Mark JW Graham: Singing Lessons Nottingham
Mark is the Midlands' leading Certified Voice Coach, providing professional singing lessons in Nottingham. Mark is known for getting BIG results in voices, fast. – 0115 871 7660 || admin@markjwgraham.co.uk
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Before we go any further, let’s recap some of the material I’ve covered from the workshop with Rhonda Carlson.
In part 1 we established the importance of a specific backstory. This enables you to inhabit the story the song is already telling, and give it nuance and a personal connection.
Continue reading “Performance Tip #3: How is your WHO reacting when you sing? (Rhonda Carlson Workshop)”
This is a beautiful song. Really well crafted, beautiful quality to the voice, contemporary but classic melody… certainly a twist on what is a standard melody right now.
As an experiment for you, try listening to it from the start, then once about 8 seconds in. Dropping that extra round of chords from the beginning makes it into a totally different feeling introduction… and I prefer the shorter intro!
Came across this recently. Really enjoyed hearing some stripped back acoustic music – hope you do too!
I’ve posted about Ralph Murphy before, and here he is again with another up to date seminar on ‘How to write a hit!’.
Now, you don’t have to be a songwriter or fan of mainstream music to appreciate what Ralph is talking about.
Every year he goes through the top hits from the pop (and country!) charts, and establishes what they have in common to give you not just the profile of the most successful songs, but because it also give gives you the profile of average listener who actually BUYS all this music.
Regardless of what you think of the music industry, this is a FAB introduction to understanding the mechanics of songwriting and how hits become hits. It’s far more complicated and skilful than you EVER realised.
In previous blog posts on songwriting I’ve covered various topics, namely just getting something being a great way to get good songs quickly, how writing about anything or nothing allows you to get the creative juices flowing, and how to…
This time I want to tackle something from a more philosophical perspective.
One of the most common comments from students who claim to be songwriters is that they hate waiting for songwriting inspiration – and that it seems to be months between inspired creative bursts.
I learned this the hard way:
Don’t wait for inspiration.
Now I’m not saying that inspiration isn’t helpful, particularly songwriting inspiration, that moment where you have an inkling of an idea and you can’t wait to have a free moment to get it out of you, or those times where you have a topic you’re burning to write about that spurs you to a complete song in an hour or two… However, every songwriter will tell you that those unprompted moments of focus and unbridled clarity for songwriting inspiration are infrequent at best.
The reality of life is, we’re rarely as inspired as we dream we should be or could be. We often sit down ‘waiting’ for inspiration to strike, as if it’s the universe’s fault we’re just not inspired.
Contrary to this common artist’s mantra, the answer is NOT to wait for songwriting inspiration to strike, as you may as well be waiting for the rest of your life. The answer is simple, and straightforward, but not easy.
The answer?
Write little and often, and do it regularly, with or without songwriting inspiration, whether you want to or not
There are a number of great books like ‘Outliers’ and ‘The Talent Code’ that tell you about how the most skilled people in particular fields have spent around 10,000 hours on that skill. While those people will undoubtedly have great focus and determination, their greatest asset their drive to just get down to doing their particular activity every day – whether or not they feel as inspired as they should be. Athletes, musicians, inventors… songwriters… we all need to get down and do it, and do it often – that’s how you get good at it. With or without inspiration. Like most things, the path to being a great writer is plagued with things you don’t want to do in the first instance, but are necessary to progress to the next level.
Trust me, it works!
One of the more interesting songs I wrote I was forced to write in preparation for a songwriting workshop I was going to. It had been a whole month since the last one and I’d been inspired in two or three different ways and so had two or three 80% complete songs. However in the whole month I just couldn’t locate the songwriting inspiration to finish them. In the end, I wrote a song out of sheer frustration in the last 20 minutes of a train journey home just before the workshop. In reality it wasn’t as good as I felt the other songs could’ve been if I’d finished them, but it was a self contained song. Self consistent, strong lyrically and melodically, but it wasn’t written from a place of inspiration, rather it was written from a place where I had a complete LACK of inspiration. However, it was the skills I’d been developing through regularly writing and sharpening my writing skills that allowed me to write a song, almost devoid of inspiration, that was still relatively strong as a song in its own right.
What is the essence of good songwriting? How does songwriting inspiration come into this?
So then, if someone can write a decent song in 20 minutes without any strong level of inspiration striking, what does that say about the essence of songwriting? Maybe that’s too broad a subject… what does it say about the importance of inspiration in writing a good song?
In my opinion, inspiration is the icing on the cake of determination – it can really enhance the flavour of the cake, but its the determination that is the minimum necessary component to make it to a complete song. I’m not a huge fan of cheesy metaphors, but inspiration is nothing without the drive to execute the inspiration through to completion. And this is so true when it comes to songwriting inspiration.
So I’d challenge you, if you’re feeling a lack of inspiration, don’t let it get you down. Just write, do it little and often, and know that you don’t need to wait for inspiration to strike before starting writing, as you can always infuse some afterwards.