If you only have one guitar and one amp, and you’re recording on a shoestring budget, you owe it to yourself to download Shred. This VST plugin has it all: pickup replacement, multiple heads and cabinets, various effects (including an absolutely wonderful tremolo), mic placement and distance, adjustment of room shape, size, and materials. With all the computations this plugin has to make, you may expect a pretty hefty latency. Not so. I’m able to monitor through this plugin without any problems, which is great when I’m putting down tracks and want to react to the sound I’m getting. If there is a slight delay, taking out the pickup replacement from the chain takes care of it.

It has a bucket of presets to get you started, but you have the ability to tweak everything until your heart is content. Honestly, I’m through looking for VST amps, I’ve found my winner. Everything that I’d tried before either sounded bad, lacked features and flexibility, or downright just crashed. Go check Shred out and I’m sure it will be your go-to plugin for getting an array of great guitar sounds.

Frankly it often takes me months to finish a song. There are few exceptions when something came together in a few days, but that is a rarity. I have pieces of songs that have been put on hiatus for years, only to be dragged out again when I’ve discovered a missing piece that I can now incorporate. For me, this lengthy writing process happens because I think that songs have a certain way that they want to be. No, I don’t think that a song is cognizant of itself, or has a self-image, or is like some fully formed spirit that is ready to be born. This is just metaphor. To clarify: I think that there is a way in which a good song is put together that is right for that particular song. I feel that in the writing process you need to work with that, and respect that in order to have a solid flow.

Say you’ve come up with this great riff, and you want to expand it into a full tune. That riff will have a personality. It will have a tone, and poise. It will suggest to you where it wants to go, melodically speaking. If you do not listen to that suggestion, if you try to make that riff into something it is not, or fit it into other structures that it does not get along with, then that song is destined to languish in some notebook. The imaginary, future song that you were going to write from this seed, had a form it was going to take. Your job as a songwriter is to discover that form.

I see this happen in my own writing. I’ll write out some lyrics, sit on them for awhile, then try to fit a melody around them. Sometimes the style I had in mind at the time the lyrics were written is completely not the style that ends up working. The words have a certain rhythm, and natural intonation that suggest one type of melody over another. When the lyrics were first written, those forms weren’t apparent as I was not focusing on constructing melody at that time. If I were to try to stick with the original vision, the song may sound awkward. I would not have respected the way the melody wants to be.

Never throw anything out. I have notes, binders, and scraps of paper going back to almost the time I started songwriting. The reason for this is that, snatches of tunes, a neat chord progression, a couple of lines that you wrote years ago may find their way into the song that you are writing today. Mine your failures for gold. Often you will find that the songs that didn’t work, failed because part of them wanted to be something else.

For example a song that I’m working on now, the refrain comes from a song that I wrote about 10 years ago. The refrain I had always liked and it was pretty much complete, with the exception of one line that needed tweaking. The verses that I had originally wrote to go with this refrain didn’t make the grade. There was no cohesion and lyrically it was a mess. So that song stayed in the notebook. The new verses come from a song that I had written a few years earlier. That song I deemed a failure for the same reasons as the first. It did have one thing going for it: musically the verses were quite strong. It wasn’t until recently that I was going through my notes revisiting old tunes when I saw that these pieces could be combined and work well. I had discovered parts of songs that wanted to be together, but I didn’t know it at the time. Now the only thing left is to write new lyrics for the verse.

If you ever find that a song just isn’t working for you, don’t trash it. Tear it apart, save all the pieces, and rebuild it, working  in the direction that the song is taking you, because you built it wrong in the first place going in the direction that you wanted. I guarantee you will end up with better songs for it.

www.balldroppings.com/js/ — Sounds a little dirty, but it’s a fun program where you make little tunes by having bouncing balls strike lines that you draw in space with your cursor.

www.thepixelplant.net/dmf/dmf.html — Tinydrum3.0 is a cute little sequencer. Try the random setting to get some tune ideas.

www.ronwinter.tv/drums.html — Turn your keyboard into a funky drum machine.

www.datadreamer.com/2daudio/projecttwo.html — Drag channels into a round mixer.

www.dothedaft.com/idaft/ — Daft Punk soundboard twiddling.

www.inudge.net/index.en.html — Another sequencer. This one has 8 different sounds you can mix together.

www.dyspxl.com/play/orbs/ — A sequencer where the grid is arranged in circles.

www.zanorg.com/prodperso/automachine.htm — Mix up techno with sexy french woman voices.

www.hobnox.com/sidspv6kippgqjh5f115ckjvn3bp6/papaya-themes/hobnox2007/noxtool/audio/audioapplication.swf/ –Play with virtual audio equipment.

www.deeperbeige.com/site/silly/flash/flashguitar/flashguitar.html — Play a virtual guitar.

www.buckle.com/static/bscene/games/drums/drums.html — Play virtual drums.

www.jamstudio.com/Studio/index.htm/ — Play with a virtual band.

Amelia Curran

There is this quality that runs through Canadian music that I would sum up as being lyrically dense. When you listen to likes of The Weakerthans, or Joni Mitchell or Gord Downie, we don’t shy away from the complicated turns of phrase. When it comes to writing songs that have something to say, Amelia Curran (Six Shooter Records) is well worth the listen. She certainly knows how to use words to craft narratives which punch you in your emotional centre. I’ve heard she’s been likened to the female Leonard Cohen, of which others include: Felicity Buirski, Suzanne Vega, and Fiona Apple. This is not surprising since her song the ‘The Dozens’ sounds much like a pastiche of ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’. But beyond that, her songs are delivered with a smoky sensuality twinged with a world-weary outlook, as though the speaker knows how all relationships end … badly. Her live performances (courtesy of Youtube) are done in a mellow finger-picking style and intimate demeanor worthy of a red velvet lounge. Go and visit Amelia’s site and listen to her music there.

While it’s tempting to think of audio recording

Go to the First Sounds website to delve into early audio recordings.

I used to write out lyrics in a spiral bound notebook, or loose leaf in a binder. When faced with the giant expanse of a page, I used to start writing, first verse, refrain, second verse, third and so on. It was all very orderly and very difficult. If things didn’t fit, it was hard for me to rework them. Occasionally I would draw arrows to show that some passages should be swapped, or I may have squeezed in a new line underneath an old one. The fact that I had this one big space that would fill up with words leaving precious little areas on the page for doing rewrites, coupled with the lack of ability to easily shift around blocks of text meant that often when the lyrics stopped working, I’d throw the baby out with the bathwater.

What I’ve found now, is that compared to my days of loose-leaf, I’ve started using a very non-linear writing process. Now lyrics come together like a patchwork quilt. That’s not to say that they are haphazardly strung together, it is still important to keep the big picture of theme and narrative in mind, but rather that the pieces of the lyrical whole are put in the places they belong. Reducing my writing area to a space that is 3 by 5 inches has given me great latitude in the construction of a song. I can generate many phrases knowing that I’ll find a place for the ones that fit and easily discard the ones that don’t. Even then, the discarded writing may find a place in another work, with just a little alteration.

One more thing, it occurs to me to mention that there is a good reason not to splurge for the expensive notebooks. I find that I’m more unwilling to sully an expensive notebook with bad writing. This may sound like a good way to provoke good writing, but all it does is paralyse and dissuade risk taking. Good writing doesn’t come about from some divine penstroke that has been fully planned beforehand. If one had to wait for only the really good stuff to burble up before committing anything to paper nothing would get done. Good writing is the result of quantity minus the bad stuff. It’s more important to be a good editor than an inspired writer.