Fi’s blog – day 1

Barry plays his trademark upside-down guitar chords for one of our songwriters.

We have a songwriting room which has a great view over the lake. Boo Hewerdine is our tutor today and he has just flown in from Glasgow and is straight into it! Weíre going round the group and playing from back catalogue.

Claire has just played a beautiful song that she wrote on the way back from Ireland after the applause dies down she is talking about wanting to break into different styles of playing and Boo recommends writing with other people and the benefits of this. The conversation turns to having to write quickly and it being getting into the practice of it.

He also encourages trying to write about things that you havenít written about before and having a solid reasoning behind them.
Antonia contributes a song, quite an up tempo number with a great theme and great tune.
The conversation turns to three chord songs and how strong they can be. The longer you hold the chord the bigger it sounds when it changes. Other chords can then be used for flavour. This is good news for me!
The next songwriter talks about how he finds the process of songwriting and Boo advises giving yourself a limitation just to get going for example having three verses and having an idea of what you want to say eg verse 1 introduce it, verse two develop it and verse 3 conclude it and make sure every line counts. He advises writing the song first before starting to produce it and maybe using ordinary language.
Kristian comes up with a title that he was thinking about developing which Boo thinks is a brilliant tile. He advised working on it and ensuring theres a beginning middle and an end. The point comes up about melody. Boo advises writing melodies without many notes if you donít have the range and says itís really good to give yourself boundaries when youíre writing to give you some focus.

Another great song is performed and the critique is that itís a great song and Boo gives some structural feedback around doing a solo after the bridge and do a short chorus and finish on the big note.
Chloe performs a song that she has given a new arrangement to which goes down well and we break for coffee before finding corners to write in to complete our task for the day. Luckily the sun is shining and soon there are fragments of melody coming from all around the place and new found friends are collaborating on new songs.