This time last year...

Tomorrow I begin my second and final year of the MA Songwriting course at Bath Spa University. (now renamed MMus Songwriting). On a typical British Autumn morning (cold, grey, overcast, howling wind and rain spattering the windows) it seems an appropriate moment to take stock and think of what has changed in my world during the last 12 months.

The new Corsham Court campus

This time last year - well, I was about to begin the course, obviously. I'd just given up my job, a typical 9-5 office job on an IT Helpdesk. It was a decent job with a reputable firm; reasonably well paid with good benefits, but every minute spent resolving some tedious computer problem was a minute of my life I felt I was wasting. I'd already concluded that I wasn't the office job-type - having done a couple of similar jobs in the previous 3 years, I'd gone way past the itchy feet phase. I was bored, uninspired and needed a new challenge.

Since I was really young, making music is all I've ever really wanted to do. I learnt piano from the age of 8 and taught myself guitar in my teens. I did a Music Tech degree in my early twenties, but like so many people didn't use my qualification and knowledge to further my career. I got stuck in a rut - did a few medial jobs, did some travelling and then, of course, settled into my cosy office job. Zzzzzzzz.

Thank goodness for the course. It was a bit of a gamble financially - I took a part-time job as a postman to (just about) cover the bills, freeing up my afternoons and evenings to concentrate on my studies. When I started the course, I'd come to a bit of a standstill musically. I'd been playing a few acoustic showcases around Bristol, but never anything serious. I wrote a few songs here and there, but I didn't have a focus, I'd lost all the drive that I had when I was younger.

I wanted to improve my songwriting skills, and start making lots of music again. One of my ambitions had always been to start up a collaborative pop music project under an alias, but I'd never put enough time or effort into it. I didn't know exactly what I wanted out of the course when I first walked through the door, and was hoping that it would become a little more clear - and it certainly did.

A year on, everything has changed for me. I'm writing prolifically again and all my enthusiasm has returned. Once again, I love making music, I believe in what I do and I'm confident that I'm finally heading in the right direction. It's hard to describe how much I've learnt on this course. Purely in terms of songwriting skills, having advice and tuition from successful, experienced writers has been invaluable. The guest speakers have been just as helpful in terms of advice, and getting an insight into what you really need to be successful in the big, bad world of the music industry.

I was lucky to meet a like-minded individual on the course in the form of Mr. Mark Vallance. Mark is an incredible singer and a gifted writer, and we instantly clicked. We were both looking to collaborate and write for others, rather than write solo material, so began working together towards the end of last year. We instantly had good results, and realised quickly that we'd stumbled across a good combination.

At the moment we're building our portfolio. We've been lucky enough to collaborate with some very successful, influential people. We've written two songs with a massively experienced writer who is currently pitching our tracks to some very big names in the industry. We also have another track which has been forwarded - it all looked very exciting for a while but then went a little quiet. At the moment, it's all about "sowing the seeds". We're still two very small fish in a very large pond!

So, to sum up. It's been an incredible year, and I can't wait to begin the course again. I've met some amazing people and learnt more than I could've ever imagined. Most importantly, I've finally realised that if you have a dream then just go for it, don't let anything stop you. Dive in headfirst, give it your all, and you never know what might happen.

MA Songwriting - year one done and dusted

I may live to regret the title of this post, as I've not received marks for my assignments yet. A mark of less than 50% would mean working over the Summer and re-submitting them. However, I'd rather be positive and assume that all is fine and dandy!

I haven't really blogged about the course this year, and that's mainly down to the fact that we've been pretty swamped with work. Even us part-timers had a fair bit to do, so I really feel for the full-timers who had an extra double module and will be doing their recording plan assignment over the Summer. Mind you, there are more tedious academic tasks out there than recording music! I love this course :-)

So for me, this term has been all about collaborating and re-writing. It's been a funny kind of term because it's been all about self-study and doing things off our own back, rather than having set tasks. So basically, we had to write with a minimum of five other collaborators and re-write at least four solo songs, then document the process and learning outcomes in the form of assignments at the end of term.

The collaboration module was great fun, everyone threw themselves in head first! Of course, the natural tendency was to write with other MA students, but there were some other very interesting collabs; for example, I wrote with someone who had never written a song before and another student wrote a song with their 4-year old daughter! I'm sure there were some other crazy collabs too that I'm not aware of - the essays must've made fascinating reading!

Rewriting was a much different task, one that a few people (myself included) found fairly awkward. We received a collection of critique after last year's solo songwriting module, and the challenge was to implement suggestions made to improve our songs. I made a bit of a hash of my first rewrite - I made the error of listening to too much critique and trying to implement everything. After that, I learnt the lesson that you must pick out only valid and constructive points - and always keep the focus of why you wrote the song in the first place.

It's an interesting task for any songwriter if you've never tried it before - seek a load of critique about one of your songs and try and rewrite it based on what people say. It can be really difficult to detach yourself from the song, but you may just find that you get a much better result. If the finished song is better, it doesn't matter how you got there!

Here's a couple of other little songwriting tasks that people may find helpful, especially if you're stuck in a bit of rut with your writing. You may find that some of these help to get you over writers block, or just get you back into it if you haven't written for a while:

- take a really old song that's long forgotten about (maybe the first one you ever wrote) and rewrite it completely. There's bound to be something in there you'll want to keep. Maybe use the concept and write new music, or keep the music and write totally new lyrics. It's an interesting idea - I did it with a track called 'Communication Breakdown' for the course. The original song was one of the first things I ever wrote - very average singer/songwriter stuff - so I turned it into an RnB pop song. You can hear the result here: http://www.myspace.com/patrickmcintyremusic

- take someone else's song and rewrite it. Again, you may end up changing little bits or creating a completely different song. This was one of our tasks this year; we had to rewrite another student's song. I loved this task. I chose Rebecca Cullen's song "You and Me", and didn't change it massively - just rejigged a few lyrics and did it in my own style. I don't think she has the original online but you can hear my rewrite at http://www.reverbnation.com/patmcintyre

So that's just a little taster of what us MA Songwriters have been up to this year. It's been great fun and the quality of music has improved massively since last year, especially some of the collaborative work. There is a school of thought out there that believes Songwriting can't be taught. This course is positive proof that it can be taught, in my opinion. The fact that every single person on the course is writing better songs than they were this time last year tells it's own story! Bring on year two :-)

I'll end with a little group photo of the MA Songwriters (unfortunately there's a couple of people missing). A diverse group of people I'm sure you'll agree, but with a reassuring bond of madness! I'm the one with the freakishly small head. I'll miss meeting up with everyone on a Tuesday, but look forward to staying in touch and making lots of music with them in the future.

PS - if anyone reading this is interested in the Masters course in Songwriting, I highly recommend it! Check out the Bath Spa website http://www.bathspa.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/songwriting.asp and get in touch with Mr. Andy West, who will be more than happy to answer any questions.

Over and out!

Sorry!

Hello there internet,

Just an incredibly brief blog to say sorry for the lack of updates. I know there's a link to this blog on the Bath Spa website somewhere; so if anyone has found this page hoping to get an insight into the Songwriting course, my apologies! At the moment us Songwriters are bogged down with very unmusical-like tasks such as essays. But in a couple of weeks they'll be over and done with, and I'll properly recap what has happened this year. For part-timers like me, it's been all about rewriting songs (new songs, old songs, other people's songs) and being involved in all sorts of collaborations. It's been a whirlwind few months - so check back here soon and I'll reflect on all that's been happening!

P

Back to school

I write this whilst battling with seemingly incurable man-flu. Only the male readers will be able to truly empathise here. It took it's grip a few days ago and just doesn't want to let go. If this is my last ever post, and the man-flu finishes me off... well, I had a good run!

Anyway. Sympathy fishing over. I've got loads to talk about, and lots of things that should be taking priority over this! Our University term has started back up, and I think we're all relieved to be back. It's been a long old break - term ended mid-December, and we frantically worked on our assignments which were handed in during the second week of January. Then we had a month's break, so it's been ages since we had lectures and tutorials.

We all reconvened this week - full-timers started on Monday, and us part-timers came in on Tuesday. It's been interesting to hear what everyone's been up to. Lots of musical projects and collaborations have been flying around it seems.

Me and Mark took our collaborative project to the next level on Monday evening, getting a talented singer in to lay down some vocals for two of our new tracks. Marika turned out to be a gem - a true pro with an amazing voice, and bags of energy and enthusiasm. We got some great vocals recorded, and look forward to working with her again in the future. We now will be mixing and producing the tracks, before sending them to some of our new industry contacts (made through the course), to get them critiqued and to see if our confidence in the songs is correctly placed.

Tuesday was a fun day, catching up with all the fellow songwriters. I can't put into words what a great bunch of people are on this course. Such a positive, inspiring collective, and I realised how much I'd missed seeing everyone. For us part-timers, this semester will be all about re-writing our solo tracks from last term, and collaborating.

We were given a task yesterday - pick one of four songs (as written/recorded by Commercial Music undergraduates), then go away in groups to re-write and try to improve the song. I picked a song called "Bitter End", and in my group were Mark, Kim, Annie and Miles. In just over an hour, we managed to completely re-write the song, and I reckon it sounded really good. As a group we gelled really well, and it was such a fun experience. So much so that we've decided to write a song from scratch as a five-way collaboration. Should be interesting!

We have also now received all our song critiques. Jez Ashurst and Paul Field have critiqued all the songs we wrote last term, and we have also been critiquing each other's songs, as part of last year's Solo Songwriting module. I received five critiques from my peers for four different songs. It makes interesting reading, and I'll definitely be taking everything on board! For next Tuesday, we have to re-write one of the songs critiqued by our peers. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into that.

I've also got another music-related project going on, albeit nothing to do with songwriting. A chap from sonicstate.com contacted me through the course, asking whether I would fancy doing some music tech equipment reviews for their website. I jumped at the chance, and am currently in the process of reviewing a Yamaha DTXM12 drum module. My review will be filmed, and if it makes the grade then hopefully I'll be appearing in an internet browser near you!

Ciao for now,

Pat

The formula for a hit record

Going back a couple of posts to the 3rd December, I talked a little about what makes a great record. I mentioned that if there was indeed a "formula" for creating a hit record, then computers would be writing all our pop music by now. Well, funnily enough, it would seem that the technology already exists! I stumbled across this fascinating article, published in The Guardian in November 2006.

It talks all about the analysis of hit records, and there's some interesting stuff about "clusters" - apparently about 80% of hit records share a small number of underlying structures. That's probably not a massive revelation to be honest, but it's interesting that this hit analysis software groups together Norah Jones, Vanessa Carlton and Van Halen in the same cluster!

I won't ruin the article, but I will say that thankfully us songwriters won't be going out of business in the immediate future by the looks of things! While we wait for computers to write the next Hey Jude, I'll pass on this link that Jez Ashurst shared with us the other day. It seems writing a hit record is simple after all, you just need these four chords...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMshvUReunc 

Quick techie blog...

I mentioned in my last blog that I'd invested in some new equipment, so thought I'd do a quick blog about it, because I love music tech chat! There might be an element of geeky music talk coming up, so if you're the kind of person that thinks Pro Tools sounds like something for fixing up shelves, it might be worth looking away now!

I was previously working mostly in Cubase SX3 on a ropey old PC, so was very pleased to get a shiny new MacBook about a month ago (on loan from the University). I'm now running Logic Pro 9, which seems to be a great piece of software. Very intuitive, and now I'm getting to grips with it, I'm finding it very easy to get creative with. The only thing I miss about Cubase was how easy it is was to manipulate audio, but overall the advantages of Logic far outweigh the disadvantages I'd say (saying that, Cubase 5 looks pretty awesome - anyone tried it at all?)

I was a little concerned that the MacBook may struggle a little, being the lowest spec Mac on the market, and knowing that I'm a little bit plug-in crazy. However, it seems to be coping admirably so far. I've just mixed a song with about 16 tracks, each having at least 2 or 3 inserts, with loads of automation and some mastering plug-ins on the output. The CPU usage was barely registering most of the time - pretty impressive. However, I've found that it pays to save REGULARLY, because Logic has crashed on me 3 or 4 times for no apparent reason.

One area where I've compromised in the past was with microphones and hardware. Not sure why I didn't splash out previously, because good equipment makes all the difference. I still remember that eternal phrase that our studio technician at Uni used at least 5 times a day: "s**t in, s**it out - you can't polish a turd!". Never a truer word spoken.

So I've invested in a new condenser mic and a decent audio interface for the Mac. Unfortunately my budget is pretty limited, so I ended up buying an SE Electronics Titan mic and an E-MU 0404 interface. I was also going to buy a preamp, but after reading up on the subject it seems that £500+ is the ball park for a decent one. I'd be interested to hear if anyone had had good results with the budget preamps that are on the market...

So far, the results are pretty good. Check out my new recording of 'Shivers' in the music player on the right, recorded with the new kit. The Titan mic sounds great on acoustic guitar. I was hoping for a little bit more warmth on vocals - I recently tried an AKG 414 and an SE Z5600a, both of which produced much better results for vocals. However, for what I'm doing it's fine, and it seemed a steal at under £240 from Digital Village. I read some reviews which thought it was good value for money, even when it was priced at nearer £1000, so it definitely seemed a good buy!

Ok, enough geek speak for the time being. If anyone else finds this sort of thing exciting, and spends hours drooling over the Dolphin Music web site like I do, please post a comment and let me know your latest bit of kit!

Over and out.

2010 - A pop-tastic year...

2010. A new year - indeed, a new decade. I for one have not been so excited at the prospect of the year ahead for some time. I'm thrilled to be diving head-first into the vast, scary sea that is the music business.

I've dabbled around with music in the past, but this year it's time to start taking it seriously. There always seems to be an excuse for not following your dreams. For me, it's always been "other commitments". Work, travel, relationships, etc. I don't want those excuses to come back and haunt me in 30 years time, so I'm going to give it a real go from now on. At least then, if it doesn't work out, I can say that I gave it my best shot.

The MA Songwriting course has broadened my horizons further than I could've ever imagined possible. At first I wasn't too sure exactly what my aims were for the course, but now I'm 100% focused. I want to write a hit record. I want publishers to sit up and take notice. I want to get that foot in the door that is so essential.

I created an 'Industrial Plan' for one of my assignments, and although I thought at first that it might be one of the less exciting elements of the course, it turned out to be quite the opposite. It's a real eye-opener in fact, and it's really allowed me to get my priorities straight. I've now got myself a part time job, which pays the bills but also allows me to dedicate most of my time to music. I've forked out some cash on some new equipment, which I was desperately needing (see next post).

I've also found a great writing partner through the course. We're constantly bouncing ideas off each other, and have already started writing some tracks which I think have massive potential. It's pure pop writing - we're aiming directly at the Lady GaGa-type market. Edgy, highly synth-based stuff which we hope will stand out from the crowd. We're in talks with a number of vocalists, so hopefully that will be the final part of the jigsaw to get our tracks sounding impeccable.

I'll be posting a few previews of our new stuff on here when it's ready. As for the solo material - well, it's not entirely forgotten, but it is on the backburner.
I've written a new tune called 'Running On Empty' recently (sketchy YouTube vid available here), and I'm re-recording some of my old tunes to update the Myspace. However, that all has low priority at the moment. It's all about pop for the time being! Time to study that Beyonce CD...