Willy Minnix: songland

Showing posts with label songland. Show all posts

Saturday, July 20, 2019

Check out my latest video on how to write better lyrics!

In this video I discuss five techniques that will help you improve your lyric writing. If you want more check out my book below:

Buy My Book!

Thursday, June 27, 2019

5 More Tips for Recording Vocals

Last time we talked about some tips that you can try when recording your vocals. This article I have a few more ideas for you.

1. Try a variety of microphones - When I was first starting out I was enamored with the idea of using a certain microphone for the vocals I needed. But after years of recording people, what I have learned is that each situation is unique, and certain situations call for different microphones to capture the situation the best. Sometimes that one special mic that you think is so amazing, just doesn't capture the sound for this particular performance like you think it should. So don't be afraid to try out different mics to see what they do for your recording.

2. Harmonies - When you are writing your harmonies, try using varying numbers of vocals. Maybe the harmony section only needs one voice. Maybe it needs 200. Who knows, and you won't until you try out a few different approaches.

3. Compression - Compression can do a lot for your vocal, but it can also be an interesting effect in and of itself. So experiment with varying levels of compression to see what works the best for the vocal you are recording.

4. Reverb - Almost everyone uses a little reverb on a vocal, but there are so many different styles and types of reverb, it would be beneficial to any budding artist to try out various types of reverb to see which one you like the best, and which works the best on the vocal you are recording.

5. Effects - Compression and Reverb aren't the only effects. Try out various effects on the vocals to see what makes them pop or what makes them blend in the way you want. They can all bring a different sound to the table and make your song unique.

So there are a few more ideas to try out when recording your vocals. If you found these tips helpful, you can find out more about songwriting tips and tricks in my new book: "Lyrics and Music: Music Theory for Aspiring Songwriters" available now at Amazon.com, or with several additional Appendices at Barnes and Noble.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lyrics-music-willy-minnix/1131960011?ean=9781987082982
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lyrics-music-willy-minnix/1131960011;jsessionid=6F73A94CC7BEF9C130CFFEF90E7B8008.prodny_store01-atgap06?ean=9781987082869
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1097464636
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RM9KZJY

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

5 Tips for Recording Vocals

Now that you have your song written and a good start on figuring out how you want to arrange it, you need to figure out how to how you are going to record your vocals. Here are five tips that will help you with your vocals.

1. Vocal Doubling - This technique has been used on thousands of recordings. This is one of the easiest technique to add some depth to your vocal lines. A cool trick is to use slightly different adjustments for each vocal. Perhaps make one version with the lows a little higher and the other with the highs bumped up just a bit. If you want you can also slightly panned left and right.

2. EQ - Speaking of EQ settings, don't be afraid to mess around with the EQ settings on your vocals. Adjusting the Highs all the way and everything else down will make it sound like an old transistor radio. Whereas, if you do the opposite and turn the lows up but the other settings down, it'll sound like you're in a very dead room or a hole in the ground.

3. Mic Placement - Feel free to experiment with mic placement. Sometimes putting your mic in a different place, or using more than one mic can give you an interesting sound.

4. Larger than Life Vocal - Double or Triple your vocal, then trim off a bit from one, and then increase the length of the other, just a tiny little bit, then pan one Left and the other Right, and leave one center. The resulting effect gives you a larger than life vocal, and if you add effects to each track, you can get some really interesting effects.

5. Accent - Try a different accent. You might move your voice closer to the front of your face, or back further into your chest. Using a slightly different accent can make your vocal pop when you need it to. Also, thinning out a vocal can help blend harmonies and other vocals that seem to stick out too much in a mix. By thinning out the vocal, I mean holding back on vibrato or other resonating techniques.

So there are a few more ideas to try out when recording your vocals. If you found these tips helpful, you can find out more about songwriting tips and tricks in my new book: "Lyrics and Music: Music Theory for Aspiring Songwriters" available now at Amazon.com, or with several additional Appendices at Barnes and Noble..

Monday, June 24, 2019

5 More Tips for Arranging Your Songs

In the last article we discussed the important process of arrangement of your songs as a way of finishing them for the recording process. In this article there are five more tips for arranging your songs.

1. DAW Set up - Some songwriters like to use their recording software to pre-plan each part of the song prior to recording. Using a DAW you can layout how many bars you want your into, verse adn chorus to be, and can even be used to give you a metronome or a basic drum beat.

2. Rhythm - While you are arranging your DAW for recording, you can spend a great deal of time creating and arranging different rhythms for various parts of the song. With just a click of a button, you can combine complex rhythms and make your song take on new heights.

3. Time Periods - Understand various time periods and styles of music to give your piece a certain bygone flare. A good exercise is to try to write and arrange songs from a wide variety of time periods. Make a version of a 20's jazz classic, or try a 60's psychedelic song. Maybe you might find that the 1950's is the time period for you and you will have a knack at that type of song.

4. Mix and Match - Once you get a good feel for a variety of time periods and styles, don't be afraid to mix and match various styles to see what you come up with. One of the fun things about writing songs is the experimental process that songwriters go through while creating and arranging them. Don't forget that playful experimentation can lead to greatness.

5. Effects - Experiment with arrangement effects like vocal doubling, lush string arrangements and other techniques to make your song sound over the top.

So there are a few more ideas to help improve your songs at the arrangement stage. If you found these tips helpful, you can find out more about songwriting tips and tricks in my new book: "Lyrics and Music: Music Theory for Aspiring Songwriters" available now at Amazon.com, or with several additional Appendices at Barnes and Noble..

5 Tips for Arranging Your Songs

So you've written a few songs and you want to record some demos. What do you do next. The important job of learning to arrange your song is the next part of the song creating process. So here are several important things you can do to help you get started arranging your song.

1. Intro - Create an amazing intro. A really catchy, interesting into will be very useful for you when you are beginning to arrange your song. If your song starts with the perfect into then it will grab the listener's attention and propel them to listen to the next section of the song. It doesn't have to have relation to other parts of the song, and can stand on it's own. Elton John's song "Your Song," is a great example of this. The intro stands alone, apart from the song, and was added in the arrangement process in the recording studio. However, it establishes the greatness of the song to follow, and is hard to imagine "Your Song" without the intro.

2. Sonic Treats - Plan for Sonic Treats throughout the song. The idea is that certain sounds will be used as ear candy just to grab the listener's attention for just a moment and also propel them to listen to the rest of the song.

3. Try various types of song forms - When you are finished writing your song, you might feel that you are finished and your song is in it's final form. But you might find that when you are recording it that you might want to rearrange the form of your song. Maybe it is better to start with the chorus, or to move the bridge to another part of the song. Keep an open mind and see what pops up in the arrangement process.

4. Song Parts - This brings up another topic, song parts. When you are working on your song, determine which parts of the song are really needed. Maybe you don't need a bridge, maybe you should add a pre-chorus. You won't know until you experiment a little.

5. Buildups and Dropouts - Plan buildups and dropouts for various parts of the song in order to give the song more dynamic range. By building up more and more instruments to a song, you create a larger sonic pallet, but when you drop out to just a couple instruments or voices, you change dynamics greatly and give something exciting for the listener to experience.

Arrangement is an important part of finishing a song, and a good arrangement can really help improve your songs. If you found these tips helpful, you can find out more about songwriting tips and tricks in my new book: "Lyrics and Music: Music Theory for Aspiring Songwriters" available now at Amazon.com, or with several additional Appendices at Barnes and Noble..

5 More Tips for Better Rhythm in Your Songs

5 More Tips for Better Rhythm In Your Songs

Today we are going to be looking at five more tips that will help your songwriting. As mentioned in the previous article starting with rhythm when writing a song is fairly unusual but can help you if you are stuck in a rut and need something to help give you inspiration. Here are five more tips that should help you use rhythm to break out of your songwriting slump.

1. Swing It! - If you have written a piece of music that has a relatively straight beat. You might give some consideration to adding a swung rhythm to it. Maybe it should be a little more bluesy or jazzy? If you try adjusting the rhythm by swinging it and it doesn't quite seem right, perhaps instead try anticipating the rhythm more like Reggae or some Caribbean styles.

2. Ramp Up the Tempo - One thing that you don't hear much on recordings is an advancing tempo. One example is "Changing of the Guards" by Bob Dylan. This song gradually increases tempo which coincides with the increase of apocalyptic nature of the lyrics. In the modern age of computer quantization, it is possible to work in a tempo increase, or decrease, in a song when you are recording it.

3. Compound Rhythms - If you want to experiment with poly-rhythms, but do not want the percussion of your song to sound to "busy" you might experiment with compound and poly rhythms within the various instruments of the song. By giving the guitar and the piano conflicting rhythms, or two guitars, or what have you, you can come up with some interesting fun combos.

4. Unusual Rhythm Instruments - You might want to try adding some unusual rhythm instruments to your song. Maybe try tapping on a glass of water, or recording the water dripping from a spout. Maybe when you make the recording of your song, you can use natural rhythmic sounds like crickets, or songbirds, as a back beat to your song.

5. Split the Rhythm - You can make a simple rhythm sound a little more complex by splitting the rhythm across a sampling of various instruments. Even the most complex rhythm can be split up using several instruments (and even non-traditional rhythmic instruments) to give it an interesting feel. Perhaps a repeated piano note, or a guitar note trading off with a bass note creates a cross rhythm that is interesting in the final recording. Experiment and see what you can come up with.

So there are a few more ideas to help improve the rhythmic aspect of your songs. If you found these tips helpful, you can find out more about songwriting tips and tricks in my new book: "Lyrics and Music: Music Theory for Aspiring Songwriters" available now at Amazon.com, or with several additional Appendices at Barnes and Noble..

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

5 Tips for Writing Better Chord Progressions

This post we are turning our attention to another important part of songwriting: Chord Progressions.

1. I, vi, IV, V is a good starting point - A lot of songs rely heavily on the use of the BIG FOUR, the I, vi, IV, and V (for those of you who are unfamiliar with those Roman Numerals think C, Am, F and G.) These chords are a great place to start writing a song that sounds "popular," because so many songs use these chords. And there's nothing wrong with starting there, but a really striking song will progress beyond these songs doing something to break out of the mold and make the listener more interested in the song.

2. Falling Chords - One of the quickest and most Beatles-y ways of breaking this mold is to use falling chords. The most popular falling chords are from the major V to the minor v. Or from the major IV to the minor IV. You can hear both of these in the songs "To Make You Feel My Love" by Bob Dylan, and the major to minor IV fall in the song "Don't Look Back in Anger," by Oasis. Other ways to fall include going from the I to the minor i. You can do the same if you borrow a chord, such as a major II and then dropping down to the minor ii, or the major VI to the minor vi.

3. Rising Chords - If you get bored with that technique, why don't you try raising the chords from minor to major? Easy choices are the ii to the II, or the iii to the III, or the vi to the VI.

4. Modal Borrowing - Now you're getting to be a pro at modifying your chord progressions, now try some modal borrowing. Throw in a bVII or a bVI or a bIII.

5. Copy the Classics - So now that you've learned how to do all of this, you might find yourself stuck for new inspiration. Why not go back and study some of the chord progressions that some of the classical composers used? Perhaps you will find a progression that does something unique and unusual that fits perfect with your song. John Popper did this with "Hook" by copying the chord progression from Pacabel's Canon. Oasis also did it on "Don't Look Back in Anger."

So there are a few more ideas to help improve your songs. If you found these tips helpful, you can find out more about songwriting tips and tricks in my new book: "Lyrics and Music: Music Theory for Aspiring Songwriters" available now at Amazon.com, or with several additional Appendices at Barnes and Noble..

5 Tips for Writing Better Lyrics

A lot of people want to write songs these days, but unfortunately a lot of what you hear on the radio isn't worth listening to. So what's an aspiring songwriter to do when there isn't much to inspire. Well, fortunately, there have been generations of great songs and songwriters of the past that we can look back on and explore some of their techniques. By bringing these old school techniques and looking at them afresh with modern eyes we will be able to add them to our songwriting tool box and make our songs much better. So here are five tips for writing better lyrics.

1. Read Poetry - I know, I know, conventional wisdom states that songs are not poems. Well, sadly conventional wisdom (and a lot of popular modern songwriters) are wrong. Songs are poems set to music. The best songwriters of all time were great poets: Bob Dylan, Sting, Paul Simon, Bernie Taupin. All of these guys knew how to make a great poem, and thus their songs were great because of it.

2. Get Out Into Nature - Whenever I am in nature, listening to the sound of waterfalls, or birds tweeting or crickets chirping, I can't help but be inspired. There's something about the restfulness of the wilderness that gets my mind in a songwriting mood. Maybe it'll work for you as well. Give it a try.

3. Practice Using Sensory Words - Sensory Words are words that turn on the senses. By using them they immediately make you feel something, or they illicit the memory of a feeling. These types of words tug at people's emotions and give the song you are writing real impact.

4. Read Songs As Poems - Go online, or get a book of lyrics from your favorite songwriter, and read their songs as if they were poetry. Strip them away from the music, and see what makes the lyrics tick. Maybe by doing so you will get some inspiration that you would not have noticed otherwise from just listening to the song as a whole.

5. Be Ambiguous - You don't need to spell everything out. You can allude to things without actually describing every detail. Also, by being ambiguous you leave room for the listener to insert their own ideas and feelings into the song, so that where you might have meant the song to mean one thing, to them it might mean something totally different. And that's ok, because it ministers to you both.

Bonus Tip:

6. Use Metaphors - Get good at using metaphors to describe other concrete things. Are you looking at a cat? Or would it be better to describe it as a "vestigial lion?" Is it an apple, or is it "Eve's Downfall?"

You can find out more about songwriting tips and tricks in my new book: "Lyrics and Music: Music Theory for Aspiring Songwriters" available now at Amazon.com, or with several additional Appendices at Barnes and Noble..