowd wanting for more, they will probably be more receptive also in the next one, so you can maybe put after that a new song noone knows so they will focus on it. After the song they didn't know and that has forced the audience to focus in order to assimilate it, we could propose another popular one, or maybe a cover (even better if rearranged in our style) to give them back something familiar and raise again their involvement and attention, so that the crowd will be never bored, as it would for example be if our setlist would start with 5 very famous songs and end with 5 songs noone knows.

4) Dynamics: for a record, also live dynamics are fundamental. Starting with 5 very fast songs and ending with 5 very slow ones would make them completely ineffective as the audience would very easily lose interest this way. To know how to connect and cue together fast songs, mid tempos and slow ones is an art, which roots into being empathically able to connect with the audience mood and proposing a setlist that should predict and adapt as much as possible to what the crowd expects. After two fast songs maybe a third one would be uneffective, so a mid tempo could introduce some variation and increase the attention (consider that also the audience is subject to fatigue), after a slow song we could set the fastest one in order to wake up the crowd after the romantic moment.
The main idea should be to create movement, alternancy of moods and rhythms within the setlist, also to leave the audience an idea of a rich, non monotonous performance.

5) Extra musical performances: if you go to a concert of any headlining, high level band that performs a full setlist (for example 90/120 minutes), you will notice that there is not only music.
Most of the times there will be small breaks here and there in which the singer or other band members can talk to the audience, sending some message, or just some funny interaction while the others take a minute of break. This is a good moment to plug your new album or merchandise, to say a message to encourage, to use some props (Alice Cooper, Kiss and Rammstein are masters in this) or to pretend to leave the stage waiting for the encore, before performing the last part of the setlist.
This will add a different dimension to the performance (obviously it depends on the performer's charisma, so use wisely!).

Hope this was helpful, if you have any other suggestion let us know in the comments!


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How to build the perfect tracklist for your record PART 2/2

(Nine Lives, from Aerosmith, another excellent example of tracklist picking)

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- After the wave has crashed we can slow down in the fourth position with a slower, more reasoned song, also to create a change in the album dynamics and to give some rest to the listener's ears: this is a good place where to put some ballad or anthemic mid tempo.

- The fifth song (or in general the last song of the first half of the album) is the one that in the vinyl and audio cassette era was closing the first side of the album, therefore concluding a chapter and forcing us to get up and change side. This today has no meaning anymore but in terms of strategic disposition of the songs in the tracklist this could be a good place where to put a song that is not so strong (I don't want to say a filler because the ideal album should have no fillers), considering that it will be statistically one of those songs that will be noticed the less.

- The sixth song (or in general the first song of the second half of the record), similarly to the fifth song, had in the past a special role: being the first song of the second side it had to be almost as captivating as the first song of the first half. We need to win back the attention of the listener and navigate him through the second half of our record, since he trusted us enough to spend one hour of his life in listening to our music, therefore this position could be good for a nice, melodic uptempo that energizes the listener.

- The seventh song, similarly to the second, should make the listener recover from the blast of the sixth and prepare him to the final part of the album: this position often is reserved to mid tempos, or songs that can have the listener relaxing a bit.

- The eight place is probably the last one we can use for a second "single", intended as a song that came out particularly well and that we could use as a business card for our album: it is the moment of the album in which the listener that has arrived so far is deciding whether to stop listening or not, and we need to give him a good reason to keep going: this is a good position for a nice ear-candy, and statistically, if the listener finds a reason to arrive this far and he likes the eight, he will much probably arrive to the end of the record.

- The ninth song is the song in which we can experiment: do we have a song very different from the rest of the album, like sang by another singer, or played unplugged, or performed in a way that is very different? We can put it here as a gift for those who have arrived until here with the listening, without the risk of giving a wrong impression to those who were casually just giving a listen to the beginning of the album.

- The last song, finally, should be decided since the beginning. The idea would be to close the album with a reason, like the ending credits of a movie, so this is a good place for a song that is particularly long and articulated, or with a long fade out ending that gives the impression that the band will keep on playing that part forever. Some bands likes also to put here some connection to the beginning of the album, so that if the listener would play the album in loop he would find a circular connection between the end of the last song and the beginning of the first one.

And now click here for an in depth article about the A-side and B-side division!

Do you have other interesting tips? Let us know!


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How to build the perfect tracklist for your record PART 1/2

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
Today we will go on with our songwriting tips talking about the best ways to create a tracklist for your record: how to decide the order of the songs to make them effective and to keep high the attention of the listener.
Let's start by saying that a tracklist is a concept of the past: those of you coming from generations in which internet was not yet mainstream will remember creating compilations on tape or on cd, carefully picking the perfect tracklist in the perfect order to be the ideal soundtrack of our life, or to be a gift to our significant other.
Today people listens to music often by the phone, the computer or the car stereo with an usb drive, so they are not tied as in the past to a certain tracklist to be forcefully listened in order, but nevertheless an artist should create and suggest still today a certain sequence for his album to be listened, if he wants his message to be delivered in the way he intended it to go; then if his songs ends up in some Spotify playlist.... It's not a problem.

P.s.: why did I choose Painkiller of Judas Priest as a cover image for this article? Simple: because I think it is a perfect example of excellent tracklist creation skill.

Let's begin by saying that there is a difference between a single (usually 2 songs), an Ep (usually 4 or 5 songs) and an album (usually around 10 songs): the album lenght is different, the attention span in the first 2 cases is not a problem, because if the album is 20/25 minutes or less the attention of the listener remains high, therefore there's more freedom in choosing a tracklist: the important is to have an impactful beginning and an ending that sounds as a conclusion, that doesn't leave the work incomplete.

For a full lenght album as we have said the situation is more complex, and in this psychoacoustics can come in our aid, helping us in picking the right song order, making them flow one into the other gracefully.
Let's say we have 10 songs, each one 5 minutes long for a total of 50 minutes of music: our aim is to keep high the attention of the listener, to not bore him and to not make him change album; let's add also that in this example we are not talking about a concept album in which the songs needs necessarily to be played in a certain order because of the lyrics.
Last forewords: as always these are not fixed rules, it's just a collection of tips I've gathered through my years in songwrting experience, and by making reverse engineering on some of the best tracklists in the history of music.

Click here for an article that explains all the various types of record more in depth: Demo, Single, Ep, Full Lenght, Split, Mixtape, Live etc!! 

- Obviously we should start with the introduction, if we have one, or with the song with the most attention capturing first 20 seconds. Since the first song will be the one listened the most and will decide whether the listener will want to proceed in playing also the other ones included in our record we must consider it as the shopping window of our album; the first impression is crucial, therefore we must showcase the best that the album has to offer: the best impact, the best melodies.

- The second song is often overlooked, like the second page of Google: people is often still thinking about the first song, so the main purpose of this position is to be pleasantly connected to the first one, to consolidate the good impression to and prepare the listener to the big wave.

- The third song should be the heart of the album: we have done our introductions, now we can get into the real business. There is a reason why in many pop-rock albums the big single is at the third position: the listener is already hooked in the album, and this is the moment to serve the main course. In this position it is a good idea to place the best song we have, maybe a nice uptempo with a very catchy chorus.


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6 Tips to write better song lyrics 2/2

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3) Rhyme: I like to write my lyrics as a poetry, respecting rhythm, metrics and rhyme, because I think this helps a lot the song groove and adds a pleasant added value to the track. Rhyme can come in many forms, from the easiest AA, BB, CC... To more complex, concatenated structures. Check out the image on top for some illustrous examples, but there are countless others around. If you struggle in coming up with a good rhyme check out the RhymeZone website: you provide a word and it will list you a serie of words that rhyme with that, ordered by the number of syllables.

4) Alternate/repeat: rhythm is created by an alternancy between downbeat and upbeat, a sound that calls and a sound that answer, for example the alternancy between kick and snare in an Ac/Dc song, and the same technique is used conceptually also in lyrics.
There are songs in which we have for example an alternancy between one voice and a choir, e.g. "My Generation" of The Who. To insert elements that rotate, repeat or alternate inside a lyric can help creating dynamic and be memorized more easily, like adding a phrase that repeats in each verse, for example in the song "These Days" by the Foo Fighters.

5) The point of view: like when writing a novel, the point of view is fundamental. The lyric can be descriptive, like a documentary with a voice of a narrator describing the events from outside, or in first person. About the time, the lyrics can describe something happened in the past ("I used to love her", by Guns n'Roses) that will happen in the future ("I'll be there", by Megadeth), or something happening right now ("Unforgiven" by Metallica). Obviously also point of view and time can change during the song, as in the song "SK8R BOI" by Avril Lavigne: in the verses she alternates between a third person description of the male and female protagonists, then she enters the lyric first person towards the end.

6) The mood: there are bands which have made a career out of depressive songs, such as Sentenced, others which made a career only based on happy songs, like Aqua, some band speaks exclusively of love, some exclusively of rage and hate, and so on. The mood reflects what the band feels towards its art and often adapts to what a certain market requires, but if we see the greatest bands in the world, we will notice that at least most of them are the ones which haven't let the expectations of the market or the label to corner them: nobody is angry, depressed or happy all the time, and it takes a lot of personality to be able to express yourself in multiple registers, such as System of a Down that can range from a sad song like "Lonely day", to a comedic song like "Violent Pornography". Other bands that have produced high quality songs moving elegantly through a very wide range of moods and registers are Muse, Queen and Aerosmith among the others. Our suggestion is, if you care about the lasting of your inspiration, to not let yourself be clustered into a single mood but to be free of moving where your heart takes you without limitations: the quality of your music will benefit greatly.


Hope this was helpful! Have fun in writing great music!


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6 Tips to write better song lyrics 1/2

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we will talk about a very sensitive topic in songwriting: lyrics.

Lyrics are the story we are telling with our song, the message we are trying to transmit, therefore we should carefully choose what to say and how to say it, because often they are the most important thing in a song (as Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters once said "white people dance to lyrics"), and while on some music genre they can be also not the focus of the song (for example in certain death metal song like Children of Bodom, which doesn't even write them in the booklet and in an interview the singer was even surprised when someone asked him about them because he consider them completely secundary), more often than not they will decide the difference between a succesful song and one that will be completely overlooked (for example in pop, rock or rap music).

In all honesty there is no way to help you inventing from scratch a lyric, you should dig deep inside your thoughts and find some original idea, something impactful and that would be an interesting subject of discussion, or maybe even some good old commonplace like unrequited love, but seen from a fresh perspective, because there is nothing worse than listening to something boring or heard one thousand times. Another good source of inspiration are films, comics, videogames, books and everything else that can feed our thoughts. I, personally, like to write layered lyrics: I start with a deep concept, some aspect of my life or some message that I consider to be important, and then I build on top of it another layer of science fiction or fantasy or whatever, so that who listens can stop at the surface and enjoy the cinematic images, and if they want they can dig deeper to get to the profound meaning.

What we can help you with is the methodic-technical side, with this list of 6 tips to write lyrics:


1) Take a look at the structure of the song: how many verses? How many choruses? How many bridges or special? And lay down your story distributing it through the song as you are writing a novel: an initial part, a central part, maybe a twist that surprises the listener, a conclusion.
The song doesn't have to be long, you just need to be good in managing the economy of words, getting the message as powerful, fast and efficiently as possible, without watering it down.

2) Metrics. If you want to keep your song flowing and euphonic you must be perfect with the timing and the number of syllables, because otherwise the song will lose the groove. This is fundamental in lyrics intensive songs like rap, but also in pop or rock songs, in which lyrics are much shorter, the vocals must blend with the music and the groove, not kill it, if we don't want to sound amateur.
We can adapt to the rhythm below, using quadruplets, triplets or any other type of quantization required by the song, or adapt the flow to the words, the important is to sit gracefully on the beat. There are surely artists which defy the metrics rules, like the spoken word singers, or those who prefer to sing in a more theatrical way, but our suggestion is, before arriving to that, to master perfectly the art of singing on time.


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Tips on how to arrange a song 2/2

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Muse and White Stripes are two extremes, but they are also two manifestations of the freedom of arranging our songs any way we want; plus we must not forget that the type of arrangement of a song (especially in pop music) follows even more rules (as we have already seen for the song structure): every year more or less we can notice how radio songs follows similar arrangement, both in terms of sounds and melodies.
This is a wanted effect of psychoacoustics (the science that studies the physiological and psychological effect of sound on man): let's say that there is a pop song that has a certain success; once it is inside the head of the listener, it is much easier for the other similar songs to get catched from the casual listener, because he will feel like he already knows that song (even if it's the first time he hears it). A classic example could be Kesha's Tik Tok and Katy Perry's California Gurls, both aired in the same semester: they sound like two different arrangements of a same song.
This can sound like a casualty, but the truth is that producers want this effect to make the songs even more easy to listen.

Today? what are the tendencies in arrangement in 2016 pop music?
I have noticed a return in the use of old school samples of ethnic instruments like marimba, xylophone, pan's flute or certain ethnic percussions that were very popular in the early '90s and that today sounds quite unusual (therefore fresh), like in Sia's "the Greatest" or in Justin Bieber's "What do you Mean?". Who knows what will be the sounds of the next season?

Dynamics: another facet of arrangement is the management of dynamics inside a song.
A song can be all focused on low dynamics, almost whispered, to sound like a caress to the ears of the listener as in certain jazz songs of Diana Krall, or on the opposite the dynamics can be crushed to the max as in a brutal death metal song, in which the emotional tension is to the maximum.
There are also songs which alternate whispers to screams and loud parts to create a feeling of insecurity, like anything can happen, as in Nirvana's "Drain You".
The most natural way to play with dynamics and make a pop or a rock song euphonic is to consider the song like the waves moving in a shore: alternate moments of riptide to others in which the wave comes forward, without being extreme or unpleasant in any of these parts; the most common way to play with dynamics is usually to have a strong intro, then a verse quieter than the rest of the song, a bridge that creates a build up and a chorus that explodes, then the song implodes back in a quiet verse and starts all over (obviously nothing forbids to do exactly the opposite, what matters is the alternance that gives a sense of variety and emotional flow) and a great example is Foo Fighter's "These Days".

Additional awesomeness: an interesting example of arrangement that starts just with vocals and drums and keeps adding elements until it sounds full towards the end is Michael Jackson's "They don't care about us".

Another interesting element that we can find in some song by the king of pop but also in most of the most popular pop songs ever published is another psychoacoustic trick, which can be heard for example in the classic Black or White: some arrangement element (in this case a rattle that doubles the snare), that lasts for the lenght of the whole song and that doesn't add much to the song itself, used as a drill to get more easily into the head of the listener.
Some producer believe that this element is a typical example of sound put there to catch subconsciously the attention of the listener: it is particular, hidden and repeated for the whole song, and its job is to convoy furthermore the attention of the listener to the song without him even completely realizing the reason.

Someone consider this trick a cheap shot, other consider it fair game, but what is sure is that producers have often played with arrangements also to experiment unusual solutions, like the incredible verse of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven that can be listened also backwards resulting in a different song, or the ebm/black metal band Aborym with the song "Theta Paranoia", that uses certain synth generated waves to induce a particular state of mind.

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Tips on how to arrange a song 1/2

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today, moving on with our songwriting articles, we are going to give a general overview on how pop/rock songs are arranged.

Let's start by saying that this article doesn't want by any mean to be considered complete, it is just intended to give an overview of the various schools of thought that are applied when arranging a song.
The definition of arrangement is "the art of giving an existing melody (or base) musical variety".
This means all and nothing: in our case the meaning is that once we have decided the structure of a song and the basic chords, we can lay down (arrange) the layers of instruments that will be the content of the song.
Imagine the structure of a song like in its fundamental parts as a stage: the arrangement are the dancers that dance into that stage (for example a vocal verse, a guitar solo, a piano interlude).

What is essential when arranging is the Vision. If we don't have clear the direction of our song, there is no point in writing it, because it will come out unfocused: we need to know in advance for example the mood of the song: melancholic, triumphant, happy, angry, etc, then we need to have in mind the atmosphere and the feelings we want to transpose to the listener and with what and how many sounds, finally we need to lay down a list with the instruments we will need for our song.

Jack White of the White Stripes (and other bands) had a strict rule about songwriting, he "always centered the band around the number three. Everything was vocals, guitar and drums or vocals, piano and drums", meaning that for every element he wanted to add he had to take out another one from playing at the same time, because he knows that the less elements are there, the more they sound "big" and important in the arrangement.

On the other hand we have symphonic rock bands like Muse, which (like Queen) likes to stack up on some song a huge amount of vocal harmonizations and orchestrations, and the examples could be countless if we would go furthermore into the symphonic declinations of heavy metal such as Blind Guardian and Fleshgod Apocalypse: in these cases the number of tracks in the project can be even around 500 or 1000, and unavoidably the weight of each single track on the total would be hundreds of times smaller than one of the three elements of the White Stripes song.

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The most famous song structures in modern music

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we are presenting a new blog category: songwriting!
With these articles we are going to break down some of the creation processes behind the most successful songs in terms of chords, sound choices, structures and arrangements.

Let's start by saying that by no mean these article wants to become a guideline on how you should write a song: a song is an art composition, and the main content it should convoy is INSPIRATION, not following guidelines.
If you don't have a musical or lyrical message to deliver, it's totally useless to apply the most effective structure, the most common chord progressions and the most modern sounds: music is not marketing, and the "fake" products, those created just with the cookie-cutter are easy to spot and will never remain in the heart of the listener.

Let's focus on the most common song structure: a rock or a pop song is often composed by 5 parts:

A) intro: the introduction of the song
B) verse: the part in which the bulk of the lyrics are
C) bridge: the part used as a connection between the verse and the chorus
D) chorus: the fulcrum of the song
E) instrumental: a part of the song without lyrics, e.g. a guitar solo

By listening to your favourite pop/rock/metal songs you'll notice that statistically, the most common structure is A-B-C-D-B-C-D-E-D-D, or some variation of it (for example the first verse can be longer than the second one, or there can be a bridge before the last choruses after the instrumental).
This song structure allows usually the artist to get to the first chorus within the first 90 seconds mark, which is a standard in writing songs for radio airplay, and to keep the overall song lenght under 3/3.5 minutes, which is also another standard obtained by studying the average attention span of the casual listener.

Now, we know that most of the songs follow those rules to be more effective, but there are many others that prefer other structures. Some of them for example do add or subtract some element, for example by adding another part:

F) Special: a verse that is totally different from the others

Therefore another very common song structure that we could find is the following, with all its possible variants: A-B-D-A-B-D-F-E-D-D
This structure is without the bridge, therefore the song is more agile, it takes less to get to the chorus and the variation element is the special before the instrumental part, or sometimes replacing entirely it.

Let's now do a training with a couple of famous songs, let's start with a pop one: Baby one more Time by Britney spears. In this case we can clearly see a structure A-B-C-D-A-B-C-D-A-F-D-D
which is a very common pop variant of the classic structure, in which intro + special takes entirely the place of the instrumental part to make the song even more focused and vocal-centric.

Moving towards rock/metal territories, let's check out this beautiful Iron Maiden single: Flight of Icarus, one of the most famous songs of the band. In this case the structure is A-B-C-D-A-B-C-D-E-D-E, with two guitar solos alternating with the choruses in the last part of the song, since guitar solos are (unlike in pop) a trademark in heavy metal.

As you can see the most common structure can be found in many different genres, and we encourage you to listen to your favourite songs and write down the structure, then compare them among them and with yours: it's a very interesting exercise in understanding the various dynamics inside the songs, to learn what we can do to make our songs flow more effectively, and especially to learn that in this world the rules are made to be broken and completely changed!

Additional awesomeness: there are some particular bands of less commercial genres like progressive, djent or some type of extreme metal, who deliberately change the structure from song to song making them much more complex and articulated (but often less easy listening). The structures can have different type of verses rotating (es. Verse with riff 1, verse with riff 2, verse with riff 3...), or with more than one chorus alternating. Let's try to break down the incredible Make Total Destroy by Periphery: A-B1-C-D-B2-B3-B4-E-D-E-F-B5-B1 !!!


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