Joe Bennett's blog

Archive

This blog is an archive of my songwriting and teaching projects 2007-2009. For more up-to-date information please see my website at http://www.joebennett.net.

Studio build in progress

Plan

The studio build is about halfway through now - fully blogged on my Wordpress site.
http://joebennett.wordpress.com

Crows, Rooks and Ravens - the songs

Crows, Rooks and Ravens

A year in the making, but it’s finally here. Crows, Rooks and Ravens is the album I co-wrote with singer-songwriter Andi Neate, released 19th March 2009. We started work on it in January 2008, and wrote/recorded around 25 songs, of which 10 appear on the album. It was a fascinating process, because Andi was in Edinburgh and I was in Bath, so we wrote all the lyrics online using Google docs, meaning we could update a lyric file separately or simultaneously. Inevitably it’s been a challenging journey, not least because Andi has never collaborated on a whole album before, and I have never written ‘remotely’ like this, but we both got a lot from it, and we’re proud of the result, and I think there are some finely crafted songs on there (but I would say that, wouldn’t I?!). The recording sessions took place in Bath and Edinburgh, with hard drives and musicians traversing Hadrian’s Wall by Parcel Force almost every week.

Burnsong 2007 - BBC Glasgow

Andi and I started working together during the Burnsong project in November 2007 (see previous posts on the Vox blog) and decided to write and produce the album together a few weeks later. The demo process was as follows;

• Initial MP3 vocal/guitar idea or lyric fragment emailed
• MP3s backwards and forwards for a few iterations
• Lyric sheet developed as a Google doc and edited throughout
• I make a backing track and email MP3 to Andi
• Andi sings a vocal straight to MP3 recorder, with the backing track in her headphones
• Andi emails me this dry vocal MP3
• I sync it up with the original backing track and create a demo, adding my own BVs and other instruments (and never pitch correcting - Andi is a fine singer and always does another take rather than let me ‘go digital’ on the vocal!)
• We repeat this process a few times until we’re both happy with the demo, then we agree via email that the song is complete, and move on to the next one.

Sometimes we had three or four songs on the go simultaneously, which made things easier if a song wasn’t working, or we wanted to put one on the back burner for a while.

Here’s a video we shot during (a break in) the Bath studios sessions – an acoustic version of our song ‘Come Back Home’.

Andi Neate - Come Back Home

PRS Foundation and CASH project - the movie

Angelina from CASH (the Composers and Authors' Society of Hong Kong) sent me this lovely video of the Creative Exchange week at Bath Spa back in August 2008. All the songs themselves can be found in previous entries.

Bath

Going back a bit...

Chris the bass

Back in November last year I worked with the lovely Chris Blanden on the Burnsong Project (see the original blog entry from last November, then follow all the entries afterwards to get the full story).
It was a great week, with some wonderful songs from the 12 participants; my only regret was that we didn't get any pics from the show we played at BBC TV Centre in Glasgow. Jenny from Burnsong has unearthed some, so here's a gallery.

Very green, Scotland...

Teaching songwriting with a Mac laptop

Demo panel at the UK Songwriting Festival 2008

I occasionally get asked, by undergraduate students, Festival songwriters, and songwriting teachers what software and hardware I use to project lyrics and play back songs for analysis during songwriting lectures. Sometimes the question actually hijacks lectures and diverts us from discussing the actual song, so I’m going to write this blog post about it, so next time someone asks, I can just send them this link and get on with talking about songwriting!

This is unapologetically nerdy and exhaustive, because the people who ask about this sort of thing often want lots of technical detail.

The hardware
During lectures I have my Mac laptop with me - it’s a standard Mac Powerbook running OSX and iTunes. This is connected to a VGA projector (see photo) and a mini-jack audio cable connects the Mac to whatever sound system we’re using (in the photo example we used a small mixing desk on the table, routed into the theatre PA system in the ceiling).

The library
My iTunes library is around 6000 MP3s that I’ve collected over the years from various sources. The computer is always live on the ‘net, so if someone in the lecture class wants to discuss a song I don’t have, I just spend the £0.79 then and there and buy it online.
Because I’m sometimes running a PowerPoint or web browser simultaneously, I like to be able to play and pause iTunes remotely in the background. Sometimes I use the Apple remote for this, but most of the time I prefer to use a background application called Synergy, which is a simple iTunes controller that provides play, pause, next track functions etc, using function keys.

Lyrics and MP3s - the background
We all know that despite many years of attempts by rights owners to prevent fans publishing song lyrics online, it’s possible to locate the lyrics to almost any song on the ‘net. But using a web browser to do this live in a lecture is inelegant, and distracts the class from the song. So I combine two techniques - MP3 lyric metatags and lyric widgets.

iTunes’ lyrics editor

An MP3 metatag (or to get really techy, its ID3 metadata… stay with me, here - it gets interesting soon!) is simply a way that the MP3 file can have textual information or images (title, artist, composer, cover artwork and lyrics) attached to the file. iTunes has a really simple text editor - just click Apple-I on any iTunes track to bring it up.
So once the lyric is found on the ‘net and then pasted into the MP3’s iTunes lyric info window, it’s there in the file forever, right there on my hard drive. This works for MP3s and also protected AAC files bought from the iTunes Music Store.
So far so good, but that’s still a lot of hassle, especially if I’m running seat-of-the-pants lectures like this year’s SWF (where I asked every member of the audience to write down a choice of song for analysis, then downloaded them live in the classroom). And it’s also not very useful to bring up the Apple-I info window, because the font size isn’t big enough for the class to see on a projector.

The widgets!

Lyrics widgets

In 2005 I discovered Mac OSX lyrics widgets. These are small applications that run in the background using Apple’s OSX Dashboard (i.e. they work with any Mac). There are several, but they all do essentially the same thing - display lyrics attractively on screen from the iTunes lyric data. But that’s not all. If they don’t find any lyric data, they automatically search the ‘net for the lyric, and then extract the text from the lyrics sites they interrogate, and paste it into the MP3 for you. All this happens live, in the background, meaning I can download a song (legally, of course) and then have the lyric embedded in it within less than 10 seconds.
I use several widgets, running concurrently, because they all search slightly different lyric sites. I’ve found that if one widget doesn’t find the lyric, another one will, and then the first one will simply pull the data from the MP3 itself (which will have been embedded automatically by whichever widget found the lyric online first). My current ones are;
Sing That iTune, Fire, Harmonic and the defunct but easy-to-find PearLyrics.

Icing on the cake - hot corners
Mac users will know that OSX supports hot corners. So I set up the Mac so that every time I move the mouse pointer to the top left of the screen, it launches Dashboard. Having previously set things up so that the lyrics widgets are always running, this means, in a lecture, all I have to do is play an MP3, sweep the mouse to the top left of the screen, and the lyrics appear!

But there’s more…

Jewelcase

Sometimes, we have an iTunes playlist running while we’re setting up a lecture - a list of recent hits, or songs in a particular form, theme or genre. So to make this a bit more visual, I also occasionally use Jewelcase, a shareware plugin for iTunes that displays not only the lyric metatag, but also the JPG of the album cover metatag - and puts the whole thing in a beautifully rendered spinning CD jewel case. Projected 20ft high in a lecture, it is a thing to behold!

And a tiny bit more…
This setup works great for lectures, but sometimes we’re discussing tempo. We can usually find the chords and key of a song (just by having an acoustic guitar to hand), and we can see its form usually from looking at the lyric and listening to the playback, but finding the tempo was always a bit fiddly, using a metronome there in the lecture.

BPM Widget

So I searched the ‘net for a tool that would enable me to mouse-click along to a track, display its tempo in Beats Per Minute, then embed the tempo in the MP3 for next time. It’s called BPM Widget. Does what it says on the tin!

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More pics from Janet

When she got home to HK, Janet emailed in some lovely pics of her own - here's a selection. The first one includes a photo of some other Chinese visitors (from Beijing) who just happened to be visiting, so it was very helpful to have some of our songwriters on hand to translate.

 

String arranging session

And here's one of my own favourite photos of the week, featuring Janet on violin. I like this one partly because it summarises the spirit of our UK/HK collaboration, and also because I loved the violin part that Janet played on 'Calling You' - Sara and Janet's musical-theatre-style song. We were short of time, so I had to add a cello part in a hurry using a sampler, but we ended up with a comfortable string quartet effect by keeping the violins higher in the mix and the sampler buried quite deep. Janet double-tracked the 1st and 2nd violins beautifully with very little musical direction needed (check out the semiquaver rising parallel thirds that go into the 2nd chorus). She was less confident with her English than some of the HK writers, but worked quickly and professionally in the studio; as she says, music is the universal language!

Calling You

Ryan's back in HK

Here's Ryan's summary of the week;

Just got back our trip last night and I’m beat. Luckily we made it back before the typhoon hit otherwise we’d be stuck in the airport right now. Anyway, here’s pictures of Creative Exchange 2008 that I was apart of in Bath, London. It was a joint project between C.A.S.H, PRS Foundation, and Bath Spa University. There was 4 HK songwriters (Rachel Kar, Janet Yung, Ng King Pan, and myself) and 4 London songwriters (Richard Lobb, Sara Spade, Carly Bryant, and Katy Carr) along with Joe Bennett (Music Director), Chris Blanden (Producer), and Peter Sarstedt (Special Guest). 

Jerry Chow Chow

Words and music by Rachel Kar and Katy Carr
Katy Carr - voice and banjolele
Rachel Kar -  piano
King Pan Ng - erhu

Produced by Chris Blanden

Jerry Chow Chow

Katy Carr and Rachel Kar

His name is Jerry. He is a Chow Chow. Which part of 'Jerry Chow Chow' do you not understand?

A

Jerry Chow Chow
Jerry Chow Chow
ni yong yuan shi wo de bao bei
Jerry Chow Chow
Jerry Chow Chow
Loving you the same everyday

B

Your love is so perfect
I can't believe you're mine
All of my world is yours
Give me a chance to tell you how i feel
Under the Hong Kong sky

A
Jerry Chow Chow
Jerry Chow Chow
ni yong yuan shi wo de bao bei

INSTRUMENTAL
Woof Woof

Jerry Chow Chow
Jerry Chow Chow
ni yong yuan shi wo de bao bei


Outro

Mango Tree

King Pan Ng and Sara Spade

King Pan Ng: Voice, piano and erhu

Sara Spade: voice and guitar
Produced by Chris Blanden

Mango tree

Sara Spade and King Pan Ng

Waking up on the train as the track rolls by
I remember a dream of when
we sat under a tree of hanging mangoes
Oh how I long to be there again
We wrote Kin and Sara under the mango tree

A promise by finger tips under sky pink blue
You smiled at me as your cheeks turned red
It seems like it was only yesterday
we flew away on wide wings spread
We wrote Kin and Sara under the mango tree

And the day was long and I lost myself
So happy in the hills I haven't seen for many years

Now that my hair is grey and I don't know where you are
Sometimes I wonder what could be
If we still sat together under the mango tree
I could spend forever wondering how it could be

Task 4 - AABA form

Igor Stravinsky

Our strictest task - to write a song in AABA form - was, interestingly, the one that most people found easiest. It seems to bear out Stravinsky's theory that creative constraints seem to enhance personal expression.

"...my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit."
[The Poetics of Music, 1939]