Six Weeks Module 6

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SIX WEEKS TO SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SONGWRITING with John Chisum

MODULE #6 - REFINING, RECORDING, & RELEASING YOUR SONG

INTRODUCTION

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Six Weeks to Successful Christian Songwriting! I’m John Chisum here for Nashville Christian Songwriters and it has been my privilege to coach you through this online experience.

I’ve loved spending this time with you and I hope you’ve found these lessons clear and helpful. We welcome your feedback and hope to continue to empower you for years to come as you write your heart out for Jesus!

This is our ﬁnal module, Module #6, where we’re going to be talking about Reﬁning, Recording, and Releasing Your Songs. Pretty exciting stuff!

You’ve been working hard and I hope that it pays off as people begin to notice the new power in your songs! It’s kind of like when you’ve been going to the gym a lot and people start noticing you’ve lost weight and your biceps are looking bigger—it’s kind of fun!

Before we get into this module, though, I’d like to take a minute to recap our course and highlight a couple of important things. I have so much more to say about all of these topics and, frankly, I edited out a lot of material because I felt like the lessons were getting too long. Guess that stuff will just have to go into the next course!

I want to acknowledge again the Berklee School of Music teachers and authors and recommend you get all they have, as well as Rob Sterling’s book The Craft of Christian Songwriting. His book, especially, helped bring some contour to this course and helped me identify some language for things I’ve

1 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. taught in my own way through the years, but lacked the kind of identiﬁers I really wanted. I heartily recommend his book to you.

Upon reﬂection, I see great value in each module we’ve covered, and realize that my primary goal has been to help you begin to think like a real songwriter. There IS a certain unspoken philosophy that my professional songwriter friends have and operate from, a philosophy that I see written about in bits and pieces here and there, but which I hope to write more completely about in the future.

The great athletes, business people, artists, and entrepreneurs all operate from a base philosophy of whatever it is they do. We Christian songwriters, however, often just “ﬂy by the seat of our pants” and try to bluff our way through the process. That, my friend, is the distinction between an amateur and a pro.

I don’t know the level of your commitment to this writing thing, but I do know that writing better songs is going to require something of you. Anything worth doing excellently requires something of us in time, commitment, money, and increased effort. You will undoubtedly improve if you have some raw talent and a lot of commitment to the process.

It’s my hope that you feel drawn deeper into your commitment to write better songs and that these modules have been helpful to that end. I’ve loved coaching you this way and hope that we’ll stay engaged through Nashville Christian Songwriters for years to come.

I want to remind you that this is a coaching course and not a comprehensive course. Given the fact that nearly two hours of material in each week just begins to scratch the surface on how deep we really could go on these topics tells you that there’s a LOT to be learned about great Christian songwriting.

2 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. Our hope has been that we could equip you with the essential tools you need to get a jump start and take some quantum leaps from where you’ve been in your understanding and then take it from there. It’s also a great idea to keep in mind that HAVING the tools is different from USING the tools. Coaching is as much about encouraging you to up your game as it is about telling you how to do it.

SO I hope you’ll come back to these modules again and again to refresh your memory on the tools, but also to refresh your inspiration and determination to keep writing. Artistic endeavors can be lonely and songwriting is a solo activity until you build up a bevy of cowriters. Even then, family and friends don’t always see the value or support you as you often wish they could, so you ﬁnd yourself “going it alone” far too often.

Be encouraged, my friend—God sees!

In fact, my friend Andi Rozier at Vertical Worship in Chicago said something profound to me a few months back when we were talking about how writing songs can be transformative in our own lives as we dig deeper into our relationship with Him to write. And said, “God called you to be a songwriter because He wanted to spend more time with you.”

I love that. That’s the “transform your life” part of our subheading for this course—Transform Your Life | Learn Your Craft | Live Your Call. Christian songwriting is transformative, if approached as a discipline and as witnessing to the world around us of the inner work of Christ.

So when it comes to the point we ﬁnd ourselves at in this course, recording and releasing your songs, how are we to think of it? Is this really what we’ve been preparing for, or is there deeper value in the process we’ve been through to get here? Can we value the work of God in our own hearts to the point that we be unaffected by the response of others, positively or negatively, to our creations?

3 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. I would say probably not completely. After all, we wrote these out of our hearts with at least some inspiration from God, assembled them line by line and section by section with all the rules and principles in mind—what if no one likes them?

The likelihood of no one liking any of them is slim. People will like some and not others for all kinds of reasons. The slippery part is when we start basing our self worth on the approval and adulation of others, judging ourselves as failures or losers if someone (or no one) likes our songs.

Further, success is deﬁned in all sorts of ways. To make an idol out of professional success is foolish, because very few achieve it. Success for most of us starts with being transformed by God as we write, then sharing that testimony with the people around us as we share the fruit of it in our songs.

From there, it’s all in God’s hands.

Phil Mehrens and Steve Marshall wrote a wonderful song called They Are Yours about this a few years back that captures this sentiment well. I’m only quoting the chorus here.

“They Are Yours” Words and Music by Phil Mehrens / Steve Marshall

(Chorus) They are Yours, Lord They are Yours Like our hearts, take these songs They are Yours They are Yours, Lord They are Yours All the music Every word They are yours

Phil Mehrens - Sunday Best Music (ASCAP) Steve Marshall - Fossil Creek Music (ASCAP)

4 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. Proof of the call to write isn’t the acceptance and approval of others. It’s only the approval of God we desire as we follow in obedience, trusting He makes the way for us and for our songs. Obedience is its own reward.

Now on to the last module in our course.

In Section 1 we’re going to talk about rewriting and reﬁning your songs and about co-writing—something I’ve been trying to get to for several modules now.

In Section 2 we’ll hit on recording your songs and how to get the biggest bang for your buck if you hire this out or how to do your own writer demos at home.

In Section 3 we’ll wrap it all up with a discussion on how to release your songs and the next steps you’ll need to take in promoting them.

So, short intro this time, but that’s okay—we’ve covered a LOT of ground in this course, so now it’s time to move on into bringing it all together and writing a LOT more VBFD’s and tap into the great prosody and reciprocity we’ve been talking about and then get those songs out to the world!

See you in Section 1!

SECTION 1 - Reﬁning, Rewriting, and Cowriting

Alright, hello again! We’re in Section 1 of Module #6 in our course. I’m John Chisum and I’m glad you’re working your way through these modules and hope you’re getting tons of great information and inspiration from them!

We’re talking about Reﬁning, Rewriting, and Cowriting in this section, so let’s get with it!

5 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. Maybe the WORST misconception aspiring songwriters have is that their songs are great in the ﬁrst draft. That has NEVER been true once in my entire career or experience. Never.

While it’s true that skilled writers can write quickly and it SEEMS like they wrote the song instantly, there’s always at least SOME refining that needs to be done, even if that writer refines on the spot. That’s self-editing to perfection when you know the principles so well that your refinement process is happening while you’re writing—that’s our dream, right?

Think about it—the skilled writer isn’t learning to write—he or she has honed their skills for years by trial and error, writing and rewriting, and digging a deep well in their souls from which they tap deep waters. What may seem INSTANT is really the RESULT of years of training. That’s why Serena Williams can slam that tennis ball so consistently, time after time, year after year—she’s not PRACTICING out there—she’s a pro and brings all the years of practice and professional match experience with her onto the court every match.

That’s what we’re going for in this course, that YOU have the right principles in place to take onto the PRACTICE COURT and eventually on to the pro circuits, should that be God’s plan and you work really hard at it.

And with Christian songwriters, the “God factor” makes things even worse. I can’t count the hundreds of aspiring writers who’ve told me “God GAVE me this song” only to hear it and really ﬁnd it difﬁcult that God is THAT BAD of a songwriter. It just doesn’t add up.

I’ve been tempted to post this on Instagram, just for fun, but I don’t know how many writers I’ll offend:

6 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. If you think about it, though, there’s a lot of truth to it. I’m not saying God didn’t INSPIRE your heart to write a song about whatever, but to think YOU wrote it perfectly the ﬁrst time is nonsense, especially if you’re not a great writer yet.

Playing the “God card” is completely unfair to your friends, family, and especially to yourself. By playing it, you’re putting yourself in a very bad position because it is ﬁrst arrogant, then it forecloses on any further critique or learning you might receive if you’d been humble about it in the ﬁrst place.

My advice—NEVER EVER play that card, especially with a professional cowriter or potential publisher. They may not say it or show it, but inwardly the eyes are rolling and they’re writing you off in that moment unless you pull out a song better than any song EVER written in the history of all time. Just don’t do it.

Having the humility to reﬁne and even rewrite is the key to songwriting success.

Bill Gaither would say, “With a rewrite, a good song can become a great song. And, with a rewrite, a great song can become a classic.” That is SO true and advice we should all take as deeply into our songwriter hearts as possible. If we cling to the ﬁrst way we heard and wrote the words or melody, we’ll miss the improvements that can make the song even better.

Another misconception aspiring Christian songwriters can suffer from is the feeling that I owe it to you or to God to somehow “publish” your bad song because I’m a Christian publisher. I had a guy contact me recently and go on and on about how GOD gave him a song that was going to rock the world and he wanted me to listen to it and somehow “get it out” to the church and the world.

Part of me ALWAYS shuts down when someone comes on like that, but then I get curious… what if God really gave him the greatest song of all time? What

7 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. if I scoff and miss the opportunity to help somehow? I’d feel like a schmuck if I passed on even listening to it and then it turns out to be something amazing.

So I listened. It was HORRIBLE.

When I contacted him, told him I’d listened and it wasn’t anything I could work with, he was offended and reacted in a pretty UN-Christian and completely unnecessary way. What did he think I owed him just because I have “Christian” in our business’ name? I faced that constantly at Integrity Music, too—all these terribly inspired but undeveloped Christian writers thinking it was MY job to teach them how to write or to somehow “publish” their very, very, very bad songs. Ridiculous!

Okay, now I’m venting! But I don’t want any student, any menthe of mine out doing that. If you’re a developing writer, keep developing until people start paying attention and GOD promotes the song—believe me, if you have something great, God and everyone else will perk up and pay attention. Pasting God’s name on your VBFD is a very bad idea.

Now - onto REFINING versus REWRITING. What’s the difference? Is there a difference? How do we do it? We’ve worked hard to follow The Songbuilder’s Blueprint™ and to work through our prosody and reciprocity, so what happens now?

REFINING VERSUS REWRITING

For me, reﬁning is a hangnail and rewriting can be as serious as hip surgery.

Reﬁning is the extrication of extraneous and inessential words. It’s also the return to Word Clusters to ﬁnd suitable substitutions for errant images and misleading references that fail to point to our ONE BIG IDEA - remember that?

8 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. Mixing tenses, point-of-view, metaphors, or any other minor inconsistencies may seem, well, minor, but they’re the “cracks in the marble” we talked about earlier—they weaken the prosody, the overall strength, of your art and people notice even though they can’t tell you what’s bugging them about the song.

We’ve already pointed out that personal pronouns such as “I” can often be omitted, as well as the extra ands, the’s and other ﬁller words that just take up space without adding anything wonderful to the lyric.

Reﬁning can also be tightening up musical phrases, chord progressions, and unnecessary measures in-between lines to pick up the pace and not cause lag time between thoughts.

Reﬁning can be looking hard at a melodic line and making sure it’s not too similar on the verses and choruses, or that there’s enough contour and interest going on to keep the line moving where it wants to go. Songs naturally want to have a strong release, a climactic moment that engages the listener and makes them want to sing along. Reﬁning is making sure your melody does this.

Reﬁning is the icing on an already nicely-baked cake—it sweetens it all the way around and makes the song something even stronger than it was already. Consistency of metaphor, imagery, language, POV, tense, and language married well to the melody is what reﬁning is all about.

Let’s look at a potential verse and see if we’re going to reﬁne or rewrite it. This verse is from a song coaching client of mine named Maria and she gave me permission to use her lyric as an example in this course. The song is called Never Told and the essence of the song is about not holding back our story, but being willing to share it for the good of others.

Here’s her ﬁrst draft of the ﬁrst verse:

9 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. V1 There’s a song in our soul That only we can sing An anthem to the author of everything When we fear the unknown It drowns out the melody Waiting to be sung over lives and dreams

Here’s the in-depth, line by line critique I offered. Hope you’re not offended by my humor. We need MORE humor in our lives, not less, and I try to be comic relief when I can be! Considering the style of her writing, I suggested we model hers after a Sara Bareilles song called Brave, which is a terriﬁc song. Go listen to the song on Youtube and you’ll see what I mean. Together we examined Sara’s second-person approach and tried to help Maria catch on. Here’s my critique, line by line.

There’s a song in our soul [Impersonal opening line - passive voice - Sara used “You” in the 2nd Person POV: “You can be amazing/You can turn a phrase into a weapon or a drug”]

That only we can sing [Still vague and nondescript - could be clearer]

An anthem to the author of everything [Nice alliteration and ﬁrst unique phrase, but throws me from our/we to an unseen third party that must be assumed to be “God” ]

When we fear the unknown [Wait! Is this a song about a song or about “fear of the unknown”? This is the THIRD huge concept thrown into the lyric, i.e. song in our soul/author of everything/fear of the unknown - - you’ve lost me already]

10 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. It drowns out the melody [WHAT “melody”?! Oh - the one from the FIRST LINE, you mean. But that was sooooooooooooooo long ago - I forgot it already! Plus I got confused by the fear thing…]

Waiting to be sung over lives and dreams [WHOSE lives and WHOSE dreams?! Our subject was so generalized that I have no idea WHO you’re talking about. Sara’s ﬁrst verse was all about “You..” which means ME, the listener.

Here’s Maria’s second draft:

V1 Don’t forget who you were And how far you have come The wasted made worthy From shame to love There is hope in your story For someone’s weary soul So speak the truth in love Or they’ll never know

So, this is a “hip surgery” rewrite. The second draft looks nothing like the ﬁrst, except that it maintained the essence of the idea, the ONE BIG IDEA that Maria was going for. NOW we can reﬁne.

Read it aloud and see if you can spot where the reﬁnements are needed.

V1 Don’t forget who you were And how far you have come The wasted made worthy From shame to love There is hope in your story For someone’s weary soul 11 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. So speak the truth in love Or they’ll never know

Here’s what I would say about it, line by line:

V1 Don’t forget who you were [Better than ﬁrst draft] And how far you have come [Drop “And” and contract “you have” to “you’ve] The wasted made worthy [Nice line] From shame to love [Nice line] There is hope in your story [Contract “There is”] For someone’s weary soul [For whose? Cold be clearer…] So speak the truth in love [Consider dropping “So”] Or they’ll never know [Nice line]

Overall, this is a better draft, but still has a ways to go to be super clear and super impacting. Were I to push Maria even harder, I would vote for starting with the “hope in your story” idea instead of leaving that for the third line. I would try to zero in on what that story is and try to dig out its essence line by line. Still, much improved.

Let’s look at another full rewrite that we’ve touched on earlier, my song Prodigal’s Lament. I like this example because the VBFD is so typical of vague writing and the rewrite is so clear and image-driven.

We’ve all done bad things from time to time Things we regret, things we wish we could leave behind But I know God loves me and forgives all my sins I wish I could hear Him say He loves me again

12 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. Notice again that there’s nothing much to salvage from this vague verse write towards some ideas, but with nothing engaging or image-driven to cause you to visualize the story.

This verse cannot be helped with reﬁning. This is more than a little hangnail. This verse probably needs more than hip surgery, too. When I read this I know that the essence is right, but these words are so wrong. These words cannot be saved by any kind of surgery. They’re dead and need to be moved to the morgue after we harvest the heart of the idea for a full on transplant called a REWRITE.

Just to remind you, here’s the completely rewritten ﬁrst verse, now in ﬁrst- person POV that uses I, me, my and mine.

I’ve lived my life on the edge of the storm I’ve walked through the valley of death I’ve huddled my soul in the shadows so cold I’ve cradled some lasting regrets © Copyright 2015 by Donnaluv Music/ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.

There! That makes me so happy to have rescued an idea that can speak to a lot of people, the essence of a song, and actually presenting it in a clear, straight forward, image-driven way that the listener can actually enjoy and be impacted by. Just makes me feel great!

10 Critical Questions About Your First, Second, or Third Drafts

Rob Sterling offers ten important questions to ask about your beginning drafts that I think are good for us to include here. I’money quoting the questions, but he goes into greater explanation of them in the book The Craft of Christian Songwriting, so check it out on pages 94 - 96, if you want to dig a little deeper.

Here they are: 1) Does the song have a well-constructed form?

13 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. 2) Are the key lines strong? 3) Is the song about one thing? 4) Is the song understandable? 5) Is the song memorable? 6) Is the song interesting? 7) Have you been consistent? 8) Do the words and music make a good marriage? 9) Does your song pay off? 10) Is your theology accurate?

Asking yourself these questions about your song will help you determine if it needs nail clippers or a surgeon’s scalpel.

Let’s take the last bit of this section to discuss cowriting and how to go about it to get the best results.

Cowriting - The Power of Two, But Is It For You?

For me, writing alone or writing with others is no question. I’ve done both for so long that I can’t imagine not writing with others or not writing my own lyrics and melodies, as well. There are powerful reasons to do either and powerful reasons to do both.

If you’ve been the Lone Ranger in your songwriting, cowriting can be challenging. If you’ve ONLY cowritten your songs, the dependency you may have formed on others may prohibit you, in the beginning at least, from trusting your instincts and cranking out some songs on your own.

Here are the reasons I recommend cowriting, along with some advice on how to approach it if you’re new to the shared writing thing.

First, cowriting songs means you gain the strength, wisdom, and experience of your cowriter. When I was a much younger writer, I was intimidated by the

14 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. agility and prowess of people like Dwight Liles, Don Moen, and the other established writers I was paired with to write. They seemed to know so much more than I did and they’d certainly had more success than I had at the time. But what helped me turn the corner and make these sessions proﬁtable was realizing that their agility and prowess are the very things I needed to learn, as long as I brought my best game and didn’t drag the session down.

Because I’m a poet at heart, imagery and rhyme are strong suits, as well as writing hooks and spotting ideas for songs. My cowriters were often stronger in melodic construction and brought contour and great music to the song. So, once I learned to bring what I had with conﬁdence, I could trust what they brought and even learn from them. I still try to learn something out of every cowriting experience, which leads me to the second great thing about cowriting.

Second, every cowrite is a lesson in songwriting. This can go either way. When I walk into a session, I always know that there will be natural imbalances in knowledge, skill, and the ability to communicate ideas. One of us will be in a mentoring role at all times, depending on the task. If I’m stronger lyrically, my cowriter has the golden opportunity to learn from me. If she or he is stronger melodically, or has a signature vibe about their compositions, then I become the student and fall into line with where the song is wanting to go under their supervision.

I recently wrote with a guy who is super good at black Gospel, Kirk Franklin, Brooklyn Tabernacle kinds of chords and melodies on the keys. I can’t play that stuff AT ALL—it’s just not in my wheelhouse. But he was stuck lyrically. He’d started a chorus and had an opening and a closing line, but that was all. He started playing those amazing progressions and I started channeling Tyler Perry’s Madea character and before long we had a great song. I love that style, but needed to let him instruct and inform me on the structure, while he let me lead the way lyrically and stylize the song from there.

15 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. Third, there’s a certain expectation and even pressure to walk out of the room with a ﬁnished song. Cowriting is a shared experience that you’ll walk out of wanting to repeat with this person because you clicked or that you will NOT want to repeat because you didn’t. The litmus test is almost always walking out of the room with a completed song, or at least one far enough along to start reﬁning. I personally get discouraged with a cowriting session if we fail to get anything done and I bet my cowriter(s) feel the same.

Now, there are differences in cowriting relationships. If I’ve written with someone for a long time, we can be okay with not accomplishing much on a given day. If it’s a new relationship and we’re not getting anywhere, that casts a pall on the situation and makes us both nervous about committing too much more time with it. Hence, the pressure to produce.

Each cowriting relationship has its unique parameters and features. I have a few people I can just email an entire lyric to and they’ll email back a ﬁnished song. Others are built on the camaraderie and synergy of the writing process itself and we both enjoy the creativity of being together to write that it fuels the process. So, each relationship must be evaluated that way.

Some cowriters want to ﬁnish something they’ve started, while others walk in cold and are happy to help you ﬁnish something you’re hot on. They key is to be open and ready to throw out a few ideas before committing to anything to write just yet, then see where it all goes.

Here are a few suggestions I have for cowriting.

1) Choose a cowriter you like. Liking someone is always helpful when trying to be creative with them. Creativity is about engaging with each other to bring out the best. in each other. Just picking a cowriter because they can play the keyboard may not result in a great relationship or song.

16 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. 2) Walk in at least half-prepared. I say half-prepared because cowriting is generally about ﬁnishing ideas or starting from scratch. Walking in with a song almost completely done is unnecessary. Why do you need a cowriter if your song is 75% done? Most cowriters I know want to have more input than that and rise to the challenge of half an idea or the essence of a song instead of something you’re almost ﬁnished with.

3) Be ready to ﬂex. Working with another writer is a creative challenge. If you’re so strongly committed to your ideas and exact lines that you can’t give them up or let them be reworked, you might NOT want to cowrite. Developing ﬂexibility means you’ll genuinely entertain your cowriter’s suggestions and participate in the mutual give and take that cowriting is.

4) Be clear about writer splits. Unless you have an established understanding of who owns what percentage of the song you’ve written, never walk out of a writing session you’ve completed a song in without asking the question, “Are you good with splitting this 50/50, or do we need to discuss things further?” I’ve only written with one writer in all of my career who felt that she deserved more credit for words and music than 50%. We wound up 60/40, I think, but I never write with her again because I didn’t feel that the relationship was mutual if she was going to ﬁght for extra percentages.

5) Be diligent in documentation and follow up. Maybe this is a pet peeve for me, but I think it’s always a great idea to be diligent about following up in a timely manner on the song and deciding on demos and pitching strategy with your cowriter. That just seems more courteous to me and I try to keep the conversation and excitement about a song going the best that I can. In the end, though, you are working with another human being who has habits and ways of doing things.

Your exercise for this section is to choose a lyric you’re working on and do exactly what we just did—read line by line through each section and decide if it’s a reﬁne or rewrite project.

Using Rob Sterling’s ten-point checklist, see if you can determine if your song meets the criteria for well-written-but-needs-reﬁning or whether you should scrub in for surgery.

Once you’ve made a decision, go to work on it and be sure to journal a paragraph or two about your experience. Journaling always solidiﬁes our learning and gives us a reference to return to in the future.

Alright, well, that wraps up this section. I’m excited to be moving into the next one called Recording and Releasing Your Songs in which I’m planning to give a demonstration of Apple’s Garageband for you and give some examples from my own catalog of song demos.

I think it’s going to be big fun so I’ll see you in the next section!

SECTION 2 - RECORDING YOUR SONGS

Hi, and welcome to Section 2 of Module #6 in Six Weeks to Successful Christian Songwriting! What a great time we’re having discussing what you need to know to become a better Christian songwriter.

We’ve been talking about reﬁning and rewriting our songs, so, assuming that’s all been done well and we have a song we ﬁnally want to record, let’s talk about all that leads us up to this point and what to do.

18 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. The ﬁrst thing we need to talk about are lyric sheets, chord charts, and lead sheets.

Lyric Sheets/Chord Charts/Lead Sheets

A lyric sheet is what you’ve already been working with as you’ve transferred your handwritten lyric scribblings over to your laptop or desktop computer. It’s simply the fully typed lyric in proper formatting, as you see on the screen now.

Beauty Will Save the World Words and Music by John Chisum

V1 We wept when we saw the face We fell to the ground when we felt the grace We cried for the pain of the pure embrace Then we knew, “Beauty will save the world”

V2 We sang when we saw the flood We shouted the Name with the taste of blood We danced in the reign of the Risen One And we knew, “Beauty will save the world”

PC Glory for ashes, honor for shame The lame are leaping up with praise

C Alleluia, sing the angels Alleluia, the King has finally come Alleluia, He’s shining in the heavens like the sun And as He comes His beauty will save the world And when He comes His beauty will save the world

V3 We ran when we saw the Light We lifted our hands in the darkest night We worshiped the moment He made things right And we knew, “Beauty will save the world”

BDG No tears or crying when He comes No fear of dying when He comes The power of death ends when He comes

No blinded eyes now when He comes No broken lives now when He comes The dead will rise up when He comes

No orphaned children when He comes No hopeless victims when He comes He will restore us when He comes 19 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. No hearts imprisoned when He comes No unremembered when He comes No unforgiven when He comes

Notice that it is single spaced and clearly divided by sections. It’s a pretty straightforward presentation for showing your lyric to others, including potential publishers. Be sure to include your name and any copyright information you have for the song. We’ll wrap up this course talking a little about copyright and intellectual properties.

The next step from a lyric sheet is a chord chart. If you’re not a musician, per se, you may need help writing out the chords for your songs. If you’ve cowritten with a musician, hopefully he or she knows how to do this.

A chord chart is your full lyric with the Nashville number system chords written above the words, as you see on the screen now.

G C/E Em C We wept when we saw the face G C/E C We fell to the ground when we felt the grace G C/E Am We cried for the pain of the pure embrace G/B C C/D G Then we knew, “Beauty will save the world”

This is obviously a verse only, so the entire song is charted out like this. A chord chart exists for your musicians to follow when recording or playing the song live, like in church. They’re common, though some classically trained

20 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. musicians have a harder time with chord charts because they don’t spell out the measures and rhythms.

A big step up from the lyric sheet and chord chart is the lead sheet. On the screen now you can see the ﬁrst page to this song, Beauty Will Save the World, as it appears on praisecharts.com.

As you can see, it has the lyric and melody line charted, as well as the chords above the staff. Later in the lead sheet it shows harmonies and other performance markings that help the musicians and singers perform it. Lead sheets cost around $125.00 apiece, so you want to make sure you’re ready to commit it to paper like this before you spend the money.

And, like we’ll discuss in a moment, you never want to spend money on a lead sheet or on a demo recording until the song is 100% ﬁnished. Never throw

21 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. money away on a half-baked song. Wait until you KNOW it’s done and in its ﬁnal form before a lead sheet or a paid recording.

Reﬁning Through Home Recording

Because I play piano and guitar and sing my songs, part of the natural refinement process for me is home recording. It’s one thing for me to hum a melody and write a lyric, but once I’m actually putting it down in a recording further refining just happens. SO now we need to talk about work tapes, guitar or piano/vocals, and home demos. We’ll get to studio recording in a moment, but let’s talk first about these things and go from there.

The Work Tape. A “work tape” is something you do on a simple recording app on your smart phone or some other recording device. It’s nothing fancy. We used to have these bulky cassette recorders, then went to smaller digital recorders, and now it’s all on our phones. I love tech! It’s so cool what we can do these days!

The work tape is the very basic recording we do as we write the song. It’s just us singing a cappella if we don’t play, or it’s us playing and singing just to get the song ideas down. I can go through a dozen versions or more of a song I’m writing because I’m just trying to capture all the lyric and melody ideas before they evaporate. And, believe me, they DO evaporate if you don’t capture them.

I can’t count how many times I’ve had what I thought was a great melody I would NEVER forget but then proceeded to forget rather quickly because I didn’t record it. Now I can be driving down the street singing a little work melody into my phone so I don’t lose it. If I’m really excited about it, I’ll come back and begin to write it.

Once I’ve reﬁned my working lyric and melody fully, I’ll always come back and make a complete work tape of the whole song so I can remember what I

22 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. wrote. It’s funny, but even if I wrote the song, I have to come back and LEARN the song in order to perform it. I think it’s because we write songs in syllables, words, lines, and sections that we really don’t learn the whole thing automatically just because we wrote it.

And sometimes it’s hard to remember what we wrote the next day—or maybe that’s just my poor memory. Either way, the work tape is the insurance we won’t forget. It’s also the beginning of the reﬁnement process that occurs as we start committing our song to tape. We’ll start realizing a particular phrase or word isn’t working as well as it could, or that something is un-singable or too rangy from the way we envisioned it to begin with. The work tape reveals a lot, as do all of the next steps, as we’ll see.

Here’s an example of a work tape using my song Beauty Will Save the World.

[Plays 30 seconds or so of work tape…]

The Guitar or Piano/Vocal. Guitar or piano/vocals are one step up from the work tape. They’re called that because a recording is made with piano or guitar only with a vocal and usually on equipment at least one step up from your cellphone. Technology is so advanced these days that there’s probably already some recording app on your laptop, but if not, there are plenty to be found and downloaded for free or at minimal cost. No need to spend a bunch of money on anything at this point, so don’t do it.

If you’re on Mac, the entry level recording app Garageband is all you need. In fact, I’m going to back out of my Six Weeks slides to show you exactly what Garageband is and how I use it to make a simple piano/vocal.

[Demonstrate Garageband…]

Home Demos. If you remember, the word demo is shorthand for demonstration recording. While some musicians and programmers are phenomenal at home

23 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. recording, I’m not. I’m a very simple player and not a programmer/sequencer. All of the tech has gotten very sophisticated and put the power in the people’s hands, so, if you’re tech savvy and want to do it, you can create some professional sounding records right at home.

If you’re not that savvy, then you might be happy with a simpler approach and get someone to help you do the basic home demo before considering going to a professional studio and upping the costs to demonstrate your song. I would NEVER go spend money at a studio unless I was planning to release the songs myself as the artist and planned to press cd’s for my road ministry, or if I had the opening to let professional publishers or industry personnel hear my songs.

Let me show you a little more on Garageband and a little demo I’ve done of one of my unreleased songs. This will give you a little more insight into what building tracks are about and how you could potentially learn to do it, if you’re a player or tech driven.

[Demonstrates a home demo…]

Studio Recordings. Again, going to the studio or having someone in their semi- professional studio demo songs for you is going to cost several hundred dollars each. If money is no issue and you want to take this step, I can recommend several amazing and trustworthy producers who will do a great job for you.

There are several strong considerations you must think through before doing this, such as:

Is my song really ﬁnished?

What’s the purpose of going to this step?

24 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. Am I committed to the process and fully understand that my song may sound very different from the way I imagined it when all is done?

Do I have a solid plan for what happens to the song after its demoed?

Can I afford to put money into this song I may never see returned?

Probably the most important consideration listed above is that songs tend to morph in production. Everyone who touches it ﬂavors it somehow, from the producer to the players to the singers. If you’re unclear about what the song needs to sound like, you could walk away disappointed if the ﬂavor changes considerably from the way you’ve always heard it in your head. That brings us back to the section in the last module about song modeling and casting. Producers will cast a song according to some model in their repertoire and skew your song into their way of hearing it if you don’t provide the model. You have to be crystal clear about what you want it to be unless you’re open to the creative processes of others changing and redirecting it.

When I did my album last year with my great friend and producer, Chris Springer, I walked in with this version of a song called Pray.

[Plays work tape of Pray…]

I didn’t have a clear model, but I love what Chris brings to the creative process, so we experimented a little with all of the musicians jamming in the room and came up with a completely different vibe that took it in a John Mayer direction. Check it out.

[Plays 30 seconds or so of Pray from the album…]

I thought what Chris and the players brought to it made it so much better—I love it! Their contribution makes all the difference, but it CAN go the other way, especially if you are unclear about what you want. The producer and

25 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. players work for YOU, not the other way around. If you’re paying the bill, you need to know what you want or be willing to experiment and live with the results.

There’s no mystique about studio recording and no real romance. It is kind of fun and I enjoy it, but once you’ve been in and around it, you realize it’s a lot of nice gear and some skilled technicians doing their thing. My greatest caution to you is to not go there until you’re ready. No reason to throw money away.

EXERCISE - Guitar or Piano Vocal

Okay, I realize this will be harder for those of you who don’t play an instrument, but the appropriate exercise for this section is to take your work tape up to a guitar or piano vocal recording.

The steps you’ll need to take are:

1) Make sure you have a good song to work with, or at least the best you’ve got for now. 2) Choose a recording app like Garageband, or something similar. 3) Become familiar with the basic gear and procedures as outlined in this section and by digging into software instructions. 4) Set up your mic and interface with the app. 5) Play and sing separately or simultaneously, depending on your skill level, or record a player performing your music, then song your vocal over it. 6) Finalize your mix and export your song to the ﬁnal MP3 or MP4 format to play for your friends and family.

Alright, well, that’s it for this section. In our third and ﬁnal section in this course, I will be coaching you on releasing your song once you’ve got a real

26 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. demo of it. We’ll be talking about copyright protection and some channels for promoting your songs.

God bless you guys and I’ll see you soon! Until then, happy tech and happy home recording!

SECTION 3 RELEASING YOUR SONGS

Welcome back to Six Weeks to Successful Christian Songwriting. I’m John Chisum here for Nashville Christian Songwriters and I’ve loved working with you through this course.

As always, our hope is that you’ve gained a lot of clarity about the songwriting process and that you feel more equipped to fulﬁll the call of God on your life to write for Him. The results of all your writing are truly in His hands, so hold on to that in moments of discouragement and rejection, which, sadly, will surely come. None of us are exempt.

In fact, I’ve experienced wholesale rejection this past year from some Nashville publishers simply because of my age. The music business chases the young up-and-coming writers and artists, so those of us who are mature, even with our past successes, have trouble getting in the door.

I don’t know about you, but I write for Jesus first and everyone else second. It’s up to Him how far all this goes and that’s extremely important when it comes to releasing our songs. If our eyes are set so firmly on what we think is “success,” we may find ourselves very disappointed and even bitter. The music business is the music BUSINESS and “business is business,” as they say.

To think we’re failures if our songs aren’t recorded by full-on Christian artists currently popular means our heart’s priorities are misaligned. That may never happen. In fact, it happens for so few people that we must realize that writing

27 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. for God alone is the only true motive. If we can get to that point, then IF an artist ever recorded a song of ours we would praise God but never judge ourselves as successes because of it. We have to hold all of this with open hands.

With that in mind, let’s talk about what can happen with your songs once you get a great recording of them.

Ministry Applications First. If you’re a worship leader, this is built in. You have a stage, a platform, from which to expose your compositions. You have to be judicious, though, and not foist all of your latest miracle songs on your congregation or they might rebel if the songs aren’t really great. Be careful, okay? I suggest getting a few people to hear it and be honest with you before you schedule it in on Sunday morning. Be open to genuine feedback and constructive critique. It’s better to make the song great BEFORE the congregation stands there and stares you down.

If you’re in a more traditional church setting or have access to one and are writing songs for choirs, one of the best ways to test a song is to create a lead sheet of it with vocal parts written out for a choir to try. I’ve done this many times when I was on staff with a church because I had a little budget to work with and $125.00 wasn’t bad for trying out a song. The choir itself is a great proving ground. If they like it and enjoy singing it, you may have a winner on your hands.

If you’re a singer/songwriter, your coffee shop clientele will be a great test run for your song. These venues tend to be much more forgiving because they understand that you are an artist and artists can be creative and out there and ﬂukey and fun. There’s much less at stake in this atmosphere and you’re generally not selling a bunch of cd’s anyway, so you can test your songs for a while and get responses to them there in order to tweak them.

28 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. If you’re neither worship leader, music minister, choir member, or singer/ songwriter, you still have options because you can approach all of them with your songs. The singer/songwriter might be the least interested, but maybe you could interest them in a cowrite and then go sip lattes while they sing your song. For the others, you can approach them and introduce your songs with a lyric sheet and guitar or piano/vocal recording to at least get their feedback on the song.

That feedback might lead to the song being used in your church if you receive their critique and tweak it, then go back and let them know you listened and adjusted accordingly. Never badger them. My friend, Nancy Gordon, always says, “Let the work do the work,” and there’s a lot of truth in that statement— your work DOES speak for itself and people will see it, if it’s there. If it’s not there yet, no amount of persistent badgering will convince them and you’ll just turn people off. Don’t do it.

Opening your eyes to the ministry opportunities around you is the ﬁrst step in promoting your song. If it’s really impacting people around you, it might be time to kick up the promo.

Posting to Social Media. There are a nice handful of Facebook songwriter groups I’ve found. I can’t quite gauge the net effect of this, but it is one place to start getting more feedback on your song. Again, this is easier for those who perform their songs or who are at least able to get a good singer on their demos. I don’t know that posting demos is a great idea unless you’re looking for feedback, though.

The point of posting to social media is to gain a platform. Justin Beiber was discovered on Youtube by Justin Timberlake and it’s still place where shows like The Voice scour for up-and-coming artists that ought to be on their show. If your goal is to be discovered and become a professional singer/songwriter, posting on all channels of social media is a must.

29 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. If you’re not in that category, you could still build a viable following for your songs if your recordings are decent and you have some other ministry value built into them such as devotionals for divorced people or healing from sexual abuse and shame. Lots of people respond to ministry-speciﬁc songs and you don’t have to be a commercial artist to minster to people from your heart and story through your songs.

In fact, I’ve talked a lot through this course about writing out of your particular Ephesians 4:10-11 ministry gifting such as “apostle, prophet, pastor, and teacher.” I know I’m a pastor/teacher, so my songs teach a lot and comfort a lot and try to get people to connect with God on a pastoral level. I pointed out earlier how so many of The Newsboys’ songs are evangelistic because that’s their calling.

What’s your calling? Why do you write? Is God trying to get a speciﬁc message out to people through you that only you can deliver? I encourage you to consider how you can formulate some devotional writings or blogs or articles that are based on your song ideas and explore developing your ministry gifting in this way. You may be surprised what could happen.

Pitching to Publishers. Let’s assume you’ve written a handful of truly great songs. You’ve walked through many of the processes above, gotten honest feedback, created great demos somehow, and you wonder what a real publisher would think about your work. How do you get one to listen? Here’s my honest opinion…

Build relationships with professional writers and industry professionals ﬁrst by attending songwriting conferences, then let them guide you through the process.

If you mail your songs in to someone you don’t know, it will be marked UNSOLICITED MATERIAL and either tossed directly into the trash or stuck in a box somewhere to be tossed later. Publishers all have a bevy of pro writers

30 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. they use, so if you’re not already one of them, your chances are slim to none they’ll listen randomly to your material and fall in love with it. Discouraging, I know, but it’s the truth.

There are a million writers and a billion songs. Don’t get mad at the publishers for NOT listening—they’re few in number with great big jobs and they don’t have time to listen, unless you’ve got a song that is catching ﬁre on a grassroots level because you’ve promoted it all over creation on social media and it really IS a great song, after all.

Continue to invest in your writing career by attending Sue Smith’s marvelous Write About Jesus Conference in the St. Louis, Missouri, area or the Immerse Conference here in Nashville sponsored by The Gospel Music Association and LifeWay Music. Spend a little money and a little time getting to know people who are involved in the professional business and slowly network with publishers instead of bombarding them with songs they didn’t ask for.

And, whatever you do, never ever ever try pitching a half-baked song on the off-chance you DID get in the door. When you begin to meet these people and ﬁnd favor with them, always make sure your song is stellar and complete before having them hear it. Make a publisher listen to a low-quality song right off the bat will ruin your chances of ever being heard by that person.

Just for clariﬁcation, Nashville Christian Songwriters isn’t a pitching service. Our goal is to become the premiere Christian songwriter’s association providing quality resources to the aspiring Christian songwriters worldwide. We say it as we’re here “to empower Christian songwriters worldwide,” and that’s our purpose.

I can’t promise that I will listen to every song you write because you’ve taken this course, though I can’t say I won’t. I can neither conﬁrm nor deny that I will notice your song posted in the private Facebook group or if you send it to me!

31 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. My purpose is to coach and guide and resource you. We offer further personal coaching packages that WOULD cause me to pay close attention to every song you write, should you be interested, but that’s another thing.

The only other way into a professional publisher is to have a friend somewhere that’s “in” and could rep you, but that’s putting your friend at risk, too, so be considerate. Attending conferences where songwriters and industry people hang out is still the best advice for creating some inroads.

Publishers are always looking for what’s already working well in the church. That’s why the earlier discussion about social media and networking in ministry settings is so important. If you have a song that’s already catching on and gaining popularity, publishers notice that and want in on the momentum you’ve already been building for the song. That’s why the publishers almost always do print versions of popular songs by Michael W. Smith and Brooklyn Tab and other known entities.

There’s no “one size fits all” for songwriters. Your path is different from mine and mine yours. God has His hand on each of us for His specific reasons and we have to cooperate with that to the best of our ability. That’s another reason I love our subheading in this course—transform your life, learn your craft, live your call—because we are cooperating with the call from God. We have a part to play and that is to learn the craft first.

Some “spooky Christian” people jump from the inspiration they feel from God to write straight to the professional Christian music business, assuming their inspiration should make them an immediate success. We’ve been talking about this, but should any commercial success come your way it only begins with inspiration. Without really learning the craft of commercial songwriting you are fooling yourself about any commercial success.

My stance is that God needs a lot more effective songs out there than can ever ﬁt into the very narrow slot of the commercial business. If you’re serious

32 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. about writing, I assume your serious about communicating Gospel truth and that tells me God’s trying to get a message out through you. Don’t limit God to the commercial thing. He’s bigger than that. Trust Him. Commit your songs and your whole life to Him and let Him take care of the rest.

To wrap this entire course, let’s talk a few minutes about the legalities of songwriting and take a very brief look at copyright issues and what you should be aware of as you write and make your foray out into the world with your songs.

Young and uninformed songwriters often worry about someone “stealing” their songs. Let me assure you, this rarely ever happens. I’ve had one infringement in 30+ years on one of my songs and it was only because it had been sung so much by one Nashville church that a couple of writers thought it was an “ancient text” and that it was in the Public Domain (which means it’s so old anyone can use it for anything).

They failed to check into the ownership and recorded it on a nationally released album with popular Christian artists. I heard it and pursued ownership as a “derivative work” based on my original and they couldn’t argue it. It wasn’t fun, but I was in the right and wound up owning their version, as well as maintaining the integrity of my original work.

The point is that this song was already in popular use. Until you have a song you’re promoting on social media or in public church or concert venues, copyright isn’t an issue. If you’re pitching your songs to publishers, they will want to own the copyright and they will get all the legal stuff covered.

Many songwriters assume they need to jump to the copyrighting stage the day they’ve “ﬁnished” a song, but the Library of Congress is jammed with millions

33 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. of songs that will never see the light of day, much less be infringed upon. In this case, a little education can go along way.

My dear friend, Susan Fontaine Godwin, is the founder and President of Christian Copyright Solutions, offering a wide range of services for independent writers and artist. She is amazing and really has your best interests at hear. I asked her which of her blogs and resources would be best for you, and here’s her response.

She says to start with the blog section and look for Copyright 101 and that should get you started.

It’s always the right thing to protect your songs and intellectual properties. I know someone being sued right now over a song that’s 20 years old and only had a brief life on a worship record and that made the writer very little money to begin with, so it can happen. That’s why you should have a clear paper trail of where, when, and with whom a song was written. Follow Susan’s resources and advice and you’ll be just ﬁne.

Well, I can’t believe it, but that actually wraps up this entire course. There’s always more to learn, more to grasp, more to ﬁgure out and utilize in your songwriting, but we’ve crammed about as much into this online coaching experience as we can for now.

I’ve said it many times, but I pray now for your complete transformation in Christ as you seek Him, serve Him and write for Him. May these principles and insights serve you well in your songwriting and may this have been a truly impacting course for you!

Thanks for your support, love, and prayers as we seek God for Nashville Christian Songwriters and for our place in His kingdom. Please tell your friends about us and post on social for us, and, always know we’re here for you with more coaching and great resources in the future.

34 of 35 © Copyright 2016 Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. This course is yours 24/7 for life, but is NOT to be duplicated or reproduced without authorization directly from us here at NCS. These videos and all the transcripts and content are the sole property of Nashville Christian Songwriters International LLC and unauthorized duplication is prohibited.

I hope you have a lot better things to do than rip us off - ha! Like writing great songs for Jesus! No go write and write and write and write. Learn your craft, live your call, and let’s change the world with the love of Jesus. For me, there’s nothing else more important and nothing else I would rather do than write for Him and encourage you.

God’s best to you! I’m John Chisum for Nashville Christian Songwriters and thanks again for being part of this online coaching experience. Bye for now and we’ll see you on the other side!