Jump to audio examples

I've been writing songs since I was 11, and I must admit, I was no child prodigy. My early songs had three chords in the same key, lots of oohs and la las, and predictably trite lyrics, but I knew I had found my calling. Back then, I would bring my nylon-string, out-of-tune guitar into the kitchen to play my latest song to the cringing faces of my dysfunctional family. Soon, I bought one of those ugly black cassette recorders from Sears. I would set the tape recorder on the back of the toilet, sit on the closed toilet lid with my guitar, and record my songs in what I began to call "my studio." I even put a red lightbulb in a lamp outside the bathroom so my family would know I was in a "recording session" and should not be disturbed.

Playing back my first recordings, I cringed myself, but these early, painful experiences helped me become a better writer and performer. I bought an additional cassette recorder and started my own multitrack studio by playing along and harmonizing with the other recording. As you can imagine, the sound quality from cassette to cassette in a bathroom with an 11-year-old singing and playing all the parts was atrocious. But it taught me about harmony, doubling, and overdubbing—mostly by learning what not to do.

Thanks to my iChat buddy list, a songwriting partner is now just a click away. (Click to enlarge.)

I continued writing as a means of expression through high school and college, evolving from the "I hate mom and dad" songs to the "my mom hates my girlfriend" songs and eventually joining songwriters' associations. That's when I learned that writing with others could take my music to a whole new place, because my co-writers had fresh chords and rhythms, and a completely different vocabulary and rhyming schemes. The music I have co-written is probably the work of which I am proudest, because of its diversity.

So many people think of co-writing as sitting in the same room with a partner, strumming guitars or stabbing at the piano and scribbling lyrics into a notebook while recording on the microcassette deck. Though I spent many years in Nashville doing exactly that and still co-write in that manner, I have found a new approach to songwriting and co-writing through embracing computer technology.

The Advantages of Writing with a Computer

Writing on the computer truly changed my life. I still pace in my driveway with my acoustic guitar and sit down at the piano occasionally, but my main writing partner has now become my computer. The most obvious advantages are the same ones you get with a word processor. Anything you play or record can be dragged around the screen, fixed, tuned, edited, or rearranged simply and quickly.

Contrary to the tedious debate that computers make music sterile and stiff, the computer is simply a tape recorder. It's not going to perfect every beat and note unless you tell it to. All of the over-editing that gives music recorded on a computer a bad rap (no pun intended) is in the hands of the operator. If you prefer not to quantize (time correct) your drums or tune your vocals, it's up to you.

I find value in balance. I like a human feel in my music, but I'm also a little vain about an out-of-tune note here and there. But, hey, who doesn't spell-check or retouch a photo now and then? I also believe looping, tuning, and editing should be done in accordance with the style of music. If I hired a bass player to play on two songs, one techno and one country, I would create loops from the techno performance and perhaps apply some edgy effect while I would try to leave the country performance as live and natural-sounding as possible. It's all up to your discretion how to edit your own tracks.

One of the biggest advantages of computers for me is that my computer is an unlimited source of inspiration. At any moment, I can find a great groove or drum loop with Spectrasonics Stylus RMX or from my ever-expanding collection of drum loops. I can play my guitar through Native Instruments Guitar Rig and sound like a rock goddess. I can use Synthogy's Ivory plugin and get a piano sound that continues to blow me away. I can use Spectrasonics Trilogy and play a virtual bass sound that is hard to distinguish from the real thing. There are countless effect plugins—reverbs, delays, EQ, compression, distortion, and multi-effects—that can make even a whole-note chord sound as dramatic as a spaceship taking off.

Stylus RMX is a drum-groove plugin with exceptional sound quality and unique randomization features that keep its parts fresh. Read the O'Reilly tutorial here.

Another major advantage of computer-based songwriting is being able to pick up where you left off the last time you worked on a song. Rather than having to find your notebook and rewind the cassette deck, you simply open up your file on the computer and it sounds exactly like it did when you last worked on it. I am always recording while I'm writing, and many times, I'll even use the original tracks in the final mix. It's invaluable to always be recording while I'm writing.

There are so many creative advantages to composing on a computer, but the most important to me is that it provides the capability for people to work together anytime, anywhere, on any software or hardware. Just as you can open a JPEG picture file on any computer in many different programs, you can easily exchange audio files to build up a song. Here's how I do it.

Synthogy Ivory, created by the sound designer behind Kurzweil's acclaimed sampled pianos, brings a new level of playability and realism to software pianos.