Unknown to a lot of people, one of my hobbies is writing songs. I started in high school with my best friends/band mates and I've been casually coming up with ditties when inspiration moves me. It's really a personal thing because for most of my life, songs I made were there in my successes, failures, heartaches, anniversaries, and the time I proposed to my then fiancee.
The unfortunate thing is that I have not found the time to nurture my hobby for the last few years. Life just happened; work, personal activities, blogging, studies, and more work took most of my time. I say it's unfortunate because my songwriting hobby is one of the truly creative things that I've done. Come to think of it, I guess it's no coincidence that most of my creative work was during a time I still sat in my room with my guitar and busted out songs, finished or unfinished (well, mostly unfinished).
That's why when I saw the blog post that the legendary Jim Paredes (of APO fame) was going to conduct his very first songwriting workshop, I was immediately sure that i was going to attend it. I wanted to find that creative spark and and hopefully pin down most of my unfinished work.
The workshop was a two-day event and it had loose structure. (As Jim said, he wanted to make a very intuitive experience.) We were twelve in the class and it was a very diverse group, from angsty teenage rockers, to experienced musicians.
We spent the two days doing three things: 1) analyzing songs, 2) creating songs and parts of songs, and 3) receiving critiques on our works. Of course, there's the occasional chit-chat about music, like who are the songwriters worth emulating (and those worth forgetting), how the APO hits were created, and good old music biz chismis (gossip). It was all cool.
My greatest learning from the workshop is how to make a song "take-off," that is, to bring the listener to a higher level. A lot of it has to do with the melody, the arrangement, and the chords that you use. It's very hard to describe and it's best heard in a song or explained by Jim himself.
Like I mentioned, we spent a great deal of time doing exercises in songwriting and applying the techniques and knowledge we picked up. After that, we shared our outputs to the class. This means that anyone who's planning to attend future workshops should lose the shyness and be open to comments, even just for the two days of the workshop. Jim, after all, is not that brutal in giving his ideas about your song. (Whew!)
For my outputs in the workshop, I'll be posting them soon. I'm still recording the rough demos, so please wait for them. Once I post them, I'd welcome anybody's comments. :)
As Jim said, there's really no 100% sure-fire formula for making great songs, but there are patterns and templates you can have as pegs. Songwriting is a creative process where you, ironically, just pick up things that are already there and put it into song. Great stuff.
Over-all, my personal experience at Jim Paredes' first writing workshop was a great one and it has spurred me to be more creative and rekindled my relationship with my guitar.
Tags: Songwriting
