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SSG Year 10 Week 19 - or 18 extended

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(@nicktorres)
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Joined: 16 years ago
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Everyone did such great work up to last week. What happened to you all? Well I'm not giving up on you. For those of you who finished last weeks task, excellent work. For the majority who didn't, we are extending last weeks assignment through this week.

Come on now, the hard work is mostly done. Get those rhymes and synonyms and lets finish this thing. You'll be happy you did.

Here's last weeks assignment again:

Wow! What a great response this past couple of weeks has seen. There are some great ideas and detail out there.

This week, we are going to take another little step or two

First we want to use the handy dandy thesaurus and/or rhyming dictionary

http://www.rhymer.com
http://www.merriam-webster.com

Read over your stuff and put the central ideas and images in both the rhymer and thesaurus. Post the rhyming words, add any new ideas the thesaurus gives you. Start thinking about clever turns of phrase or couplets, but DON"T WRITE THE SONG. Anything else you come up with is fair game and post it. YOU ARE NOT IN ANYWAY OBLIGATED TO USE THE RHYMES OR WORDS FROM THE THESAURUS, just post them.

The idea this week is we are loading up our sonic palette of words and tone and coloring for the final song painting. We don't want to go beyond that though. We don't want to judge the value of the words yet as we haven't thought about storyline or structure. Be patient, two more weeks and I think we'll be done.

Good luck and good painting.


   
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(@hobson)
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Joined: 15 years ago
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As one of those who did the homework, I have to say that it was not fun. It was tedious. It was worthwhile, though. It's about learning a process. No surprise to me that there weren't more postings.

Renee


   
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(@jamestoffee)
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As one of those who did the homework, I have to say that it was not fun. It was tedious. It was worthwhile, though. It's about learning a process. No surprise to me that there weren't more postings.

As one who has not done the homework but has tried this method before, I'd agree with the statements....not fun....tedious....and worthwhile. As it is similar to Pat Pattison's method of songwriting, in his book Writing Better Lyrics, he says you have to go through the process about 10 times before it becomes easier, more natural and part or your collection of songwriting tools.

I've never been able to make it totally through the Pattison process from start to finish....I've always tried bits and pieces, but I am going to try to accomplish the process. :roll: s....tr..e....ch.....in........g!

My copy of Pattison's Songwriting Without Boundaries: Lyric Writing Exercises for Finding Your Voice just arrived yesterday, so I started that 14 day journey of object writing....one more attempt on my part to make a go at this type of pre-writing preparation.

I know I for one needed the extra week :wink:


   
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(@pearlthekat2)
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Joined: 13 years ago
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I have the same book about object writing. I don't find it tedious or boring. I can't make the time every day to do it and four fourteen day exercises can take forever if you don't do it everyday.

I'd liek to direct you to Objectwriting.com, also. check it out.


   
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(@nicktorres)
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Joined: 16 years ago
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Tedious? I always find this part frought with opportunity, new ideas and directions!


   
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(@andygetch)
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Fun for me too (otherwise why I am doing this?). I haven't made it through Writing Better Lyrics yet but bits of it have already helped. Object writing, different approach to rhymes, box building. I have taken many ways to write a song. This is the first time starting with a detailed fictional scene and building from there. There have been times when I start dictionary/word/rhyme diving it takes me in an unexpected direction.
Andy

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=1228093


   
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(@jamestoffee)
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Thanks for the discussion :D
Fun for me too (otherwise why I am doing this?)Tedious? I always find this part frought with opportunity, new ideas and directions! I don't find it tedious or boring.
I think it's great if you enjoy this style of pre-writing....I also think it's good that even though I don't enjoy it, I am going to give it a go because the process makes a lot of sense.....and it makes so much sense, I am willing to stick with it to make myself a better writer.....strengthen those challenge areas for me which is sensory details.

I also know for me the joy of songwriting is the marriage of an idea and music....that's why I write. But to be honest, I do get "stuck" in those moments where I am trying some stretched rhyming because I haven't laid out a word matrix and I am pretty confident that most of the songs I write that listeners don't understand is because of the lack of concrete and sensory details..........

.....so in all, I am not knocking the method at all. I think the method is great. If you are excited about this method, you already have a leg up and are on a pretty much sure fire road to getting songs pumped out; not having to wait on inspiration.

....I figure if I really try this for 10 songs and still feel this way, then I will have really given it a shot and can move on to try something else....but my hope is somewhere a long the way I will have an "a ha" moment and see the big picture of how to tap into sensory writing......cause a lot of what I keep reading points right back to object writing and sensory details for connecting with the audience.


   
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(@chris-c)
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As one who has not done the homework but has tried this method before, I'd agree with the statements....not fun....tedious....and worthwhile. As it is similar to Pat Pattison's method of songwriting, in his book Writing Better Lyrics, he says you have to go through the process about 10 times before it becomes easier, more natural and part or your collection of songwriting tools.

Hi James,

I also have Pattison's book Writing Better Lyrics and I admit that the word “tedious” occurred to me too. :? It somehow seemed rather contrived and laborious, and also felt like it was reducing something that I find magical and fun to a schoolroom exercise. Yet it clearly works for some people and if you take it line by line the advice certainly all seems very good. It would be hard to disagree with anything he says, and at least one of his students has had great success with it. So I did wonder if I should work at shifting my initial bias and bash away at it until it became another tool in the box, or just accept that there's no one way to write and that mine is different to his?

Perhaps there was a clue in his “other hat” as a poetry professor? He did seem prone to spinning out every point to lecture length, and his strategies seemed very tuned to being able to produce stuff that was “poetic”, “colourful”, and grammatically aware, in a ‘Creative Writing 101' fashion.

I think that the point (as you say too) is that he's offering tools rather than a template for writing songs. As he says himself “Object writing prepares you for whatever writing you do. It is not a substitute.”

My guess is that a lot of readers/posters could miss that point though and get hung up on the process of writing flowery descriptions, word lists etc and then wonder why they still didn't get an actual song out of it. Perhaps that's why there are lots of lists here but not that many signs of songs springing to life, except from those who can already write them to order? Pattison also seemed so determinedly focused on the grammatical and technical use of words that I began to wonder if he was ever going to get around to discussing the fit between words and music (I think it was Chapter 14). To me, the major difference between poetry and song lyrics IS the fit with the music, and it's a much earlier priority when I write songs.
I think it's great if you enjoy this style of pre-writing....I also think it's good that even though I don't enjoy it, I am going to give it a go ...

I also know for me the joy of songwriting is the marriage of an idea and music....that's why I write.

“The marriage of an idea and music” nails it for me too. :D

My own feelings (based on when I get outcomes that are songs that I'm happy with) are that all these exercises could be useful in a technical sense but they don't write the song. They're the paintwork not the engine. Pattison clearly gives the reader some good clues on how to get some polished paintwork (especially if you like his version of a paint job), but he didn't give me the impression of a guy who you'd necessarily get to build your engine. It all felt a bit too much like trying to learn to make love by reading a medical textbook on reproduction. To put it another way he just didn't seem to rock. His methods would probably never have written something as simple as “You Keep on Knocking”, or indeed a big swag of basic but effective pop songs. That doesn't make his methods bad of course, but they may not be for all of us either.

I spent some time yesterday trying to work out what was different from the way I like to write. It boiled down to my desire to have two central things to write a song - a good idea and a rhythmic skeleton to hang it on (just like you it seems). I'll mess around for a while, in quite a random fashion, until something pops ups that I can build on. It's likely to change as I go along but I don't lose sight of the need for those two things. If I don't keep them in mind I end up with a lot of feathers but no bird.

EXAMPLE:
I didn't read all the posts here (too many piles of feathers for me...) but one post title caught my eye. It didn't take me more than a few minutes to write the core of two different songs based on the same title. One was a slow wistful kind of social commentary style song, and the other was a more upbeat story of lost love in unusual circumstances. In both cases all I had was some music and a three or four couplets that encapsulated the central idea. But that's the core of what I need. The rest is mostly carpentry work. I'd expand on the story, refine and extend the music, add colour, choose tenses, viewpoints, etc. If I got stuck I might chuck it back in the mental tumble-dryer and see if I could see any new angles, but if I did all that object writing and list stuff first it would have killed my interest long before I got to the song.

I think that your method is hard to beat (if I've got it right :wink: ). I think of it as probably a combination of looking at dozens of successful songs and working out how and why they pull it off, plus writing, experimenting, writing, experimenting, writing, experimenting etc for a few hundreds of hours until your own style comes to life. It's what I do anyway. :)

Cheers,

Chris


   
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(@jamestoffee)
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Hi Chris,

Thanks for the insightful input. :D
So I did wonder if I should work at shifting my initial bias and bash away at it until it became another tool in the box, or just accept that there's no one way to write and that mine is different to his?
As only you can answer that, but at least bashing away at it helps you clarify why it works or doesn't work for you......which you are already well on the path of self-discovery reading through the rest of your post. :wink:
“Object writing prepares you for whatever writing you do. It is not a substitute.”
Yes, I can see that if someone is writing A LOT as in every day.....this can help a person get to work quickly if they can get through the process quickly.....similar to building up speed when changing chords.....laborious until you can do it without thinking about it.
It all felt a bit too much like trying to learn to make love by reading a medical textbook on reproduction. :lol: :lol: :lol: I don't know how many kids he has....but I think that's getting off subject :lol: :roll: :wink:
- a good idea and a rhythmic skeleton to hang it on (just like you it seems).
Yes, we are birds of the same feather on that one.
In both cases all I had was some music and a three or four couplets that encapsulated the central idea. But that's the core of what I need. The rest is mostly carpentry work. I'd expand on the story, refine and extend the music, add colour, choose tenses, viewpoints, etc. If I got stuck I might chuck it back in the mental tumble-dryer and see if I could see any new angles, but if I did all that object writing and list stuff first it would have killed my interest long before I got to the song.
Ditto on that one....I find it hard to not think of the words and music together....each guiding the direction of the song.....each influencing what will come next in the song.....that's the "fun" in it for me...the experimenting.
I think of it as probably a combination of looking at dozens successful songs and working out how and why they pull it off, plus writing, experimenting, writing, experimenting, writing, experimenting etc for a few hundreds of hours until your own style comes to life. It's what I do anyway. :)
Yes, and I say kudos to Nick and Dave and Vic for all the experimenting opportunities that have been around SSG :mrgreen:


   
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