Day 1 Introductory Lecture

Introductory session Day 1

Itís ten oíclock on a sunny Monday morning and Joe Bennett is welcoming everyone officially in the University theatre. The first task is for the songwriters to introduce themselves to each other with details of their favourite songwriters influences and the team 25 plus strong are introducing themselves and letting everyone know what their role will be during the week.

With some housekeeping and health and safety details dealt with, Joe goes on to give an outline of the week and making note that with 38 songwriters and five tasks that amounts to 190 song!! What an amazing thought!

Jo touches on the ethos of the SWF experience and the purpose of critiquing and being comfortable with giving and receiving it. i.e. strengths of a song and suggestions for future rewrites.

He outlines the tools and facilities available to songwriters both on campus and on the Internet and references the fact that as the 10th largest music department in the country there are pianos in any practice room and laptops available to borrow. Joe makes the distinction between song writing and performance; the focus here is on writing that great song and not judging performance skills, just focussing on harmony, melody and lyrics.

The discussion turns to the performance nights and songwriters are reassured that if they are not confident in performing there are others around who will do it for them.

One delegate asks the question as to whether there will be opportunity to have back catalogue critiqued. Joe reassures that that is the purpose of the first playback session today! After that it will be all new songs!

Joe talks about the small groups of around six songwriters and the value in that. He talks about the demo panel which students are encouraged to submit to which are critiqued by a professional panel, which will be critiqued objectively.

Mention is made of the songwriter John Gill who will be given a specialist lecture on writing songs for children later in the week.

The launch event of a gig from singer songwriters Boo Hewerdine and Iain Archer is talked about. Itís free to all SWF students. Brilliant! They are both such great songwriters and performers that everyone is really looking forward to it.

Talk moves onto the creative process and how to break out of habits and increase range. Common habits including guitar chords and four chord loops. Joe references existing songs out there that all do this well but says that the tasks are there to give you more choice in your approach. He talks about the tendency to be over protective of first ideas, resistance to rewriting, resistance to starting and of course the Demon of Doubt! The tasks are designed to break the back of these limiters and be prolific!

The lecture moves onto getting started with a song and using titles, a lyric phrase that suggests more, a verbal expression, a visual image such as a object, action or place and a melodic snippet or riff.

Joe gives examples of all of these and asks for some chords, he takes the chords shouted out and strums his guitar and adds a melody. He adds that drum loops can be a fantastic tool to get started with writing lyric and melody.

He pulls a drum loop up in logic and as thatís pumping round the room uses the chords that were shouted out earlier to put some guitar sounds over it. He then moves to the keyboard and uses that to demonstrate the same thing. The idea being that he is now playing things he wouldnít have played otherwise.

Changing the tempo of the drum loop helps ëforce him out of m id tempo hellí that people who write on guitars typically write at.
He reinforces that this is just another technique available to you.
The discussion moves onto craft of writing simple short songs as you develop with the advice of being clear about what is going on in your song.

We then talk about the difference between lyrical ambiguity and use of metaphors. One songwriter raises the question of how do some people write ambiguously and it means something and some it sounds like rubbish! Itís a good point!
Joe pulls up Strawberry Fields and talks about how it evokes a mood, a dreamlike state, it has an ëIí and ëyouí character, it is economical and everything comes together to set that mood. Also considered is Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds as an example of very powerful use of imagery and originality with its line of tangerine trees and marmalade skies.

Joe then comes back to the idea that with your top ten favourite songs they are likely to have a very clear, specific core meaning. A ëBig Idea.í
Also discussed is the idea of not wasting intro time and demonstrates by playing an extremely long intro until people start to laugh. He stresses that it doesnít just apply to pop.

If choruses are used make them simple, clear, repetitive and summative. Donít feel restricted by sticking to exactly what happened–itís not a diary! The question is does the song communicate to the listener.
Joe then goes onto talking about pitfalls to avoid. ClichÈ being one and rhyme traps forcing you down a road of writing something that you didnít want to write about. He talks also about static melodies and being aware of them. He goes on to talk about too many lyrics, the song being too long and lack of repetition.
We then look at the teaching and learning methods employed at SWF i.e. analysing successful songs, analysing our own songs and using tasks to break habits and practice.

This leads nicely on to Task 1, which was to write 10 titles and choose one to develop into a song. Then write a chorus form song where the title appears twice in the chorus.

The session finishes with a recap of whatís going to happen next, and everyone heads off for a coffee break before going into their tutor groups.