In today’s article I’m going to talk about the importance of feedback. And no, I’m not talking about the kind of feedback you get from your guitar, which can be cool or annoying depending on what it is you’re trying to do. I’m talking about the feedback you get from your peers. You know, you’re fellow songwriters and music producers. It’s always good to hear what other people think of your stuff. How else will you know if you’re on the right track or not?

Now, let me qualify this with a little caveat. Ultimately, you have to decide what feedback you’re going to listen to and what you’re going to do with it. Everybody has an opinion and having an opinion doesn’t automatically make one right or wrong. Just because somebody says to you “I don’t like your song because…” and then gives you their reason, doesn’t mean that reason is the “correct” one. It’s just one person’s opinion. Now, if 100 people all tell you that your song is really bad and all give the same general reasons why, it’s a safe bet that you should probably listen to them. So yes, feedback is important but the more of it you get, the more data you will have to work with in order to determine what it is you’re going to do with it.

Let me give you an example of some feedback I got the other day.

I had put together this piece of ambient music that you can listen to below.

Now, I thought it was pretty good. I traded off between several instruments on the lead so it didn’t get boring. The pad had a nice airy sound like what I was going for. Overall, it had the feel of an old Paul Hardcastle type tune. I was generally pleased with it.

So I posted it up on this music production forum looking for feedback on the production end of it and not so much on the composition or performing end. The responses I got were interesting to say the least. And when I thought about them, I realized that they made good points.

Overall, the main criticism was that the piece didn’t go anywhere or progress. It stayed on the same even plain throughout the entire track. There were no lows and highs, no change in dynamics. Now, if this were meant to be a meditative piece then maybe that would be a good thing. But that wasn’t my intention. And in listening to the piece, I realized that they were right. Even though I changed leads throughout the piece, each lead was still more or less the same dynamic and the pad in the background never varied. There were never any cool sounds sprinkled in throughout the piece. Nothing to really break it up a little. In short, the piece was stagnant.

This was a real eye opener for me as I never really heard this piece like that. But if you listen to some old Paul Hardcastle stuff, you will hear that he does just that, even with his more laid back tunes. You’ll find the odd synth noises coming out of nowhere to spice up the piece. You’ll hear changes in dynamics, even if they’re only slight changes.

I’ve started working on another piece where I am going to focus a lot on dynamics and shifts in timbre. The piece may turn out to be a chaotic mess but it won’t be boring and stagnant. And eventually, I’ll find a happy medium between the two and as a result, my music will improve.

Here’s another example of some feedback I got on a song of mine. You can listen to it below.

In this track, the feedback I got was something I would have never thought of. The vocals in the beginning didn’t sound real. Now, realism in this track wasn’t something I was particularly going for, but obviously something about the track suggested that I was going for realism with the vocals in the beginning. So invariably, I managed to accomplish something that I didn’t want to accomplish that ended up making something else in the song come off as less than authentic. Had I maybe used more synths, the vocals in the beginning wouldn’t have been an issue.

Your listeners will sometimes point out things to you that you would have never thought of in a million years. And that’s how you get ideas. That’s how you grow as a songwriter, a performer and a producer, assuming you’re one of those poor souls who has to wear many hats like I do. When the day comes I can hire a mixing engineer, I’ll do just that.

Like I said, you do have to take feedback with a grain of salt. Some people like to look for things to complain about, even if they’re not really there. Remember, not everybody loved The Beatles. But if 100 people all say the same thing about your music and very few have anything good to say, you might want to listen.

Personally, I love feedback. I think I’ve done most of my best writing after getting feedback on my tunes. Sometimes just the right word can spark an idea. For example, the song I’m working on right now, I probably would have never written had I not been told that my airy pads track laid there like a dead raccoon. The last thing I want to do is put my listeners to sleep. I’d rather they walked away scratching their heads saying to themselves, “What the hell did I just listen to?” At least then I know I made an impression.

You need to decide what’s important to you. If you record a tune and somebody tells you it sounds like something that should be on a meditation CD and that’s what you were going for, then keep it and keep at it. You’ve managed to do what you set out to do. But if that’s the LAST thing you wanted to do, then you might want to consider making some adjustments.

That’s what I do.

For The Love Of Music,

Steven “Wags” Wagenheim

Imagine this track of music. It starts out with a kick drum keeping a steady 4/4 beat at about 60 BPM. After 4 bars a flute like lead comes in. And that’s it. For 5 minutes, all you hear is this kick drum keeping the same steady beat with no variation at all and a flute like lead meandering about the place. And it goes on for 5 whole minutes.

How long do you think it will be before your audience turns it off? I might hang in for a couple of minutes but then when it’s obvious that the piece isn’t going anywhere, I’m going to turn off the music. Some people won’t even wait that long.

Attention span, especially in today’s “I gotta have it now” world, is limited to say the least. People just don’t have the patience to sit through things like they used to back when I was a kid. The speed at which information can be retrieved today is partly to blame, but only partly. The real blame goes to the fast pace of the world in which we live in. Because we can get things so quickly, the world around us expects us to do things just as quickly.

I blame the fast food industry, but that’s another story. Right now, we want to focus on keeping our audience interested. How can we do this?

Well, generally speaking, we do this through change. But there are many ways to change our music through the course of one song. I’m going to cover just a few of those ways here. Hopefully, this will give you some inspiration to keep your tracks interesting so that they don’t just lay their flat.

One way to keep your audience interested is through micro changes. What do I mean by micro changes? Those subtle things that don’t really stand out but you know they are there.

For example, take that kick drum. What if you had the first bar with a steady 4/4 beat on every beat but then the second bar you added a 16th note before beat number two and you kept alternating bars like that. That subtle variation would keep the kick interesting, for a while anyway. But you’d eventually have to add something.

So how about after 16 bars you had a snare come in on beat 2? Ah, something different. How about after 16 more bars we added the snare on beat 4 as well? Now things are really starting to develop. And we’ve only touched the drum part. There are other things that will be going on during all this. But even if we started off our song just with this drum part, slowly progressing as it went along, that alone could keep the interest of our audience. Change is change, no matter how small or subtle. These are little micro changes and they can be applied to any instrument in your mix.

Take your synth lead. You can add doubling or delay to it after the first 16 bars. You can try playing it an octave higher. You can have another lead come in playing harmony quietly in the background. You can have another sound take over.

What about big changes?

This is where we have to be careful. Big changes can be jarring to our audience. If there are too many or they happen too quickly, the audience doesn’t have time to settle in. They’re just getting used to one part and then suddenly there’s another part coming in and before they can get familiar with that part something else comes in that’s completely different. After a while, this can become quite unsettling.

If you’re going to do big changes, you have to spread them out over the course of the song. Naturally, since this is going to take time, you’re also going to need to do those little micro changes to keep your audience interested so that they make it to the big changes.

So what are these big changes?

Well, here are just a few off the top of my head. Please feel free to add your own.

One big change would be a change in tempo. Suddenly your 60 BPM dirge speeds up to a 150 BPM dance track. If you plan this right, it can be very effective and certainly unexpected. Naturally, you want the change in tempo to ramp from 60 to 150 and not just be a sudden split second change. That would be very jarring to the audience.

Change in key would be another big change you could make in your tune. Now you probably don’t want to have too many key changes in your tune. Sometimes all you need is one or two. Most times that’s all you want though there are exceptions. Key change can be very effective and dramatic if done properly. It will certainly wake your audience up if you’ve been putting them into a coma.

You can also use what I call the rhapsody method. Look up the definition of a rhapsody. You’ll notice that it’s a piece of music that is pretty much constantly changing. Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody is a perfect example of this. Even at 6 minutes long, that song never gets boring. The main reason is because it’s constantly changing. Of course we are talking about Queen here so there’s that too.

Of course writing a rhapsody is not easy work. It requires some skill to pull off effectively, otherwise the parts just sound like they’re thrown together. You want to make it seem like each part naturally went into the other even though they sound nothing alike. That takes some doing. Listen to Queen. It’ll be a great exercise to analyze that song.

Those are just a few of the things you can do to keep your audience interested in your music. I am sure if you sat down and gave it some thought, you could come up with some of your own. The key is to keep things moving. Don’t let them just sit there and stagnate. That’s a sure fire way to put your audience to sleep.

For The Love Of Music,

Steven “Wags” Wagenheim

This article is going to be a brief review of Spectrasonics Omnisphere. I hope you get something out of it and can make an informed decision on whether or not to get it.

Okay, what is Omnisphere? Well, it’s a soft synth but not just any soft synth. This thing as more bells and whistles than you can possibly imagine. That has its good and bad side. Everything comes with a price.

So let’s start with the price. The suggested retail is $499. I got mine at a slight discount for $479 and change.

It comes in a box with 6 CDs and an installation book with instructions. Installation is where things of this size usually scare the crap out of me, especially when it says each disc takes 1 hour to install and there are 6 discs.

What I discovered is that because of the speed of my machine, which really isn’t that fast by today’s standards (it’s a core 3) the whole process took under 2 hours. So if you have a fast machine, this won’t take you long at all. You will need to be connected to the Internet for registration but to install there is an offline version if you need it.

Under the hood is a 10,000 horse power engine. This thing is massive and probably should have been called that and might have been had the name not been taken by NI’s Massive.

If you look at the menu system both for picking out patches and multipatches, it’s very deep. In many areas, you can pick one parameter and go further into it and tweak the heck out of it.

Speaking of the menu system, the main menu system for choosing patches and/or multis is very well laid out. Everything is categorized and even has a search feature so you can do a search for patches by type of sound or use like “lead synth” and it will give you everything listed under “lead synth” or whatever tag you choose.

What about the sounds themselves? Honestly, some of them don’t do this thing justice. I realize that you have to cater to a variety of musical styles and maybe some of these patches just don’t thrill me because of the particular style they cater to, but some of them just leave me cold. But then there are the ones that really show off what this thing can do and they will blow you away.

You essentially have two sound sources. The first is samples. So in that sense, this thing acts like a sampler. The second is basic raw waveforms like you would find in a traditional analog synth. So this thing can function in either capacity.

At first glance it would appear that there aren’t many waveforms to choose from and technically, there aren’t. Maybe 4 or 5. However, because of the ridiculous number of editing functions that this thing comes with, you can turn any wave into just about anything you want. So don’t be fooled by sawtooth, triangle, sine and noise. What you ultimately end up with is up to you.

There are different modes of play in this thing. You have your regular patch mode where you pull up or create a patch and play it. You have multi mode where you have many patches that you can split across the keyboard and in live mode play any of those patches and even latch them in real time. You can have as many as 8 of these. So by the time you’re done latching, you can have up to 8 different patches playing at the same time all by themselves.

Finally, there is stack mode. This is where you can pull up as many as 8 different patches and have them layered together in a number of ways. In this mode, you can get some really thick, fat sounds, not that you can’t with just one patch because you can thanks to their unison function. So in stack mode, the sounds you can produce with this thing can be downright obnoxious.

But stack mode can be used for more than just stacking one sound on top of the other. You can have them respond to velocity where some patches only sound when played very loud. Or you can stack them by control change to have some come in when you move the mod wheel as an example. This way you can produce some very complex and moving sounds.

And that really is the big selling point of this synth as far as I’m concerned. It can produce textures that would be difficult if not impossible to produce with other synths.

What you’d expect in a synth like this, the ability to modulate any one parameter with multiple modulation sources, is there. Want to modulate the filter cutoff with the mod wheel? No problem. The number of modulation sources you can assign are numerous to say the least.

There is a lot of talk about the Orb that’s a new feature in Omnisphere. This provides real time control over the sound itself and can morph it in a variety of ways so that it almost sounds nothing like the original sound. Don’t ask me how the Orb actually does what it does. It’s too technical for me. All I know is if you move it around it does stuff. Yeah, it’s a little unpredictable but that’s part of the fun. Experiment with it.

And of course there are effects. Tons of them. They can be assigned on the oscillator level and/or overall with as many as 4 effects per level.

So say you have a 2 oscillator patch. You can assign 4 effects to oscillator one, 4 to oscillator two and 4 to the overall patch, if you want.

Yes, it’s pretty obnoxious.

Guess what? I haven’t even scratched the surface of this beast. It has an arpeggiator and lots of other goodies under the hood. And in spite of all the stuff it has, it’s fairly easy to get around in. It has a help manual on the first disc and there are tons of videos that it links to. Plus, there are a ton of YouTube videos with tutorials that you can watch.

Yes, you probably want to have prior synth experience to get the most out of this thing. It can present quite a learning curve to a new synth owner. Having been programming synths since the days of Moog and ARP I didn’t have too much trouble. But even I got a little lost in the architecture. It’s pretty deep.

Is it worth close to 500 clams? For me, it’s a no brainer. Whether or not you need something this deep or could get by with something like Zebra or Synthmaster at half the price, only you can answer that. They’re great synths. I love them and I will still use them. But Omnisphere will definitely be a synth that will regularly be added to my palette of sounds.

For The Love Of Music,

Steven “Wags” Wagenheim

I want to explore the two-headed demon of the music world. It’s a constant source of internal strife for a lot of people because ultimately, if you’re a musician, you want to make music. At least I know I do. Maybe some people don’t care about making music. That’s going to be part of our discussion today. But personally, that’s what I want to do…make music.

Ah, but I also want to eat. I don’t want to starve to death. I don’t want to be homeless. I don’t want to die. I think those are reasonable desires to have. I don’t know too many people personally who don’t care if they starve and die or have to live out on the street. So let’s for argument sake say that every musician wants to go on living. Well, in order to do that, you need money. Can we agree on that much? Because if we can’t, then the rest of this article is going to have very little meaning for you.

Okay, so we all want to live and we all want to make music. Well, living means having money. Making music, as you probably know, doesn’t always result in making money. And it’s not because there isn’t a demand for music. There’s plenty of demand for music. What there isn’t plenty of demand for is art.

What’s the difference between art and music? Well, there’s a big difference. Music is just sound. It can be art or it can be a calculated mix of sounds designed specifically to make a buck. And if you don’t think that stuff exists, you haven’t been listening to the industry the last 50 years or so.

John Doe comes out with the latest “sound” and everybody and their grandmother jumps on the gravy train to get a piece of the market. They analyze the song to see what makes it a money maker and then they scientifically duplicate it in order to make money for themselves. I could give you plenty of examples of this throughout the ages but we’d be here forever. So I’m asking you to just take my word for it. The “me too” stuff has always been more prevalent than the original stuff.

When that happens, what we have isn’t “art.” It’s just making money. Heck, you might as well just be printing up the dollar bills in your basement. You have your formula and you crank out your “hit.” Yes, there still has to be a slick polish to the production, but that’s all it is…slick polish. Underneath is very little of any substance.

And that’s what we call making a living in the music business. But it has very little, if anything, to do with art.

Then there is the guy who sites in his basement trying to come up with the next “Planet Rock” or “Flying Saucer” or whatever it is that’s so different and so unusual that it’s almost beyond art. Genres are invented from these innovators. Groups like Gentle Giant and King Crimson paved the way for all the prog rock groups to come after until eventually the genre itself died due to the lack of real creativity. Even in something as “artistic” as prog rock, there were the “me too” bands.

Now admittedly, it’s getting harder and harder to create real “art” because just about everything has been done to death. Sure, there have been some innovations over the last few years but not nearly as many as the early days of music. And the reason is simple. Once something has been done it’s been done and can’t be new anymore. The more things that are done, the fewer things that are left to be done, even if you believe in a near infinite universe. Taking one from a gazillion leaves us with one less option than we had the day before. That’s just basic math.

That doesn’t mean we’ve approached that point yet. I am sure there is still plenty of innovation left. But is that innovation going to make us money>

Ah, therein lies the rub.

We can assume that it’s still fairly easy to come up with something artistic (it’s really not) but even if we do, is that “art” going to put food on our table? If history is any indication, probably not. The innovators who made a living at this are very few, relatively speaking. And I give them a lot of credit because they had a lot of guts. They made the music that they wanted to make and the heck with what anybody thought of it. You can add Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk to that mix. On the more rock side of things you can add the group Sparks. If you’ve never heard anything by them, listen to the album “Propaganda” because you are in for a treat. I don’t know how successful they were but they were truly unique. Nobody ever tried to copy them either.

Personally, I’ve tried to do art but I’m not really talented enough to come up with something truly unique that hasn’t been done before to death. I’ve also tried to make money by writing formula pieces. But I’m not really talented enough to write those either. So I’m kind of stuck in no man’s land. But that’s besides the point.

So let’s get to the point.

I think you can do both. I think you can write your art and write your stuff to make money, just not at the same time. Break it up. Spend a little time on your art and then, so you’re not totally frustrated by being poor, spend some time on the stuff that’s going to make you money. For example, spend some time writing your experimental music and go out on weekends and play in a cover band to make a few bucks. Lots of people do just this. Or you can work at a music store. I wouldn’t mind working at this one Sam Ash in Springfield if I ever had to work for a living. Great bunch of musicians there, all doing the same thing. I could think of worse things to do with my time, especially if I didn’t want to starve to death.

So yes, you can have your art and eat it too.

For The Love Of Music,

Steven “Wags” Wagenheim

In this article, I’m going to talk about one of the most common problems that musicians have when creating their music if they’re doing everything themselves. If you’re able to break yourself away from this, you will give yourself the best chance of coming up with the best possible production that you can come up with.

When we are on our own in the world of music making, we don’t really think about this, but we wear many hats. If I took you through the entire process from start to finish, you would indeed see how true this is. In fact, I’m going to do just that right now so you can see the process clearly laid out and hopefully identify which part of the process is tripping you up and why.

At the beginning, we have the actual song creation. Now there are different ways of writing a song. I’m not going to get into them all. But you can start writing by picking up a guitar and playing some chords. Maybe you sit down with a pen and paper and scribble some lyrics. Maybe you actually go through the painstaking process of creating boxes for your song’s “story.”

Bottom line: You use some kind of process, that can change from song to song even, to create your song that will soon be ready for recording.

Now, while you’re doing this process, you’re not thinking about anything else. At least you shouldn’t be. You should only be concentrating on writing the best song possible. There should be no thoughts about how you’re going to sing it or what kind of reverb you’re going to put on the vocals or anything else other than how the song is going to flow from beginning to end. Will it have prosody? Will it be satisfactory on its own?

After you’ve completed writing the whole song, next comes the performance part. Here is where you have to concentrate on making sure that every thing that gets recorded is as perfect as can be. How good the actual song material is doesn’t matter here. You’re only concerned about performance. Where people get tripped up is not thinking it terms of what performance will best serve as a vehicle for the song. They figure the song is good (after all they wrote it) so however I sing it will be fine. This is not true. Each song lends itself to be performed a certain way in order to get the most out of that song. And the only way to do this is to put on your performance hat. Your thoughts should be on only one thing. What is the best way to perform this song, even if that particular performance style is not a personal favorite. Be objective. We’ll soon see where this becomes harder and harder.

Okay, so the performance is done and out of the way. You’ve worked very hard on each part. Now it’s time to process the individual tracks. Do the vocals need reverb? Does the piano need EQ and compression? What about the drums? Should each piece of the drum kit go on its own channel so you can compress the kick and snare but only EQ the high hat? You want every instrument to sound as good as it can. This has nothing to do with how good or bad the song is. Lots of people, when they’re not satisfied with the quality of the writing itself say “The heck with it” and just rush through the processing part because they don’t really think it will matter. Or, they may think the music is so wonderful that the song doesn’t need any processing. You need to objectively look at the recording and say to yourself “How do I best bring out each part?” When you’ve done that, you can then go about adding whatever processing is needed to achieve your end goal.

Next we have the mixing part. This is getting the levels of each instrument just right in the mix. Now think about what’s gone on before this stage since we’re doing everything ourselves. We love the song. We love the way we sang the song. We love the drums and the way we did that little 16th note slice on the high hat. We love the way we processed that pad. We want every little instrument to shine in the mix because we worked so hard on everything.

Guess what? Not every instrument is going to shine. That 16th note high hat slice is probably going to be far back in the mix if not buried completely. Some instruments will have to take a back seat. If you’re doing a vocal recording, your vocals are probably the most important part. Don’t like the way you sing? Too bad. You can’t bury the vocals just because you don’t like your voice. You should have gotten somebody else to sing but you didn’t. You can’t let your feelings cloud your professional judgment. Those vocals have to be up front. Period. Those drums can’t be booming over everything else. The synth pad has to be in the background. That guitar is going to be somewhat back in the mix until the lead kicks in. That’s when it can shine.

Mixing a track, especially when we’ve played every single track ourselves, is the hardest thing to do because we’re so in love, or so hate, everything we’ve done before that. We let our personal feelings cloud our judgment. And when we do that, the mix suffers.

Finally, we have the mastering stage when we have our two tracks and we need to make sure they sound as good as possible. So we’ll do our final EQ, compression and limiting here and whatever else our “professional” opinion thinks needs to be done. Again, we can’t let our love for our previous work cloud what we do here. We may love the mix to this point. But can we do better? If it’s a dance mix, are the vocals too up front with everything else too far back? Do we need to compress things a lot more because of the genre and maybe have the vocals not as pronounced? If we love our vocal performance, this may be hard for us to do. But for the good of the track as a whole, we have to do it.

This is why wearing all these hats is so difficult and, quite honestly, not ideal. But sometimes we have no choice. I can’t afford vocalists and pianists. I can’t afford a mix engineer. I can’t afford a mastering specialist. I have to do all this myself. And sometimes it’s not easy to be objective about things. But to get the best recording of your song, you have to make sure you wear the proper musical hat during each part of the process.

For The Love Of Music,

Steven “Wags” Wagenheim

Cleaning out the musical closet. Wags, what the heck are you getting at now?

Picture this. You’re a kid. You go into your toy chest or closet where you keep your games and toys and you start rummaging through some old stuff and to your surprise, find a box of marbles. Man, you remember when you used to play marbles.

And then you open up the box and there they all are. Your aggies, mibs, shooters, the whole lot. Man, you haven’t played marbles in so long. So you take ’em out and start reliving your not so distant past. All of a sudden, marbles are fun again.

Music is kind of like that, believe it or not. Or have you not noticed that throughout the years, especially since the dawn of rock and roll, a lot of music has come and gone and come again.

In 1972, a guy by the name of Robert John did a song by the name of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” which shot all the way up to number 1. Now, by itself that doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Except the song was an old tune from back in 1961 that was redone and very much in the same style as it was done originally, with that late 50s, early 60s sound.

Going back to 1933, a song by Gertrude Niesen was recorded for the first time. The name of it? Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. Now that could have very well been the end of it except it was also recorded in 1958 by The Platters and then again as an uptempo version by rock group Blue Haze.

I won’t even attempt to go over all the other times the song had been recorded. Too many to count.

Truth is, songs and even whole musical styles get recycled all the time. The question is why?

Well, I am sure there are a lot of theories and speculation as to why songs and even whole styles of music get recycled. I’m going to toss some of my own into the ring. These may or may not jive with some of the stuff that you’ve heard or believe.

At the top of the list, from a business perspective, songs and styles get recycled because, if they were hits once, maybe they can be hits again and make some people a lot of money.

Face it, as much as you might not want to admit it, music today is big business. If there is a way to make a buck off of something, the big wigs today will find a way to make it. And one way is by cleaning out that musical closet to see if there is anything in it that might just ring that bell.

But that’s not the only reason that I think musicians themselves clean out the musical closet. I think boredom is another one.

After a while, we get tired of hearing the same old thing. I am actually surprised that rap music has lasted as long as it has since it all sounds the same. (Ducking for cover). In all honesty, most musical genres or sub genres don’t last that long. Look at prog rock from the 70s. It’s dead. I sometimes wonder if it’ll ever come back. I think one of the main reasons it’ll probably never come back is because of the length of the songs. People today have less of an attention span than ever and just don’t want to sit through 10 minute tracks no matter how good they may be.

So because we get bored with things and there is only so much “new” under the sun, we look to old stuff to see if we can maybe resurrect and old song or even whole style and maybe update it a little bit to make it fresh. Personally, I think we’re running out of ideas. Most of the really “unique” stuff is under the radar. You don’t hear it on the popular radio stations. You find it on YouTube or on private web sites of the artists themselves. A lot of it is on Soundcloud. In fact, Soundcloud might be the best place to find some of the cutting edge stuff if you can stand wading through all the garbage.

Personally, I’m always looking for new sounds. It’s why I’m always on the lookout for the latest advances in technology to maybe give me a spark of inspiration.

For example, last night I checked out Omnisphere. Now, while not new, it was new to me. First time I ever even heard of the soft synth. Not sure how it got past me but it did. All I can say is, wow. If that thing doesn’t inspire me when I get it, nothing will. It is without a doubt the synth to end all synths. Someday, I will review it for everybody.

And finally, I think we recycle old things just for the nostalgia. We remember a simpler time in our lives and these old things remind us of those simpler times. It’s why I still love music of the 60s and 70s when I grew up. I have stronger memories of some of that stuff than the stuff more recent. In fact, very little of the new stuff does anything at all for me.

Point is, for whatever your reason may be, cleaning out the musical closet can inspire new ideas or at least ideas that are going to be new to the current generation.

Remember, a lot of the kids around today don’t remember the 80s let alone the 60s and 70s. My daughter was born in 1988. By that time, I was almost done with popular music is was getting so bad. There were still a few good tunes on the radio, but it wasn’t like the old days. I was so uninspired, I wasn’t even doing that much writing back then. Know what got me inspired to write again?

Old classical music from the 17 and 18 hundreds.

Now THAT is what I call cleaning out the musical closet.

You should try it sometime.

For The Love Of Music,

Steven “Wags” Wagenheim

You know the old saying, “You are what you eat” meaning that if you eat a lot of junk food you’re going to be sick and if you eat healthy you’re going to be healthy? Well, there is something to that. I used to eat terribly and wasn’t too well. I changed my diet and my health improved considerably. Take what you want from that.

Today, for some reason, this got me to thinking. If we are what we eat, are we also what we write musically?

Listen to your favorite artists. Might not be as true with groups because they’re made up of many personalities. But listen to people like John Denver, Harry Chapin and John Lennon. Why did I choose these threw? Well, for starters, they’ve all left us too soon. But more importantly, they’re remembered for being peace loving and generally good people. They all had their causes that they gave too and all believed in love and peace and not war. And that’s what they wrote about, more or less. Their music wasn’t filled with violence and hate.

I listen to a lot of the gangsta rap today and I really have to wonder what kind of people these artists are. Is it just an act? Are they really peace loving people? Or are they just a bunch of hoods? I’m not passing judgment but it does make me wonder.

Point is, everybody has a style. And each style highlights a particular personality trait. Some are warm and fuzzy and some are mean and nasty. Some, like Ray Stevens, are funny. And then the guy comes out with something like “Everything Is Beautiful” and totally blows away what I thought of the guy.

When Kiss came out with “Beth” it was like “huh?” I really had trouble wrapping my head around Kiss, a group that came out with songs like “Shout It Out Loud” and “Rock And Roll All Night” coming out with a love song like “Beth” which, by the way, is still my favorite Kiss song of all time.

But like I said, when you’re dealing with musical “groups” you’re dealing with multiple personalities so something like this might be easier to understand than a solo artist completely changing his style.

So the question I’m putting to you today is this. Is what you write really dictated by the kind of person you are? And if you try to write in different styles can you do it and still sound authentic? In other words, can musical “skill” override personality?

There are several ways to look at this. Let’s start with this way.

What if you don’t have a lot of musical skill? What if you can just about write anything? What if you don’t even know the difference between musical genres? What if all you did was just pound out chords on the keyboard and sometimes you’d do it slowly and sometimes more quickly? Maybe sometimes you’d hit major chords and other times hit minor chords. If you did this long enough, there’s a good chance that you’d come up with a number of musical styles, just by dumb luck. And if you were to play all these songs, assuming you’d ever get them finished, for people, they’d probably think you were either very talented to write so many different kinds of songs or psychotic.

True story. When I first started writing songs back in 1979, I really didn’t know much about music. I wrote in many different styles because I just did a lot of banging on the piano. And my lyrics, I tried to match the music. So I ended up doing ballads, prog rock, space music, experimental and even punk. You name it, I did it. My music wasn’t very good because I wasn’t trained yet and didn’t know what I was doing, but there is no question that my music was quite diverse.

Fast forward 35 years later. I’ve gotten musical training. But having been exposed to so much music over the years (I listen to everything from death metal to classical) I’ve reached a point where I can literally write anything. If somebody tried to determine my personality based on what I wrote, they couldn’t. They’d be guessing and I’d venture to say that they’d guess wrong. Very few people really know me. I prefer it that way.

So not having a lot of musical skills can actually be a catalyst for developing multiple styles as long as you allow your mind to wander free. Don’t censor yourself. Just go with it.

What about somebody who is trained from an early age? Are they going to adapt the personality of the music they’ve been exposed to? Or will they take their technical training and adapt it to what they are truly feeling inside? Or will they make a conscientious decision to write in a particular style because they think it will give them the best chance of being “successful?” And if so, what does that say about their personality?

I mean, think about this. You write songs about love and peace because it’s what happens to be popular at the time and you’re trying to cash in on the craze so you write songs about love and peace, just to make a buck. What does that say about you as a person? I admit that at one time I would have written anything just to make a buck. But not anymore. I do have my limits. I won’t write songs about drugs or violence. That’s where I draw the line. I’ll write songs about the horrors and sadness of war but I’ll never glamorize it.

So are you what you write? I can’t answer that for everybody. I can say that, to a degree, I’m not what I write because I write so many different styles and write on so many different subjects. However, because I do have my limits, I would also say that, to a degree, I am what I write because of those limits.

For The Love Of Music,

Steven “Wags” Wagenheim

You lyric writers are probably going to want to check this one out. It talks about the natural flow of the language which is ultimately the most important part of a lyric, no matter how great the story might be.

Now you’re probably wondering why I say that and may not even agree with it. But when it comes down to it, without a natural lyrical flow, your listener is going to be distracted and won’t get the story behind the lyric.

Let’s take this line from the classic song “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head”. Heck, let’s take the title itself, which is the first line in the song.

Now, you know how it goes right? How each word flows into the next in a steady tempo?

Imagine you said the words like this. I will put (…) where I want the lyric to break and take a long pause.

Raindrops…keep…fall…ing…on…my…head.

If you sung it like that, you would drive your listeners crazy. It’s the same words and yet sung with a break between each word or even each syllable would make it sound absolutely nerve wracking.

Okay, so can we agree that the flow of a lyric is important and that even with a great lyric, content wise, if the flow isn’t natural, the song is going to suffer.

Now, the question is, how do we make our lyric flow?

Well, it’s really quite simple. Forget about the song. Take the melody out of your head. Take the line, as it is, and just say it as if you were going to say it in natural conversation. Make a note of where the stressed syllables are.

Let’s take the example above. I will say the line and have the stressed syllables in all CAPS and the unstressed syllables or words (in the case of one syllable words) in lower case.

RAIN-drops keep FALL-ing on my HEAD.

There you have it. there are only 3 stressed syllables or words in this line. RAIN, FALL and HEAD.

Imagine had you stressed the syllables and words like this.

rain-DROPS KEEP fall-ING on MY head.

It really breaks up the flow of the line and makes it sound plain awful.

Now, is there a scientific way to do this? Well, there are some rules of thumb that I’m going to cover next. These should help you in making sure your lyrics flow in a way that will please your listener. Ultimately, that’s what you want.

So, rule number 1. The words you want to stress, in general, are nouns and verbs. Why? Because these are the main parts of your song. Prepositions and pronouns are not normally stressed. Adjectives and adverbs can go either way depending on the context.

Let’s take our example again.

RAIN-drops keep FALL-ing on my HEAD.

Okay, raindrops is a noun. The first syllable of raindrops is the accented syllable because that’s how we normally say the word in the normal course of speaking. We say RAIN-drops, not rain-DROPS.

But, there are exceptions and sometimes they work.

Look at this lyric from “My Favorite Things”

“Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.”

In this lyric, DROPS is the accented syllable of the word. It works because of the melody and the flow of the line in general. So while there are rules, they are not hard and fast. Everything has to be taken in context. But when in doubt, go back to the normal course of speaking or, as the title of this article suggests, the natural flow of the language.

After thinking about this stuff, you’re going to start listening to music differently than you used to. Some songs will bother you. Like I said, some writers break the rules all the time. But for the most part, you’re going to find that lyrics flow naturally. Listen to country music. That’s stuff that really flows.

Speaking of country music, there are some words, because of the region where they’re being spoken, that aren’t pronounced the same as in other regions.

For example, take the word “police.”

In the northern united states, it’s pronounced po-LICE but in the south, it’s often said PO-lice.

Now this is important when writing a song where you want regional dialects to come into play. If it’s a country western song, you’re probably going to want to use the second pronunciation to make it sound more authentic.

I was watching a master class video a few days ago and it was fascinating what I heard the instructor do with a few lines in a song. What sounded perfectly okay to me upon first listen turned out to be so much better after he made a few subtle changes in the stresses.

Remember what I said about pronouns not being stressed? His explanation was that pronouns were pros, that they didn’t need to be stressed, or have the spotlight. They were content giving that spotlight to the more important nouns. Fascinating explanation.

And that is really what this is all about. What words in your lyric do you want the listener to focus on? Is it inconsequential words like “the” and “an” or is it important words like “love” and “hate?”

Imagine if you had said this line…

YES, I’m the GREAT preTENDer

Like this

yes, I’M the great pretenDER

You’re putting the focus on I’m? I’m isn’t really that important to the lyric. In fact, it’s kind of egotistical to think that I’m is more important than GREAT.

If you put your mind to it, you could probably come up with lots of ways to say a line that just sounds all wrong. The hard part is when you have a line that could go in more than one direction. Depending on what direction you take, you could completely change the implied meaning of the lyric, even if the actual words don’t change.

And of course you also have to take into consideration the music itself. Does the music go up in pitch between each syllable or down or stay the same. That’s why “My Favorite Things” works because “drops” goes up in pitch after “rain.”

So the next time you go to write some lyrics, keep these things in mind. If you do, I have a feeling you’re going to end up writing better lyrics with a more natural flow in the process.

For The Love Of Music,

Steven “Wags” Wagenheim

We’ve all had ’em. You know which ones I mean. The days when you really should have just stayed in bed. I had one of those days yesterday. And you know what the funny thing is? I was up and working at 5 AM that morning. I put in 15 hour work day and got absolutely nothing accomplished. Hard to believe? Let me give you a little taste of the day I had and see if something like this doesn’t sound familiar. Like I said, we’ve all had ’em.

My goal for the day was simple. Finish my sales page, membership upsell page, membership login page and membership download page and get everything ready to submit to Clickbank for product approval. It’s not like I’ve never done this before. After all, I’ve been creating products since 2006. This shouldn’t have been that difficult.

Well, I get the sales page done and test it and it’s working fine. Great! We’re a quarter of the way home. I then test the upsell page. On its own, it works fine. But I can’t get the sales page to go to the upsell page upon purchase.

So I contact Clickbank to find out what I’m doing wrong in my Pitch Plus testing. Turns out you can’t test Pitch Plus until AFTER your products have been approved. Well that’s kind of dumb. But whatever.

Okay, so I test the sales page and the upsell page separately and they seem to be working fine. Next I have to create the membership system which consists of a signup form, login page and download page. The signup form gets created by Optimize Member on the fly, so that’s no problem. I just have to concern myself with the login page and download page after they’ve successfully logged in.

Here is where things get a little sticky.

There are videos in the support area for how to do all this. I had watched them once and figured I remembered all that I needed to and could just go ahead with the process. If only it was that easy. Nothing worked. I mean NOTHING.

So I watched the videos again. They seemed simple enough. I thought I was following all the instructions. Apparently not because when I went through the page creation process again and tried to integrate everything, I couldn’t get the members download page to protect. Anybody could get to it, even if they weren’t a member.

Obviously, I was doing something wrong. But what?

I had spent hours going through the process of creating and deleting pages and starting all over again. By the end of the day, I still had just two working pages.

Ah, but it gets better.

During the course of the day, I discovered that my version of DLGuard (4.5) was not compatible with Pitch Plus. I had to upgrade to at least 4.6 and even that only provided a workaround.

Not having the money to upgrade at the moment, I put that to the side. But I realized that I would probably end up having to use another solution for this system.

Did I mention that by the end of the day I had just two working pages?

Today, I got a message from the DLGuard creator telling me that he would give me a upgrade to 4.6 because I’ve been a customer for so long.

So, I installed it. Now I can’t get into my admin area at all.

In the meantime, I didn’t write any new songs yesterday. I made all of one new synth patch for Zebra 2 and I had to deal with Clickbank. Something I don’t really look forward to doing. Of course I don’t look forward to dealing with most support staffs because most of them are woefully trained and only marginally so.

Today, I almost dread what’s next. I have to wait for the DLGuard creator to get back to me on the errors. I am going to try to watch those videos yet again and if I have to, stop them after each step and hopefully get some music done today.

I’m not holding my breath on any of that.

This has been a frustrating couple of years for me. I used to have a thriving business. Now, I’m starting all over again from scratch. So I guess you could say I’m having one of those years.

But, and this is a big but, I am confident that eventually everything will work out. How do I know this?

When I first turned to the Internet for a living, after having lost my last corporate America job in 2000, it took me 3 years just to start making any money at all. And even then, it was only about $1,200 a month. It was nothing to write home about.

It wasn’t until 2006 that my income jumped to the $45,000 a year range. In 2009, I think it was, my income really soared. And then after that year, things started to decline slowly. I was hoping it was just the economy and that things would pick up. But they never did. It turned out that my marketing methods were no longer viable thanks to changes at Google. I didn’t keep on top of things so that’s what happened. Finally, in 2013, things really hit rock bottom and this year I’ve made all of about $500.

Hard to believe I used to be one of the top marketers on the Internet. Seems like a lifetime ago.

And through all of this, here I am, still plugging away. Why? Because it beats the alternative.

I’m confident that things will turn around because I’ve done it before. Yes, it took some time, but I managed to build a successful business.

And with that, here comes the point of this article as it applies to you. It’s simple and it might sound cliche, but if I can do it, you can do it.

I don’t care what your musical dreams are, whether it’s being a hit pop writer or a world famous orchestrator. If you put your mind to it, you can do anything.

Now, where did I put those videos?

For The Love Of Music,

Steven “Wags” Wagenheim

I was the king of excuses. Think I’m kidding? Ask me why I wouldn’t do something and I’d give you a million reasons why. Those days are long dead and gone. But it didn’t happen overnight. It took hitting rock bottom to make me realize that I had nothing to lose by trying things suggested by other people even if I didn’t think they would do much good.

Now don’t get me wrong. If somebody says to me to go to the top of the Empire State Building and jump off, I’m going to say no. And if they ask me why not, what my “excuse” is, I’ll simply tell them that I don’t like my chances of survival.

At some point you’re going to be faced with doing things that are a no brainer that you just don’t do them, either because they’re illegal, immoral or just plain dangerous and reckless. I’m not talking about those things. I’m talking about the guy who says to you, “You know, maybe you should upload some of your music to Audio Jungle and see what happens.”

I bring up Audio Jungle because this is actually a true story. I don’t know if you read my earlier article about the pros and cons of music sites like Audio Jungle. The problem with uploading your music to a site like that is you’re a small fish in a freaking ocean. The chances of anybody finding your work is slim to none. And in the past when people would suggest that I upload my music to these sites I would tell them that it was a waste of time.

But I’ve finally changed my tune. I have a royalty free music site with over 5,000 tracks. I’ve made 2 legit sales. Everything else has been illegally downloaded. So what do I have to lose by taking some of my music and uploading it to Audio Jungle. Sure, it’s going to take some time to upload any significant portion of my catalog but it just might do some good.

Am I holding my breath waiting for a sale? No, of course not. I realize that it might not come. But like Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss all the shots you don’t take.” So instead of making excuses for why I’m not going to upload music to those music farms, I’m going to give it a shot. If nothing else, if it totally bombs out and turns out to be a waste of time, I can turn around and say to these people “See, I told you. Waste of time.” That will at least give me some satisfaction that I was right and they were wrong. In the meantime, I’m doing something that just might make me some money. At this stage of the game, what do I have to lose?

For this reason, I am branching off into some of the business models I talked about in my last article. There was a time I would have never considered them. But now, I figure I have nothing to lose by giving them a shot.

Which ones am I going after? Well, if I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you. Let’s just say they all have something to do with music or music technology.

Okay, but how do you tell what things are sensible to at least try and what things are a total waste of time and can’t possibly turn a profit? For example, if somebody told me to place ads on FFA sites, I would absolutely refuse because I learned a long time ago that posting on FFA sites is a waste of time. How do I know? Because back in 2002, I did just that. So something like that, where I had actual first hand experience that the activity was a waste of time, I would refuse to do it if somebody suggested I tried it.

Another reason for refusing to do something would be ethics. There are a lot of activities that are done online that I feel are unethical. I’m not going to list them because I don’t want to give anybody any ideas. I’m sure you probably know of a few yourself. And I don’t care how much money these tactics could make me. I’m not sacrificing my integrity for a buck. You have to do what you think is right.

Of course there is legality which is totally off the table. If the activity is clearly illegal, I won’t do it. I’m not risking going to jail for any amount of money. Again, you have to do what you think is right.

Aside from those things, I’ll give just about anything a fair shot. Of course money has to come into play here too. If somebody wants me to do something that’s going to require me to take out a $100,000 loan, that’s not happening. I am finally out of debt and I’m not going back into it on the “chance” that I might make a few bucks. Unless it’s a sure bet, I’m not interested. That’s just basic risk/reward management. You don’t go to a Vegas roulette table and toss $1,000 on double zero. That’s just a stupid bet. So no, I won’t do something stupid. I draw the line at stupidity.

Where you draw the line is up to you. You may take more risks than me or you may be more cautious than me. But don’t say no to things just because you “think” they won’t work. I’ve been doing that for way too long and there’s no telling how much money I’ve left on the table because of it.

You do have to take some chances in life. If you don’t, you’ll never get anywhere. Very few things in this life will just fall into your lap. Everything that has ever happened to me that was good, I made happen. It’s when I realized that fact that I stopped making excuses. Because if I don’t make things happen, they won’t happen.

Audio Jungle, ready or not, here I come.

For The Love Of Music,

Steven “Wags” Wagenheim