Would it be of benefit if we had a songwriting/performance forum?

[Darwin James]

Sorry I wasn't sure where to put this:

I for one would love to have a songwriting/performance forum here on GS. Would anyone else find this useful? More importantly, what is the ownership's take on the subject, if (Jules and co) can chime in?

[Mr.HOLMES]

Originally Posted by Darwin James

Sorry I wasn't sure where to put this:

I for one would love to have a songwriting/performance forum here on GS. Would anyone else find this useful? More importantly, what is the ownership's take on the subject, if (Jules and co) can chime in?

I would love it with it we may come back to talk about music back again and not so much about gear a sub forum for arranging writing and performing music and topics which are related to it would be a great idea in my opinion.

Without great music our business will die and much faster....

[mobius.media]

+1

Great idea.

[C Heat]

+1. Again.

[RTR]

I have said it a few times...a songwriting forum would be great..I think at least 40% of us on here are musician/songwriters

[Unclenny]

You guys actually write songs??!

I like to just play with my gear........

Originally Posted by Darwin James

I for one would love to have a songwriting/performance forum here on GS.

I'm in.

Originally Posted by Mr.HOLMES

Without great music our business will die and much faster....

[jamwerks]

+1

[Scrybe]

+1

there's a site I post on a fair bit called Guitarnoise that has a Sunday Songwriter's Group. Each week, the guy in charge posts an assignment and participants write to meet that assignment, then post their lyrics/music and others give feedback. There's no obligation to contribute every week, if you get too busy or feel uninspired you can drop out for a bit. In addition to general discussion on songwriting and performance, something like this could help anyone who has to/might have to write to order. The topics over there can be anything from a lyric topic (i.e. write a song about love gone wrong) to a musical genre (write a folk song). Just a thought.

[geareyes]

I would thoroughly enjoy a songwriting corner in Gearslutz.

Without great emotional musicianship and songwriting.The gear makes a **** hairs worth of difference.

Hopefully a songwriting element would go a step in the right direction to alleviating the fallacy around here that gear is the be all and end all....

Bring back some organic-ness to this forum.Introduce a healthy pocket to this forum where peoples collective attitudes reaffirm that the gear plays 2nd fiddle and serves the craft of good songs.

Mike Longhurst

[author]

To my knowledge there are no pro songwriter forums at all. So, it could be very cool -- maybe.

Talking gear is one thing... but nothing's more personal than writing. Not sure if anyone would like to share secrets and knowledge?

[Darc]

+1 I´m with you

[theblue1]

s

Originally Posted by author

To my knowledge there are no pro songwriter forums at all. So, it could be very cool -- maybe.

Talking gear is one thing... but nothing's more personal than writing. Not sure if anyone would like to share secrets and knowledge?

Happily there are a few -- but there's always room for one more. Here are some I know about:

Songwriting - Harmony Central Musician Community Forums

Songwriting Tips & Tools - The Muse's Muse

Not a forum, per se, but certainly a valuable resource: Songwriting Tips


If anyone knows any more, let me know so I can add them to this songwriter's resource list (soon to be overhauled):

Songwriter's Resource List - Harmony Central Musician Community Forums

[author]

Originally Posted by theblue1

s
Happily there are a few -- but there's always room for one more. Here are some I know about:

Songwriting - Harmony Central Musician Community Forums

Songwriting Tips & Tools - The Muse's Muse

Thank you -- very nice links! I wasn't aware of these sites.

[theblue1]

Originally Posted by author

Thank you -- very nice links! I wasn't aware of these sites.

If you fall by the Harmony Central SW forum, say hi... the forum mod there looks a lot like me -- although his handle there is blue2blue -- and in that forum, he's usually on his good behavior.

[olivialand]

Originally Posted by Darwin James

I for one would love to have a songwriting/performance forum here on GS. Would anyone else find this useful?

+1. Good idea.

[author]

Originally Posted by theblue1

If you fall by the Harmony Central SW forum, say hi... the forum mod there looks a lot like me

I already noticed!

[Mark Kaufman]

Other great songwriting forums: TAXI, Just Plain Folks (the biggest of them all), Tunesmith.

I'd be into it.

[author]

Originally Posted by Mark Kaufman

Other great songwriting forums: TAXI, Just Plain Folks (the biggest of them all), Tunesmith.

3 more I didn't know of. Where have I been?

On Just Plain Folks, there's a user called A_Gun_Called_Maria! How can you not love a name like that...

Has Tunesmith anything to do with Jimmy Webb?

[opentune]

I think this is a good idea.

[days]

A forum on which songwriters can post MP3 files of their songs, and ask for feedback, sounds like a great idea, but I do see at least two potential problems:

(1) Let's say one of the participants posts a song to the forum. Everyone agrees that it's a great song. Encouraged, the songwriter takes a few weeks to refine it, and eventually applies to the Copyright Office for a copyright of the song. However, in the time that he was refining the song, another one of the participants in the forum had already taken the same song (which of course is not his), kept the melody, changed the lyrics, and sent off his own copyright application.

(2) When you've got songwriters from disparate genres submitting stuff to the same forum, there is going to be feedback that has more to do with stylistic taste than anything else. Let's say a participant submits a country/bluegrass lament about being done wrong. The opinions of the hard rock and R&B songwriters on the forum are probably going to have as much to do with how they feel about country music in general as with the value of the song itself. That's why I think any songwriters forum absolutely must be broken down into genre-based subforums.

[Xian00]

+1!

[alexamk]

+1 Absolutely!

[Scrybe]

Originally Posted by days

A forum on which songwriters can post MP3 files of their songs, and ask for feedback, sounds like a great idea, but I do see at least two potential problems:

(1) Let's say one of the participants posts a song to the forum. Everyone agrees that it's a great song. Encouraged, the songwriter takes a few weeks to refine it, and eventually applies to the Copyright Office for a copyright of the song. However, in the time that he was refining the song, another one of the participants in the forum had already taken the same song (which of course is not his), kept the melody, changed the lyrics, and sent off his own copyright application.

(2) When you've got songwriters from disparate genres submitting stuff to the same forum, there is going to be feedback that has more to do with stylistic taste than anything else. Let's say a participant submits a country/bluegrass lament about being done wrong. The opinions of the hard rock and R&B songwriters on the forum are probably going to have as much to do with how they feel about country music in general as with the value of the song itself. That's why I think any songwriters forum absolutely must be broken down into genre-based subforums.

I think number (2) depends heavily on how well we can trust people to be self-moderating. This is an internet forum, so.....

[author]

Originally Posted by days

A forum on which songwriters can post MP3 files of their songs, and ask for feedback, sounds like a great idea, but I do see at least two potential problems:

(1) Let's say one of the participants posts a song to the forum. Everyone agrees that it's a great song. Encouraged, the songwriter takes a few weeks to refine it, and eventually applies to the Copyright Office for a copyright of the song. However, in the time that he was refining the song, another one of the participants in the forum had already taken the same song (which of course is not his), kept the melody, changed the lyrics, and sent off his own copyright application.

Which is why you'll never see a pro upload as much as 3 consecutive notes/words from her/his unpublished songs to any forum...

EDIT: Unless, of course, this upload actually could be regarded as Publishing. Time-stamped, and all. Hm.

[theblue1]

Originally Posted by author

Which is why you'll never see a pro upload as much as 3 consecutive notes/words from her/his unpublished songs to any forum...

EDIT: Unless, of course, this upload actually could be regarded as Publishing. Time-stamped, and all. Hm.

I've been involved in online workshopping of both songs and recording techniques since the late 90s and I've kept my beady little eyes open for this type of thing.

So far, I haven't really seen it. The small handful of stolen song stories I have seen are almost always related to people who played together -- with honorable mention to manager/agent/publisher types who've been accused of misappropriating songs.

That said, anything that can be conceived in the mind of man will be likely to eventually happen -- and certainly people steal other stuff all the time -- and often with no pangs of guilt, whatsoever.


The best way to protect your work, of course, is to register each song with your national copyright office; you can also register a group of songs as a collective work (but I'm told that it's best in that case to file a separate addendum for each song so that they are all individually searchable in the copyright office's database -- such an addendum, IIRC, is an extra $2 per song under current US fees).


FWIW, I use a middle ground: when I have a new song I record it and upload it to the Internet Archive [ www.archive.org ] and avail myself of their Creative Commons registration (using the most restrictive of their licensing conditions, as a rule). This is not as good as a national copyright office registration, I'm told, because the courts will tend, they say, to give most weight to the official copyright office registration, if any. Some courts have, I'm told, brushed aside evidence of prior art when that art was not registered. But such a non-governmental copyright registration will give me a time-stamped record of publishing and copyright (if not registration with the official national copyright office) and should provide some traction in the apparently unlikely event someone tries to steal one of my songs.


And a parting FWIW: having watched and listened to folks and their music with regard to this issue, it's my (perhaps slightly snarky but sincere) thought that, by and large, those who profess the greatest fear about having their songs stolen are often those with the least to worry about... [EDIT: This is in no way directed at anyone in this thread, by the way!]


PS... The one time I wondered if possibly someone hadn't been influenced by one of my songs was fairly striking, but it was only one musical and lyrical phrase. Both songs were about suicide. (Mine, written in 1991, was about a guy; the other song, from the Pernice Brothers' first album, released in '98, was about a girl.) In my song, the phrase was "They found his car..." and in Pernice's song, it was "They found her car..." and the melody and chord change was very similar. It's possible that Joe Pernice, in his earlier band, the Scud Mountain Boys, played a two-room club that I used to play at frequently as a solo in the 'cafe' side. It's possible he heard me sing my song and the phrase lodged in his subconscious. But... the rest of Pernice's song was considerably different -- and about 25 times better... (it's really a good song and mine is really, um, well, it's really far from my best, which, I believe, makes it rotten. ) Anyhow, I thought I'd share, just because, when I first heard the Pernice Bros' song I just about fell out of my chair, seriously, it was one of those moments.

[author]

Originally Posted by theblue1

And a parting FWIW: having watched and listened to folks and their music with regard to this issue, it's my (perhaps slightly snarky but sincere) thought that, by and large, those who profess the greatest fear about having their songs stolen are often those with the least to worry about...

Good observation!

But there are exceptions. And if you work 8 hours a day for several months on each melody, rewrite it a few hundred times, live with it, dream about it, then I DOUBT you'll upload it anywhere...

[goldenlotus]

[opentune]

(said with sophisticated british accent) "This is an interesting thread. I must say..."

[days]

Originally Posted by theblue1

Having watched and listened to folks and their music with regard to this issue, it's my (perhaps slightly snarky but sincere) thought that, by and large, those who profess the greatest fear about having their songs stolen are often those with the least to worry about...

[gurian1]

I like the idea..