Quote:
Originally Posted by enroper  I'm wondering if anybody does this. I'm more a visual person, and don't read music. I know some people "chart" out their songs.
For those that do, how do you do it? If you do, any chance you can scan and post and example?
The way I'm thinking of trying it is have the lyrics and maybe the simple chord changes, then draw in little glyphs to represent different nuances, like a delay here, or a crash there.
I'd love to see how anybody if at all maps out productions...
and mods, if this is the wrong forum feel free to move it to the right one. |
I like to use a graphic layout, typically with four bars to the line (depending on tempo and tempo scale). Most of my songs work out well with a line of lyric breaking at the four bar point.
Even if you're otherwise totally a music-by-ear guy, being able to count bars (on some level -- many folks have or develop a
feel and don't have to explicitly count; the more you count, the more 'natural' the feel becomes and the less you
have to count).
Counting always seemed somehow mysterious to me until a drummer in a punk band I was sitting in with for a few months got tired of me and the guitarist (I was on bass) losing our place in a 4 bar kick drum into. He finally said, look, it's 16 beats -- four bars. Count it like this:
1-2-3-4,
2-2-3-4,
3-2-3-4,
4-2-3-4... and that made it click into place in my head just like that.
Anyhow, once you get used to laying out all your lyrics or chord arrangements on standard 4 bar lines (or whatever is appropriate for a given song) instead of the sheet music convention of putting as many bars as fit on any given line (which is
really confusing to a lot of folks), being able to 'notate' the structure of your song becomes a
lot easier.
BTW, when I was starting out recording, an older wiser dude suggested making production notes on the lyric sheet (it may help you to lay out the lyric sheet as I recommend above) because it will help the engineer think in the same terms as the musicians -- in terms of the song's verse/chorus/bridge structures. If an engineer says,
There's a problem in the bass at 2'12" -- it means a lot less to the guys in the band than if he had said,
There's a problem with the bass in the second line of the second chorus.