FAWM 14, The Fab 4 And The Decisive 5

February Album Writing Month (FAWM) is just a warm memory now but I wanted to share a Beatles-flavoured spoken-word improv oddity from Paul Turrell (aka Hoopshank) - just like Yesterday it was inspired by a dream!

Enjoy The Decisive Five

Once upon a time, there were four red Mini Metros. 

[For those who don't know, the Mini Metro was a car made by the British manufacturer Austin intended to be a successor to the Mini. It was very popular in the UK but enjoyed nowhere near the international success of the original Mini]

In the first red Mini Metro were the four Beatles, all in a good mood. In the second red Mini Metro were the four Beatles, all slightly annoyed. In the third red Mini Metro were the four Beatles, all extremely angry. In the fourth red Mini Metro were one Beatle from each of the first three red Mini Metros. That's not to say that there were only three Beatles in each of the first three red Mini Metros - there were four. And there were four Beatles in the fourth red Mini Metro, even though there was only one Beatle from each of the first three red Mini Metros. The sixteen Beatles in the four red Mini Metros were having an argument which was eventually resolved. So who were the decisive five?

You can check out my FAWM songs here especially I Too Need Love - the Harrison/Beatles influenced song I wrote and recorded from scratch in 58 minutes

70+ Songwriting Tips From The Beatles
The BeAtletudes
About Beatles Songwriting Academy
Let's Build An Airport EP

FAWM

Tomorrow is Feb 1st and that can only mean one thing FAWM! (aka February Album Writing Month). So posts will be a little thin this month but I do have a few Beatles related things up my sleeves.

If you're a songwriter (and why wouldn't you be) I'd highly recommend signing up for FAWM. You can keep up with my progress here

Links

70+ Songwriting Tips From The Beatles
The BeAtletudes
About Beatles Songwriting Academy
Let's Build An Airport EP

Joe Scala's Got A Ticket To Write

Today's guest blogger Joe Scala combined a Beatles approved chord with a really original approach to writing lyric in one of his recent songs...

I used an interesting process on the FAWM song Take A Photograph. I wrote the moody echo-y music first, but I had no idea where to go with the lyrics. The obvious direction was something along the lines of “I am lonely, I am empty, I am nothing” but this isn’t the kind of song I want to write. It’s ok to be moody; you don’t have to be depressed.

An idea came to me – from out of nowhere it seemed, although it probably un-buried itself from my memory from a writing class in college – to use photos as inspiration. (I often use poetry by Frost, Whitman, Dickinson, but I was tired of that method). I pulled up flickr and looked at the daily photos. I saw a lot of stuff, and when something struck me, I wrote a description of what I saw.


It started with very basic, prose-y stuff: “a gray and brown train riding along with a town in the background”. But then I kept pushing myself to write more, what else could I find? I added some flowery descriptions. I repeated this for 3 or four photos, and I expected to find some good lines for the song in there.
I didn’t. Everything still looked boring. So I printed out all of my descriptions like this:


I looked for interesting phrases across the lines, stuff that I would never have written, although I kinda did, and just found it. I circled lots of stuff. From there, I constructed a new list of possible lyrics. Once I found the lines “Take a photograph / Fill it up with what you see” it suggested a pattern to the verses, and away I went. I pieced the song together from there. It’s interesting how the verses each reflect one of the photos, even though I chopped everything to bits.

I was browsing Beatles Songwriting Academy for an easy idea to use and found “Ticket 44 – Use the Minor 5.” While I was messing around with a chord progression, a pretty standard one actually, I looked for a place to insert the minor 5, an unexpected twist. This lead me to the structure of the verses that I ended up with. I used my new Hamlet pedal and set the reverb to 12 (yes it goes to 12!) to get the eerie arpeggiated guitar tracks.

Joe Scala is a 'regular guy with a regular job' from Baltimore MD who is also the guitarist in The Katie Bowers Band and Katie & Joe. You can check out some of their music here and listen to another Beatles related tune by Joe here.

Want to read about more regular guys using Beatles songwriting knowhow? Here you go!

This post originally appeared on Joe's blog (thanks Joe!).

Songwriting Is Habit FAWMing

Hi my very patient readers! It’s that time of year again – February Album Writing Month. So as well as prepping my EP I’m going to attempt to write 14 new songs in the next 28 days including who know how many as co-writes with crazy 10 year old pupils. You can follow my progress over on the fawm site or check out mattblick.com where I'll try to post updates and song demos.

 I will attempt the odd Beatles post. But Feb will be crazy and what kind of example would I be if I couldn't spend time writing songs because I was too busy writing about writing songs?

So here's my special February offer.

If you've been reading BSA and you've picked up ANY tip which you've used in a song of your own shoot me an email

explaining

• what you've learned and how you used it, 
• with a link to your tune (youtube, soundcloud whatever) 

AND YOU WILL GET YOUR VERY OWN POST! That's gotta be worth something! (Please - one song per person/band)

 Here's some people who've already gone before you.

And here's my previous FAWM songs

Beatles Re:FAWM

I suppose I owe you all an explanation about where I disappeared to for most of February. The answer is obvious of course. I got sucked into the songwriting parallel universe called FAWM (February Album Writing Month). I had a great time and wrote, or co-wrote, 16 songs. You can read about it here, listen to my songs here or here or check out FAWM for yourself here.

Hopefully things will be back on track soon but in the meantime check out the Organising Sound blog. John Thomas Mumm was kind enough to write a nice post about Beatles Songwriting Academy which was an honour as his own site is packed with really great songwriting tips and tricks. There's all kinds of material on chord progressions, avant garde songwriting techniques and all manner of other helpful ideas. John even has a place for you to submit songs that have been written using the songwriting techniques.

Get over there and say hello