GTD for Songwriters (pt 7)

Welcome to the final instalment. After sorting out paper & digital files let's finish off by looking at how important titles are

Songs

It's not just albums where we get to be creative with the metadata. Even if you get through a few working titles you're still likely to end up with lots of versions of the same song with the same name. I avoid confusion by labelling my songs like so

You Spoke The Stars D4R2V2M5

D=Draft

This is the version of song that I'm on. When I get the idea for a song and write it out in full that's draft one. Every time I do any substantial work on it that becomes the next draft. I may not do a fresh recording of each draft but I do want the audio name to match up with what I have written down. Lyrically a new draft is often the point where I can no longer scribble any more amendments on a sheet of paper and have to type out a new one.

R=Rewrite

Sometimes I record/perform/whatever a song, then realise it's still not the best it can be. This can happen years after I 'finished' it. A song that I revisit in this way will get an R tag though I'll keep numbering the drafts (I also stupidly put the R before the D but I think that's because my inner geek would get a kick out of seeing a song with R2D2 in the title).

V = (Recorded) Version

I don't bother using this for just capturing song ideas, but sometimes you attempt a demo for public consumption and then scrap it and try again (think of Love Me Do by The Beatles. Pete Best would be V1 and Ringo Starr would be V2 (Yes Beatles geeks, Andy White would be V3!).

M = Mix

Pretty obvious but probably the most useful. It's easy to spot the version with Ringo on the drums, but what about the one where you added more compression to the bass in the 3rd verse?

One cool little bi-product of having everything digital is it's easy to duplicate a song if you need to.

For example, you have finally completed Awesome Song. The finished article is named Awesome Song D4R2V2M5. Store it in the Awesome Song album. Then copy it and put the copy into the 'best of' playlist. Now retag the copy with the name of your real album and all the metadata you'd want Joe Public to see. You can do the same thing if an idea ends up inspiring more than one song and add a duplicate file to each album.

(another bug to watch out for is the way iTunes renames files when you rename tracks – WMP sensibly leaves the filename alone. I like it like this because sometime I can't remember which mix I chose to release).


If you didn't check it out before let me recommend the Songwriting For Busy People podcast by Graham English. He covers many of the ideas I've put forward in these posts, but fits it all in to 7 minutes!

Download all my 2011 songs for free!!!
Other free songs by Matt Blick

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GTD For Songwriters (pt 6)

I'm taking a bunch of posts to look at applying the 'next action' principal of GTD to songwriting. Let's look at managing audio files.

You and Media 

So, rather than files and folders, your media player is where it all happens. But how does it happen?

Through a creative use of playlists, albums and titles.

Playlists

Getting back to GTD terminology, your playlists function as 'next action lists' You can have any number of lists but the three basic ones are

Song Starts
Raw ideas that might turn into a song

Best Of
Which is the playlist you might use to share songs with any interested party, or just play to yourself when you need reminding that you're not a talentless loser who can't finish a song

Current Song
This is your work bench for the things you're working on right now

There doesn't seem quite the same need for a dead/completed audio playlist as a physical song folder as the sum total of all your hard work just sits there in your media player anonymous but searchable and sortable.

I said this system was a work in progress – a bug in the system is that whenever I've backed up data and wiped my hard drive the playlists are the things that never quite come back properly. Loosing track of which rough ideas are worth working on would be a big problem...any ideas?

Albums

Albums are your key filing system component. What you do is create a separate album for each song. Eventually this one 'album' will contain all the versions of your song from initial riffs through various drafts and alternative versions to all the different mixes and the finished track. The advantage (other than having everything in a handy bucket) is that if the song title changes you only have to rename the album (a simple move in WMP and iTunes) not all the individual tracks. For example the album for my recent song Brother contains tracks called CivilSatrianiZepHel (the original riff), Not About The Pigs (the original title/concept) and Brother (the finished song).

Download all my 2011 songs for free!!!
Other free songs by Matt Blick

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GTD For Songwriters (pt 5)

As I've written about previously I'm using the GTD philosophy to sort song ideas. I've already covered the physical stuff (lyrics and chords on paper etc) but what about all the audio? This is much more of a work in progress but here's what I've got so far.

The future is not digital

Everyone has an iPod (and a Kalashnikov)

Digital is the present. It's pain for old timers like me because so many of my songs and ideas are stored in analogue form (I rocked a C90 back in the day) but digital is really the best option for all the reasons that persuaded us to start buying CDs in the first place. Ease of access, storage, portability...y'know - the whole 'being able to carry your entire music library with you as you fly to work in your rocket suit' shebang. And you can eat your breakfast off it. (No wait, that was a lie...)

I'd also add the benefit of being able to instantly access and do A/B comparison on ideas from the last 28 years of my music career. But lest you think this is just an issue for geezers like me, do any of you young whippersnappers have ideas spread around on voicemail, WAV, mp4, FLAC, CDs, minidiscs and DAT?

So the goal here is to rip everything onto one computer (or cloud) in mp3 format (lofi, but fine for capturing ideas).

Folders Shmolders

The next issue is sorting all this stuff. Listen to me carefully here. Labelling folders is no use whatsoever. You don't access audio files via folders you access them via your media player so what you name your folders, where you put 'em and how you arrange them is irrelevant. What folders are is a place for storing and to find when you need to back em up. So just make sure you're music is all in one place (and preferably somewhere separate from everyone else's music on your hard drive).

Download all my 2011 songs for free!!!
Other free songs by Matt Blick

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GTD For Songwriters (pt 4)

Here's another post applying the principals of GTD to songwriting. If you missed them, here's the intro, part one, part two and part three. Today, let's look at clearing the backlog.

Being a song filing champ isn't the Win you're looking for

I’ve started to make a few steps on this journey of reclaiming all the old material from my files. It feels great. At least one song which I thought was a great concept turned into a great song (Everything Is Broken) and others that turned out less great are now out of my hair.

That said, it’s important that we don’t start filing wild geese by making 'sorting out our archives' our sole goal for the year. A chef doesn’t have the right to feel he’s getting somewhere cos he finally cleaned out his spice rack. Productivity for song writers means writing songs.

Diary of a recovering song hoarder

Here’s what I’m doing. I’ve got my potential folder containing the last few years worth of ideas in there. Songs in the front, single line ideas in the back. I’m still finding songs masquerading as single lines and vice versa. I’m starting to pull out the single ideas that are actually titles and group them together.

From that I select ONE idea at a time and put it into a wallet folder and work on it till it’s finished.

I’m also ripping up my old note books. Songs I’ve finished are easy to deal with. Each song gets it's own poly-pocket in an alphabetised folder three folders four folders). All my rejected ideas and songs go there too. That one step alone means half the pages I've accumulated I’ll never have to look at again. My head feels clearer already!

What about audio? Well that 's more of a work in progress for me – but I'll be back on Monday to share what I've come up with.

No matter how original you think you are some one has always thunk your thoughts before you. Graham English did a great (and very short podcast called Songwriting For Busy People that I'd recommend - unless you're too busy to listen to it. He covers some of these very same points.

Download all my 2011 songs for free!!!
Other free songs by Matt Blick
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GTD For Songwriters (pt 3)

I'm taking a bunch of posts to look at applying the 'next action' principal of GTD to songwriting. If you missed them, here's the intro, part one and part two.

Say No To Moleskines

Not moleskin! Mol - eh - skeen - ah!

So you're gathering things according what you need to do with them next. That means all the drafts of your current song need to be together. All your potential songs need to be together. All your rejected and finished songs need to be together – out of your sight! Tozier won me over. If you're going to jot ideas down in a note book it needs to be one you're not afraid to rip up and file the pages away (so don't write a different song on the back!).

Speaking of which...

Everything Digital?

Why not keep everything digital as word docs or even something fancier and shmancier than that? Because sometimes you need to flick through all you ideas quickly (like pages in a book) and sometimes you need to lay out a million ideas where you can see ‘em and move em around (like pages ripped out of a book) but mostly because you need to not see a whole lot of other ideas (like pages that have been stored away in a totally different book).
“But I’ve got a billion terabytes on my laptop and I can store everything I’ve ever written!” you cry. But your brain can’t – that’s the point. The reason songwriters get into this mess is too much raw data. It needs sorting.

That said I do type things up and have digital copies of most drafts. These live in files marked current (songs in some stage of development), finished and old. Old contains a sub folder for each song. The others don't need sub folders as they should only contain one version of any song.

Next time - filing and hording

Related Posts: Writing songs with Joseph Pulitzer
Download all my 2011 songs for free!!!
Other free songs by Matt Blick



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GTD For Songwriters (pt 2)

Have you read the intro and part one?

Getting Things Done (GTD) teaches you to sort things by what you need to do with them next, rather than what they are (a CD, a chord chart, manuscript paper).

As I’ve wrestled with the problem of how to file songwriting ideas, I've realised everything pretty much falls into one of six categories

Best of

This is your portfolio of your best work to date, finished enough to share with the world in a form that the world can understand. For me it's a playlist of my best final mixes and a folder with all my best songs in chord chart form.

Current

The song you’re working on right now. Song. Singular. Not plural.

Potential

This has two parts. Song ideas that actually might be worth working on someday and fragments - a line, a title, a chord, a metaphor that might fit in any number of songs

Retired

It’s over. It may have even been in your 'best of' once upon a time but the years (or months) have not been kind to it and it’s time to put the little fella to sleep. These are the demos your next of kin are going to be fleecing your fans with long after you’re dead. (BTW you can always gut the song and put any parts worth saving back into your potential file)

Archive

These are all the various drafts and rewrites of the songs that you’ve already completed. These are documents your next of kin are going to be fleecing collectors at auctions with long after you’re dead.

Rejects

You got the inspiration and faithfully wrote it down, but now you look at it in the cold light of day you realise that the muse meant to drop it off at Mr Poopie’s house for inclusion on Poopie Music Vol. 10.

Next time – why I don't like nothin' and what the point is not

Related Posts: Writing songs with Stephen King
Download all my 2011 songs for free!!!
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GTD For Songwriters (pt 1)

(read the intro post here)

For the last 2 years I’ve been attempting to implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity system into my life and for the same amount of time I’ve been trying to get some kind of meaningful handle on the mountain of raw song material I already have.

Did I say mountain?

50 odd cassette tapes (yeah remember those?), 4 track master tapes, a DAT tape, 30 CDs, a couple of hundred mp3 files, not to mention mp4s, WMAs & WAVs. That’s just audio. 4 ‘page a day’ diaries full of lyrics, 7 or 8 manuscript books, a couple of exercise books and a few ring binders. 


No wonder I never go there. That amount of information frightens me. I might go in to look up some old chord progression and never come out again, only for one of my kids to find my body weeks later crushed under a pile of mp3s.


The way out

Last year I’ve began to see a way through the mess and it was inspired by an insight from GTD. Allen say...

Most undermining of the effectiveness of many workflow systems I see is the fact that all documents of one type (e.g., service requests [or lyrics]) are kept in a single tray even though different kinds of actions may be required on each one. One request needs a phone call, another needs data reviewed, and still another is waiting for someone to get back with some information – but they’re all sorted together. This arrangement can cause a person’s mind to go numb to the stack because of all the decisions that are still pending about the next-action level of doing.

GTD p. 151-152

can cause a person’s mind to go numb ?


 - David, you know me so well!

Our natural habit is to store ‘like with like’. Take books for example. Where do you keep the books you love and reread and refer to? What about the ones you're probably never going to read again? Probably rubbing shoulders on the same shelf somewhere. And that’s fine. For books.

What we really need to do with our songwriting ‘stuff’ is gather and organise it according to what the all important ‘next action’ is - the very next thing we need to do with that file or piece of paper.

Portrait Of Chaos 

Look at my files. In one manuscript pad I have a transcription of a John Scofield solo followed by the finished score for a 4 voice minimalist piece, excerpts from the Rite of Spring, various riffs, scale and rhythmic ideas to explore and finally horn charts for one of my songs.

In audio files finished mixes rub shoulders with rough mixes, live performances, single riffs, snatches of melodies & chord progressions. I have music recorded in professional studios next to ideas captured on a built in laptop mic.

The way out of this creative jungle is to file things not according to what they are , but according to what we need to do with them next .

I'll unpack how I do this in practice in part 2

Related Posts: A songwriting masterclass with Peter Jackson & Steven Spielberg

Download all my 2011 songs for free!!!
Other free songs by Matt Blick

The 4 Stages Of A Songwriter

I'm going to take a few posts to explain my system for writing songs. I'm going to be quite forthright about what I think works and also hasn't worked for me. If something works for you, great! Feel free to leave me a comment disagreeing. But “works for you” is the operative phrase. 

Is your system (or lack of it) really helping you to write more (and better) songs or hindering you?

I've observed four stages we can go through as songwriters learning the craft.

one

You try to write a song. You plug away until you finish it or (more often than not) you lose heart and give up. You subscribe to the ‘if it’s great I’ll remember it’ school of thought. But eventually you forget a couple of great ideas and you’re having so many ideas anyway the new ones are pushing the old ones out. Congratulations. You've outgrown stage one.

two

You begin to wise up. The weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memory right? So now you are the proud, but bemused owner of numerous scraps of paper, envelope backs, notebooks, unlabelled mp3 files & dictaphone cassettes. Your voice mail is filled with embryonic melodies you’ve sung to yourself. You don’t know where anything is and you’re constantly surprised by the random and incomprehensible snippets you find. But at least you found some killer lines for your latest song. It's just a shame that you found ‘em two weeks after you'd finished it.

three

You’re smarter. You have a system. It’s a file. It’s a program. It’s an App. It’s a beautiful and overpriced notebook that makes you feel smarter and more artistic just because you own it.

It’s something to pour all you ideas into. The problem is that once ideas go in they never come out.

Welcome to my world

Tomorrow I'll start a short series about Stage Four – GTD Songwriting

Download all my 2011 songs for free!!!
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Best Of 2009: Books And Films

Books

1)The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture (Scott Klusendorf) – This book makes a compelling pro-life argument and help us to cut through the many smoke screens and false trails to the one issue behind all others in the abortion debate. In a way the only drawback is that it does this so effectively in the first chapter that it becomes a victim of it’s own success and the following few chapters seem a bit superfluous . However later chapters approach the issues from different angles and are very rewarding. Informing and crystal clear without being any heavier than it needs to.

2) Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity (David Allen) – a brilliant life management system - simple, comprehensive and common sense without getting dogmatic. David Allen argues convincingly for running your life from the bottom up rather than top down (against books like 7 habits) and shows you how. I’ve read it twice and am still applying the lessons.

3) Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (Jung Chang) – a heartbreaking study of the cost of Chinese communism told through the real life stories of three generations of Chinese woman starting with the author’s grandmother – a Chinese warlord’s concubine.

Films

Up – a kids film? Hardly. Out of a ridiculous premise (OAP balloon salesman flies his house to South America) Pixar craft the most profound and moving film of the year. If there is any justice in the film industry this should win best picture Oscar. A moving plot, humour, and better characterisation that 90% of Hollywood films. Even the talking dog is believable!

Man on Wire– a thrilling, dramatised documentary of the illegal wire walking stunt of the century. In 1974 Philippe Petit smuggled ½ ton of equipment into the twin towers and walked between them, 104 floors up, for three quarters of an hour. Using interviews, original footage and reconstruction the film explores how he did it, who helped him and what it cost them all.

Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travela quirky and original low budget British sci-fi comedy that pays homage to, and subverts, the genre at the same time. Great fun.

Honourable mentions

Lucky Number Slevin

Rendition

Meet Dave

Inkheart

Related Posts: Best Music (2009)
Best Music Videos (2009)