Songwriting projects

A year in the making, but it’s finally here. Crows, Rooks and Ravens is the album I co-wrote with singer-songwriter Andi Neate, released 19th March 2009. We started work on it in January 2008, and wrote/recorded around 25 songs, of which 10 appear on the album. It was a fascinating process, because Andi was in Edinburgh and I was in Bath, so we wrote all the lyrics online using Google docs, meaning we could update a lyric file separately or simultaneously. Inevitably it’s been a challenging journey, not least because Andi has never collaborated on a whole album before, and I have never written ‘remotely’ like this, but we both got a lot from it, and we’re proud of the result, and I think there are some finely crafted songs on there (but I would say that, wouldn’t I?!). The recording sessions took place in Bath and Edinburgh, with hard drives and musicians traversing Hadrian’s Wall by Parcel Force almost every week.

Andi and I started working together during the Burnsong project in November 2007 (see previous posts on the Vox blog) and decided to write and produce the album together a few weeks later. The demo process was as follows;

• Initial MP3 vocal/guitar idea or lyric fragment emailed
• MP3s backwards and forwards for a few iterations
• Lyric sheet developed as a Google doc and edited throughout
• I make a backing track and email MP3 to Andi
• Andi sings a vocal straight to MP3 recorder, with the backing track in her headphones
• Andi emails me this dry vocal MP3
• I sync it up with the original backing track and create a demo, adding my own BVs and other instruments (and never pitch correcting - Andi is a fine singer and always does another take rather than let me ‘go digital’ on the vocal!)
• We repeat this process a few times until we’re both happy with the demo, then we agree via email that the song is complete, and move on to the next one.

Sometimes we had three or four songs on the go simultaneously, which made things easier if a song wasn’t working, or we wanted to put one on the back burner for a while.

Here’s a video we shot during (a break in) the Bath studios sessions – an acoustic version of our song ‘Come Back Home’.

This is unapologetically nerdy and exhaustive, because the people who ask about this sort of thing often want lots of technical detail.

The hardware
During lectures I have my Mac laptop with me - it’s a standard Mac Powerbook running OSX and iTunes. This is connected to a VGA projector (see photo) and a mini-jack audio cable connects the Mac to whatever sound system we’re using (in the photo example we used a small mixing desk on the table, routed into the theatre PA system in the ceiling).

The library
My iTunes library is around 6000 MP3s that I’ve collected over the years from various sources. The computer is always live on the ‘net, so if someone in the lecture class wants to discuss a song I don’t have, I just spend the £0.79 then and there and buy it online.
Because I’m sometimes running a PowerPoint or web browser simultaneously, I like to be able to play and pause iTunes remotely in the background. Sometimes I use the Apple remote for this, but most of the time I prefer to use a background application called Synergy, which is a simple iTunes controller that provides play, pause, next track functions etc, using function keys.

Lyrics and MP3s - the background
We all know that despite many years of attempts by rights owners to prevent fans publishing song lyrics online, it’s possible to locate the lyrics to almost any song on the ‘net. But using a web browser to do this live in a lecture is inelegant, and distracts the class from the song. So I combine two techniques - MP3 lyric metatags and lyric widgets.

An MP3 metatag (or to get really techy, its ID3 metadata… stay with me, here - it gets interesting soon!) is simply a way that the MP3 file can have textual information or images (title, artist, composer, cover artwork and lyrics) attached to the file. iTunes has a really simple text editor - just click Apple-I on any iTunes track to bring it up.
So once the lyric is found on the ‘net and then pasted into the MP3’s iTunes lyric info window, it’s there in the file forever, right there on my hard drive. This works for MP3s and also protected AAC files bought from the iTunes Music Store.
So far so good, but that’s still a lot of hassle, especially if I’m running seat-of-the-pants lectures like this year’s SWF (where I asked every member of the audience to write down a choice of song for analysis, then downloaded them live in the classroom). And it’s also not very useful to bring up the Apple-I info window, because the font size isn’t big enough for the class to see on a projector.

The widgets!

In 2005 I discovered Mac OSX lyrics widgets. These are small applications that run in the background using Apple’s OSX Dashboard (i.e. they work with any Mac). There are several, but they all do essentially the same thing - display lyrics attractively on screen from the iTunes lyric data. But that’s not all. If they don’t find any lyric data, they automatically search the ‘net for the lyric, and then extract the text from the lyrics sites they interrogate, and paste it into the MP3 for you. All this happens live, in the background, meaning I can download a song (legally, of course) and then have the lyric embedded in it within less than 10 seconds.
I use several widgets, running concurrently, because they all search slightly different lyric sites. I’ve found that if one widget doesn’t find the lyric, another one will, and then the first one will simply pull the data from the MP3 itself (which will have been embedded automatically by whichever widget found the lyric online first). My current ones are;
Sing That iTune, Fire, Harmonic and the defunct but easy-to-find PearLyrics.

Icing on the cake - hot corners
Mac users will know that OSX supports hot corners. So I set up the Mac so that every time I move the mouse pointer to the top left of the screen, it launches Dashboard. Having previously set things up so that the lyrics widgets are always running, this means, in a lecture, all I have to do is play an MP3, sweep the mouse to the top left of the screen, and the lyrics appear!

But there’s more…

Sometimes, we have an iTunes playlist running while we’re setting up a lecture - a list of recent hits, or songs in a particular form, theme or genre. So to make this a bit more visual, I also occasionally use Jewelcase, a shareware plugin for iTunes that displays not only the lyric metatag, but also the JPG of the album cover metatag - and puts the whole thing in a beautifully rendered spinning CD jewel case. Projected 20ft high in a lecture, it is a thing to behold!

And a tiny bit more…
This setup works great for lectures, but sometimes we’re discussing tempo. We can usually find the chords and key of a song (just by having an acoustic guitar to hand), and we can see its form usually from looking at the lyric and listening to the playback, but finding the tempo was always a bit fiddly, using a metronome there in the lecture.

So I searched the ‘net for a tool that would enable me to mouse-click along to a track, display its tempo in Beats Per Minute, then embed the tempo in the MP3 for next time. It’s called BPM Widget. Does what it says on the tin!