Week 3, SAC Challenge 2014

2014 SAC Challenge, Week 2 March 1, 2014

 

SAC Challenge 2014, WEEK #3, compose 6 songs in 6 weeks 

Overview of this week's blog:

1. Listen to the "BATH CAT OPERA" song (link)
2. Lyrics for song #3

3. Epiphanies about the songwriting process

4. The assignment for week #3

Listen to the song "Bath Cat Opera":

https://soundcloud.com/sherashakera/bathcatopera-bysherashakera

Lyrics for song #3

 Bath Cat Opera  music & lyrics by S. Katz, singer/artist: Shera Shakera

You give yourself a bath

You look so happy and relaxed

I’ll look after you today

Please don’t ever run away

Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow

I love you like that

Because you’re my cat

You’re breath is a purring

So sweet and alluring

What, you want to play?

Okay

I have a puppet on a stick

(I’ll) throw it,

you can grab it

Now you’re content

Hey, don’t walk away

you want to eat now,

that’s okay

I’ll give you anything you want

I’ll even clean your box

‘Cause you’re so sweet and soft

You’re my cat

Meow meow meow meow

Meow meow meow meow

Meow

So cute and cuddly

you can sit on my lap anytime

that you want

any time at all

meow meow meow meow

(real cat meows)

Epiphanies about the songwriting process 

For week 3, the challenge is to create a song that has a different structure than a typical pop song.

In order to complete the task, I started to think about songs that could inspire me to do this, such as “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen.

The song “Bohemian Rhapsody” doesn’t have an obvious chorus, and the song goes all over the map in terms of musicality. The repetitious chant of “Hit me where the wind blows” is included, if you want to call that a chorus. There are other chants such as “Mama mia let me go” followed by some nonsense word that sounds like “beelzibub” followed by a very high pitched voice saying “…for me, for me, for me”, and an awesome guitar riff, where the music speeds up, then later slows down.

Don’t Stop Me Now has several versus of very well-written metaphors, before getting to the chorus of “Don’t Stop Me Now”, which is followed by three lines of “Don’t Stop Me, post-chorus, where the music speeds up, and this is followed by some awesome guitar riffs.

I am thinking of “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” by Billy Joel, which is a much-longer than the usual format type of song. This song sounds like a storybook that has a beginning, middle and end regarding a person’s love life, and it all starts with a bottle of wine in a restaurant. What makes it strong is that the opening verse and final climaxing verse have the common idea of meeting in a restaurant. There song is divided into parts that speed up and then slow down, as if divided into chapters in a person’s life.

These are some of my favorite songs of all time.

These three songs are definitely are constructed in a way that is different from the typical popular strong structure of c/v/c/v/b/c (where c=chorus, v=verse, and b=bridge). The music in each song has parts that speed up to a climax and slow down, and some awesome guitar riffs.

More Comments & Epiphanies

I noticed that my own common songwriting ruts include:

1. Going with the common format of Verse/Chorus/Verse/Chorus/Bridge/Chorus when it would be fun to change it up a bit
2. Making great efforts to have a lot of rhymes  (but I have been getting away from this pattern more lately) when this is not always necessary
3. Being too general instead of giving more details
4. Composing with piano/keyboard instruments, instead of guitar

I decided that for this song, I will break all of the above rules.

Building on the first two weeks of songwriting, I learned that a catchy title and catchy first line are important, but also based on helpful feedback on week 2’s song, in which I left out a lot of the details, I decided I will include all the details of how I feel for ten minutes in a specific place and time.

I decided to try to do a song with guitar instead of piano. I created some riffs, while observing the cat, and started to jam all of my present observations. Then, I recorded these observations while singing, and using some of the riffs I created.

A few days later, I picked up the guitar again and did the same thing. I tried to incorporate the idea of having several different types of recognizable sounds/guitar motifs in the song, but cutting some of them in the middle, going back and around them but not in any particular order, speeding up and slowing down, and highlighting the meow meow meow part, up to a high sopranic crescendo towards the end, then slowing down again for the ending parts.

In fact, the part where it goes “you’re my cat”…I would like to redo singing the word “Cat” next time, and really stress the word cat, while singing that word over several pitches of high notes within the voice. It is meant to be the most explosive part of the song…and this was inspired by  the unique structure of the song in “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, where the words “for me” are similarly followed by a speedup in the music. This song is also inspired by the originality of Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much”, where she uses the word “Okay,” before making a statement.

I also tried to write lines that could be applied to humans, such as “you give yourself a bath”, such that anyone listening to the song might think I am calling out to a cat, but humans have many things in common with a cat, so it can imply that I am calling out to a human instead of a cat.

I added the real cat’s meow at the end. I was going to add it to the beginning as well, but decided against this idea because I wanted to keep it as a surprise for the end of the song.

I was having difficulty editing, and due to time constraints, was not able to do everything I wanted to do with the song. I have so much to learn!

I used audacity to add in the cat’s meow, and can’t even remember how I accomplished that, hence I was unable to do any more due to time constraints. So much to learn!

 I finally did figure out how to delete something in audacity, which took forever to figure out. The key is to press the stop button before deleting, as you can’t delete something if it’s on “pause”. Saving from audacity into a .wav file is also tricky and the key here is to rename the file by adding the .wav extension after saving it.

Trying to get the cat to meow was tricky too, but I have experience & love cats!

Peace & smiles from

Shera Shakera

The Challenge – Week 3 – Time to experiment!

The challenge this week is “to do something different, e.g. starting with a chorus, using odd line lengths or unexpected rhyme schemes, etc.

1.  Identify your common songwriting ruts.  Why are these structures/forms comfortable for you?
2.  Write a song that breaks 1 or more of these “rules.”
3.  Have fun writing outside the box!”

-Christopher Ward, songwriter