Mostess wrote:
I love SongFight! and the deadlines have given me all the motivation I need to write and record even though I'm a father of three, a husband (of one, ha ha), and have a more-than-full-time (a.k.a. academic) job. I love the challenge of having to write a song called "Our Love Violates Corporate Policy" in a matter of days (if not hours). I love the fact that people here will actually listen to that song and consider it in a voting decision.
That said: precisely 100% of what I have learned from the SongFight! community is about recording and production techniques. The review threads are a forum where people will tell you how much they like/dislike your voice, your drum sounds, your microphone choice, your use of compression, the EQ settings on your guitar track, your use of panning in the mix. Feedback about the song itself is invariably about the length or the style (i.e. "...I got bored halfway through..." and "...it's not my kind of thing but...").
I don't mean this to be dismissive: production is important and music performance is to some extent a form of salesmanship. People want their ears pleased and it's hard to do that with a tinfoil mic and a detuned guitar. But I have stopped writing reviews and almost stopped reading them here because I've gotten about as good at production as I care to get and I've given up expecting discussions about the use of meter, modulation, prepared dissonance, word painting, story-telling, phrasing, and structure in crafting a compelling song.
This is why I like GarageBand: even a crummy vocal take can be normalized, pitch- and time- corrected a tad, and Creamy Male Lead Vocal'ed into something listenable without any technical know-how. It levels the playing field in a way that would have made my SongFighting life a lot easier in 2002 when I started submitting here (TASCAM 4-track -> Archos Jukebox mp3 encoder). Then people are slightly more likely to say something about your lyrics than about your crummy vocal take. Slightly.
I guess mileage varies on this, depending on what type of engagement you've had with the community, and what level of expertise you have in non-production topics, but I feel like Songfight can and has taught its users (and myself) about a variety of topics related to the creation of a song and its recording, as well as how to listen critically.
I've participated in several lively discussions about lyrical scansion. Also, a few fights ago, I had a discussion about tone in lyrics - should the words of a song always be conversational? Can you get away with phrases and archaisms in song that would have sounded funny if you tried using them with your co-workers?
Just this past week, I learned quite a bit about microphone technique (which is related to, but I feel ultimately different from, "production").
JB once pointed out here on the boards that brevity of lyrics is one the things he most values. He urged us to take a look at the lyrics to some of our favorite songs and note how few words there were. I did, and I was amazed.
I've seen discussions about the purpose of bridges in songwriting, and whether they're necessary. Ditto for instrumental solos. I believe it was roymond who offhandedly dropped a piece of advice that I almost always think about when writing: the bridge should introduce another point-of-view or approach to the topic of the song.
Collaborating with Jim of Seattle taught me a lot about how to introduce variety into chord progressions.
I've learned lots about arrangement from making my own mistakes and letting those songs get reviewed. When is a song too bare, and when is it too cluttered?
Don't get me wrong, I've also learned a ton about production, too, since my first couple of songs were guy-and-guitar recorded in a single take into my computer's stick microphone being piped into a computer running freeware direct-to-mp3 recording software. I pretty much had nowhere to go but up from there. But the expertise of this community has assisted me in literally every aspect of song creation that I can think of.
Sorry to hijack the thread. As you were.
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