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Continued from Part 1:

4) Now here’s where we’ll need to experiment with your ears to build a unique “character” to your performances. When you break this step down, it could even be construed as a primer on how to make a remix. However for this part of these tips, all you’ll have to do is listen and learn. Easy right? Not exactly as it sounds, I’m going to challenge you to open your ears and more importantly open your mind! Although it’s generally understood we each have an inclination towards a particular genre or sound like jazz for instance, that which can help us break free from writing purely within our comfort zones is the ability to appreciate other kinds of songs. Try hymn, hip-hop, rock, bossa nova, nangma, etc; listen to songs outside of your preference but please, please, puh-LEASE be patient with them. Those songs may not strike an accord with you immediately but, likewise with repetition, listen with a discerning ear to find what you may like about them. Very specifically, listen for an instrumental expression, an emotion, a rhythm, a rhyme, a pattern, or a melody that might have some semblance to the kind of songs you had been used to listening. Listen also to how a similar instrument of your liking was performed in a completely different way and context that you had never imagined possible. Every style of music derived from some other form of music so it would broaden your sense of deference to this art by building your multilingual musical vocabulary, as it were, and understanding how it binds us together.

5) Still we are interested in finding a unique “sound” that distinguishes you among the crowd. So let’s take the first song you had rehearsed a billion times note for note, and replay it. This time however be mindful of the performance and notice any subtle changes that may have occurred. Did you perform the song differently this time? In distinct phrases? A chord inversion? A different phonation? Excluding memory issues, maybe you were hesitant to perform a certain note or in a certain way because you were thinking or contemplating how to perform it. If so, don’t trip. These are all good signs because we are concerned with providing you compositional dexterity and diversity for your future works through these incremental changes. Progressing through your musical developments in stages allow you to be rooted in your original preferences, and maintains an authenticity without compromising your previous sound that could otherwise seem like you’re posing or veering completely out of character–as if you’d shifted entirely from one genre to another. Your influences and what you make of them should be like a moving mirror: an evolutionary reflection and interpretation of your aural receptivity inasmuch as your performance qualities.

6) It’s time to experiment with your new found sound and test out your chops on your instrument. Just as you were patient listening to the variety of music that sat outside of your comfort zone, use the same patience to practice another billion times to listen not only to what intrigues you but what you can settle with as well. Here we are actively listening in to what “fits” with you and you only. And by doing this, I’d argue you are not forcing something foreign into your repertoire but you are instead merging the styles into something seamless to your ears and especially into what resonates with you. Take for example the rock meets hip-hop version of “Walk This Way” when Aerosmith had collaborated with Run-DMC.The work is original as much as it is a covered remix because it was based on Aerosmith’s preexisting song released in 1975 but included the unique raps of Run-DMC and re-recordings of Steven Tyler and Joe Perry on vocals and lead guitar respectively. It may initially have sounded cacophonous when it was released in 1986, but history that paved the way for the likes of the Beastie Boys, Ice-T, Rage Against The Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Cypress Hill, and Kid Rock prove that freshness was most definitely on its side.

7) Having mastered how to remix covers you’ll want to take your chops and spin them into originals. Sure this may sound a lot easier than it is to do, but if it will help, take comfort in knowing that every artist of original works was a remix artist at some point before they’d made the jump–Mozart, Prince, The Beatles. Need I list more? Without a doubt even they had to learn and interpret music from preexisting works, whether they were minuets, psalms, funk, rock, blues, bhangra, etc. exposed to them both by their respective fathers or forefathers. A genius of leaps and bounds and many a heartbreaks people could have you believe is what it takes to create an original song, but making the switch from arranging remixes to writing originals is really one shift away in mindset. John Mayer had once stated his belief there is no such thing as a truly original work, because original works are essentially composed of previous works hidden so well you couldn’t detect their origin, sample, or derivation as a whole. Based on what artists and mix engineers are trying to achieve, some “hide” better than others. But what you’re hearing in a unique work is actually a cohesive block masking all the musical references. So how are they masked you ask? When broken down a new song is the combination of many referenced sound bites from the gazillions of genres out there. You or even the songwriter might not be able to point them all out because the sound bite is so small the ear can no longer discern it’s from here or there.

Freedom in this sense is therefore not a creation of something so out there as if it had come from a vacuum; no one would be able to relate to it but you. Rather freedom is a movement from the doldrums of sameness (in lyrical theme or sound) based on your mobility and ability to stitch together an overarching consistency to your mix-mashed collage of sounds into what’s unique, what’s “yours,” and is founded on creativity in re-creation. While your preexisting tastes could sum up musically who you are, your original works would forge an independent pathway towards who you are becoming through your songwriting skills. So go out there and sing me your songs of redemption. Sing me your songs of freedom! Okay okay, here’s your Bob: [+]

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