SIX WEEKS TO SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SONGWRITING with John Chisum MODULE #5 - MAKING YOUR SONGS SING! INTRODUCTION Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Six Weeks to Successful Christian Songwriting, an online coaching experience aiming to empower you to write the best songs you’ve ever written and to transform your life as you dig deeper into Jesus for your writing inspiration! This is John Chisum for Nashville Christian Songwriters. I don’t know about you, but I have enjoyed every minute of this and my hope is that you’ve come alive in your songwriting! Everything I’ve shared with you has come straight out of my heart and out of my 30+ years of writing and publishing. I’ve had such an amazing life of working with some of the best Christian artists and songwriters—I’m loving sharing those insights with you! What I hope you’ll keep in mind is that this six week’s coaching is about equipping you, giving you the tools you can use the rest of your life to write great songs. It all doesn’t come to a crashing halt when the six weeks is over and you’ve listened through each module. In fact, that’s just where it all STARTS! These modules are broken up into 20- 30-minute segments in hopes they’ll be more digestible for you and that you’ll want to come back to them again and again, or at least print out the transcripts, put them in a song notebook and review them anytime you’re feeling stuck and needing a little boost to get going again. !1 of 35! © Copyright 2016 by Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. Inspiration can be elusive UNLESS you keep yourself in the songwriting flow. It’s easy to get lazy, let a few days or weeks or months or even YEARS go by and not be writing… but writing is a discipline just like anything else—the more you do it, the better you get. So write every day, even if it’s just one paragraph in your journal to keep words flowing out of your fingers and then it’s not so awfully hard to prime the pump and get some great songs going. Believe me, I didn’t write for almost a decade and I cringe at all the great songs that could have been written during that time. Don’t let another day go by—get busy and trust God with the outcome! Alright, well, this is Module #5 called Making Your Songs Sing. It’s all about pulling together many of the facets we’ve been talking about—prosody, reciprocity, Word Clusters, song blueprints, and so much more—only now it’s time to dig deeper into melody and combining the lyrics you’ve been learning about and writing to actually compose a full-on song. We’re going to walk through the process of making a song sing and uncover even more practical ways you can write your best songs yet. In Section 1 of this module we’re going to be talking about choosing a musical style for your song and how to “cast” it by modeling it from an existing song or artist you like. In sections 2 and 3 we’ll talk about what makes music and melodies compelling, interesting, fresh, memorable, and singable. We’ll hit on basic chord progressions, melodic phrasing and movement, repetition, and a few other important concepts. Somewhere in all that we’ll talk about cowriting and how to benefit from it no matter what skill level you’re currently at. !2 of 35! © Copyright 2016 by Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. Now, I can’t possibly teach an entire course on music theory in these short modules, but that information is out there in a lot of great places, especially the Berklee School of Music materials. I owe a lot of the inspiration and a good bit of the information I’ve included here to Pat Pattison, Jummy Kachulis, Mark Simos, and Jack Perricone, all of Berklee. I’ve already credited Rob Sterling and his book The Craft of Christian Songwriting for bringing together in one place so many of the concepts I’ve used and coached with through the years, even though I may have called them slightly different things. I recommend you get that book and all the Berklee books, at least until we here at Nashville Christian Songwriters get ours written and published for you! I’ve called this module “Making Your Songs Sing” for several reasons. The first is that anyone, and I do mean anyone, can make up a song. Whether it’s a non-sensical little ditty or a poorly written piece of poetry that sounds like a Hallmark Card® set to a tune, people are musical, in general, and most people could improvise something if they were forced to. Writing songs is protracted, informed improvisation. The better writers learn to improvise speedily and with great precision. The principles and patterns of song have become so ingrained that they don’t have to think about them anymore, kind of like driving a car or riding a bike—you just get to where you only have to think about the rules and principles if you get stuck. Jack Perricone wrote,” There are many ways to compose a song, such as beginning with a lyric, a melody, a chord progression, a bass line, a guitar riff, a drum pattern and so on… [but] … it is important for anyone trying to find his or her own personal voice to seek out the bases of sounds and their organization—sounds such as the major scale or rhythmic patterns…” !3 of 35! © Copyright 2016 by Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. It’s true. To write great music and melodies, one must be at least somewhat able to identify what scales are, the twelve notes Rob Sterling was talking about in our last module, and how to piece together the notes and rhythms that turn a lyric into a song. Without a lyric we have an instrumental. Without the melody, we have only words. Put the two together in a dynamic combination, a communion and commingling of sorts, and we have something that can change the world. There is power in music alone—it can certainly move us to tears, as in Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Just go listen all the way through it with no interruptions and see what I mean. We can be moved by words alone, too. Go listen to Martin Luther King’s historic I Have a Dream speech and see if you aren’t moved in your soul to make a difference in the world. But the powerful fusion of Spirit-birthed words with Spirit-born music is something that surpasses both of them alone and that has the power to transcend race, religion, politics, and all human bias to go straight to the heart and ignite miracles and even change nations and the course of history. It is arguable that the work of Integrity Music and the Hosanna! Music series alone changed the course of praise and worship music in the entire world. No kidding. But, let’s bring it all back to you as an aspiring Christian songwriter. !4 of 35! © Copyright 2016 by Nashville Christian Songwriters All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited. Few of us set out to change the world. We just want to write what we’re feeling in our hearts and maybe get our congregations to sing one of our worship songs. If we’re really industrious and have more vision for ourselves, we would love to have a CCM artist like Casting Crowns or a Southern Gospel/ Bluegrass group like The Isaacs sing one of our songs. It can happen, believe me. It all comes back to the song. My “A-ha” moment about what it takes to really write a great song happened years ago when I spent about six weeks writing ONE lyric that was assigned to me by the late Bill George. He had a title and the ENTIRE melody written. He handed it to me and asked me to write it. I was challenged to the core and worked on it for hours every day for all those weeks. Seriously—it was the first time that I rose from those moon-June “Mary had a little lamb” rhymes I was stuck in to real lyric writing. It was a quantum leap for me. I’ll never forget the effort I put in on that lyric. It was “on hold” for several of the big artists at the time and eventually became a CCM hit for Larnelle Harris and it put me on the map as a serious songwriter. Working through that process taught me that, to really compete, I would have to step up my writing game and stand out from the pack to be heard. That is still true of me and of you today. There are no shortcuts to great, lasting, impacting, world-changing songwriting. Are you in? Are you willing to dig deeper, go farther, dream of being heard as a songwriter? It can happen. I can’t promise it WILL, but I know that it CAN. But only if you’re willing to pursue something higher than you’ve ever gone for and let these principles and practical approaches sink in to your fingers and heart and mind and GO for it.