It’s Don’t Mean A Thing Unless It Got That Swing
I don’t know any musician in any genre who is looking to make their music more soulless. Even if you were, you are always trying to craft some sort of emotional response. As a producer, I watch musicians declaring “_____ makes this part work” without ever listening to alternatives and judging them. Music listening is a reactionary experience, hence why you don’t like every song with a great chord structure. When you choose to use logic instead of listening back to things and making a decision you defeat the very purpose of crafting a song. While greater knowledge and understanding of songwriting can help aid your decisions of what to do when crafting a song, you need to trust your reactions to each change, not just paint by numbers.
That Feeling
We have all known the feeling, someone plays a part and you just feel wierd. Then you play the song again and the same thing happens. That is YOUR GUT telling you you don’t like the part. That is the very thing I am telling you to speak up about. That is your body having a reaction to music and an unpleasent one.
If there is anything I have learned from working on songs for the past 18 years is that I constantly regret when I don’t listen to my gut. I will often listen back to records I produced in the past. I hear things all the time that I consider mistakes. Without fail everyone of those things were things my gut told me were mistakes, I just wrote them off as things like:
- No One Will Hear It
- It’s Just Me Being Picky
- I’m Overanalysing It
All of those things are excuses! As you get better at crafting music, you will hear these mistakes FOREVER! To make matters worse certain fans hear EVERYTHING, when they hear your record and if you are hearing it so will someone. Even if the listener can’t pinpoint what is wrong they will be able to deduct that you are not quite on the money with your songwriting and that someone (who probably “checks their gut”) is doing it better. YOU NEED TO FIX IT IF YOUR HEAR IT!
In Practice
If you are not following the real life applicatyion of what I am describing I will try to make it more clear. Let’s say you are working on a song and your drummer is playing a humongous fill into the chorus.
You: Hey man, that fill isn’t really working
Drummer: No dude, it works because it speeds up the song
You: Can we try something else?
Drummer: Dude this fill, like, MAKES the whole song!
Rather then trusting the reaction someone is having to a song, the drummer is spouting a close-minded theory. Anyone can SAY a part does something. I could easily come into the equation and say the part slows down the song. The greater point is when a fan of yours is in their basement listening to the song, you can’t be there to say “It’s awesome, it speeds up the song”. It needs to work without any context or explanation to the listener.
When someone feels something in their gut, you need to TRY EVERYTHING to fix it. Then react to each different variation on the part from your gut until you have something everyone involved in the songwriting process actually likes. How do you know when a song is done??? When everyone’s guts are calm and you all have goosebumps!
photo by flickr user cote