I'll Take A Fifth and Thirty Useful Tips For $100, Alex

Here's a short explanation on the Circle of Fifths. Even if it STILL doesn't make sense when you're done reading it, you'll come away with at least two or three new chord progressions to stick in your quiver.

After reading that I started reading the blog I found it in. Great ideas here! This guy has a blog chock full o' ideas. I found myself just reading straight down the page and getting more and more inspiration.

He posted an article about playing live here.

That lead me to the site it was hosted on, Muse's Muse.

I feel like Alice In Wonderland here, but THAT lead me to THIS site, which was highly suspect because of the random pop-up ads, but I stayed and surfed anyways and found a list of programs for creating loops. (I've been messing with a pretty fun online loopmaking program called Splice that I really enjoy, but that's another rabbit hole to wander down at another date.)

Which naturally lead me to I Am The Mighty Jungulator, a band AND an educational software for looping music used in schools in the UK. Yeah. I took the blue pill.


Too many links? Sucker, you ain't seen nothin' yet. I need to write/finish a song now. As is obvious, the computer used its evil tentacles of coolness to wrap me up and suck me in.

(Read Jeff's Songwriting Blog if you do anything, but if you feel like chasing the rabbit, start with the first link and work your way down...)

Tunesmith - Songwriting Books

A couple years ago I purchased and read a book called Tunesmith by Jimmy Webb. After going back to this book recently, I can honestly say that every songwriter should read this book. Even if only for the first chapter. Webb is an inductee in The National Academy of Popular Music Songwriters Hall of Fame. His biography says the following:

Jimmy Webb has given the American songbook more hits, in more styles, than any other songwriter of his generation. The wunderkind of pop music, Webb became the hottest songwriter around when, starting at age twenty-one, he wrote a string of hits including "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "Galveston," "Up, Up and Away," and "MacArthur Park."

Here are a couple quotes from the back cover of the book:

Tunesmith [is] an eminently readable master class in songwriting-one that will thrill aspiring composers and lyricists, yet still interest the general reader." - Michael Eck, Albany Times Union
Tunesmith may be the most interesting book ever written on songwriting... The sections on writing lyrics are riveting... It's for anyone who enjoys words." - David Hinckley, New York Daily News

Chapter titles:

Out of Thin Air
In This Room You'll Never Make a Mistake
It's Only Words
Elements of Form
It Can't Get No Verse...
Give Us a Tune Then, Jim
In Search of the Lost Chord
You and the Words and the Music
At Odds and Ends
Getting to First Base
Living With It

If anyone knows of any other useful books on Songwriting, please include the title and author(s) in a comment and I'll post the list in this thread or on the sidebar.

Thanks,
John

Songwriting/Recording Book Listing -

• Webb, Jimmy. Tunesmith. New York, NY: Hyperion, 1998
• Swedien, Bruce. Make Mine Music. Norway: MIA Musikk, 2003
• Blume, Jason. 6 Steps to Songwriting Success. New York, NY: Billboard Books, 2004
• Thall, Peter, M. What They'll Never Tell You About the Music Business. New York, NY: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2002

This Guy Listens To Crappy Music

David Byrne.


A crappy music listener.

This article is deep and wide and looks into the implications/ramifications of music formats (tape/lp/cd/mp3) on it's creation.

Here it is.