Dear Everyone Can Sing Community members,

We hope that this email finds you physically and emotionally well after what has been an intense and strange few months. We want to thank you for being patient and flexible with us while we have had to change how we operate during the COVID-crisis.

As we head into this next season we intend to do our utmost to stay COVID-safe and have your wellbeing as our first priority.  Please note that the direction of the NSW Government might change and we will act and update you accordingly.

This is what our current guidelines look like:

• Disinfect your hands when coming in and going out.
• In order to uphold our health and safety standards we also ask that you please pay through our online methods rather than cash.
• Please maintain social distancing to keep everyone safe and healthy.

As previously stated, our team has your best interest at heart and is monitoring the situation closely. We are following the advice provided by NSW Health and will be doing our utmost to keep our offices clean and safe.

In the meantime, please contact Deb if you have any questions or concerns.

We cannot WAIT to see you!!

Deb & The Team

Everyone Can Sing

The post Staying Covid-Safe Together appeared first on Everyone Can Sing.

Dear students and carers of students,

With the latest government announcement and the strong urge for non-essential businesses to close their doors, we have decided to do our part in getting the COVID-19 under control and go 100% online for the time being. Most of you are already participating in online lessons and have been extremely positive with your feedback. We are thankful for your flexibility and dedication!

As a community this is a time to stay connected and we want to do everything we can to facilitate positive experiences for you amidst all the uncertainty. 

We will be hosting:

– Online performance groups: A chance to connect with others and keep on honing your performing skills.

– Online voice, guitar and piano lessons: One-on-one tutoring for half an hour or an hour.  

– Kids lessons: Fun and interactive lessons catered to your child’s age group. 
  
– Online music theory: If you can’t make too much noise at home, why not continue to develop your musicality by learning the essentials. 

– Songwriting workshop: For complete beginners as well as more experienced. 

– Music career management workshops: How to get online presence, how to put together a set-list, how to score gigs and other relevant topics. 

– Online open mic nights: Monthly performance nights with the whole community online. Proceeds go to charity. 

– Community work: Brainstorm sessions to work out what we can do to help others less fortunate in this season. 

If you are interested in any of the above, please contact me. If you are overseas or interstate this is also for you! If you know someone who would be interested in our services, please feel free to pass this on. 

I have attached some videos for you to watch of students who have made the transition to online lessons. Give it a watch when you can… 

To keep things real for a minute, we know that it is a challenging time for most of you. Our dedication as a team is that you don’t feel alone in all of this. Let’s stay creative, let’s keep on making music, let’s stay connected! 

Please feel free to contact us. For a lesson, for a chat, if you’ve run out of toilet paper (thanks to those who brought some in to share with others- it’s going to my house for now so be quick, before I use it all myself, lol 😂)

Lots of love and see you soon. 

Deb and the Team 
Everyone Can Sing 

Steph’s experience with switching to online lessons

Marie shares her experience with online singing lessons

The post It’s time to get extra creative (online)! appeared first on Everyone Can Sing.

Wallace suffered from a depression all his life, which eventually killed him, but he was a great thinker and writer. And he is also responsible for promoting another great line, which is the perfect antidote for self-consciousness, and may have originated with Olin Miller, reminding us that ‘people who worry about what other people think off them should realise that they seldom do.’

Who we think we are – or more enigmatically – who we are able to let ourselves be, is a problem that radiates within the heart of creativity. This is because, like it or not, all creativity, and particularly singing and song writing, is an extension of oursense of selves.

It is probably here that the problem of wanting and striving to be perfect can build a destructive momentum. Self-consciousness can be fuel for a desire to be perfect and can result in a constricted immobility, or worse, a sneering contempt for the creative attempts of others.

To be free is to be able to play with the materials available and to turn them into something good for the pleasure of ourselves and maybe some others. To be creative is to be free to be yourself; whatever that is and whatever we make – or let – it be.

The Problem of Being Famous

If you have the inclination and a spare half an hour to read it, Jack Marx’s Walkley wonderful story about his short–lived friendship with Russell Crowe is a powerful insight into the deeply self-conscious world many public people live through. 

A short way into the story, there is a moment when Russell Crowe invites Marx, who is a music journalist among other things, to his home and asks an assistant to sit Marx in a room where music from Crowe’s band Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts is playing. 

The truth of the matter is not made clear in the story, but Marx is suspicious that Russell Crowe has set up a camera in the corner of the room and is watching Marx’s reactions to the music so as to, I guess, read an honest opinion of his musical talent.

It’s a story of the sad self-consciousness that comes with public acclaim and the desperation people can have for external validation of others. Something, I suppose, we all suffer from because our default settings also seem to make it difficult to accept ourselves for the mystery that we truly are. We are, also, imaginatively capable of deluding ourselves with fantasy in a world where we are never totally certain objectively of what we can actually do as we drift through time making the best of our lot.

If it’s any consolation, perhaps recognizing that popularity creative work represents nothing more than a consensus of popular opinions, and those opinions are often heavily influenced by the weakness many of us have of wanting to belong and like what everyone else does. It’s a rare thing to find people who can stand against fashion and like something unpopular just because they do.

Artistic tastes go through periods of fashion because people are convinced that what is popular is good. Our current fascination with people who are ‘influencers’ is what this is all about.

Creativity is Playing Around – a Lot

In any case, being able to play with creative work and do something that may – or may not – represent some form of your own mysterious self takes a lot of courage. It requires answering the negative and destructive thoughts that arise within yourselfcarefully and kindly so as to nurture self-acceptance and find the freedom to play around and see what works.  

For a whole range of reasons associated with anxiety embedded in our times – just look at how many remakes there are of films nowadays – we are living through a period where sameness and safe works of creativity are being generated by people afraid to make a mistake on their way to creating something new because it wouldn’t be perfect.

The illusion we all often share is this problem of perfection, and it was probably best illustrated in the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

James Gallaway

The post The destructive nature of self-consciousness and perfection appeared first on Everyone Can Sing.

It’s hard to believe, but there really are people in the world who don’t like music. 

Actually, it’s probably fair to say that it’s not so much that they don’t like music, but that they find it boring and distracting because they have a psychological condition called musical anhedonia. 

People like this mostly lead normal happy lives, it’s just that when other people find out they don’t like music – and tell them there’s something wrong with them – that’s when they get unhappy and there’s no music to cheer them up.

Sadly, and of a much greater concern, are people who absolutely hate music, and have it banned.

The Taliban, a war–traumatized gang of nut–cutlets who are still fighting it out in Afghanistan, banned music and jailedmusicians they caught them playing an instrument, after they captured Kabul, in 1994.

This hatred of music happens even in times of peace. Powerful people in the United States and officials who run the BBC in the UK, all through the 20th Century, banned music by Billie Holiday, Peter Paul and Mary (Puff the Magic Dragon), the Sex Pistols and Shirley Bassey.

In Russia, too, and much more recently, the members of a bandcalled Pussy Riot were jailed because of a gig they held in a cathedral in Moscow.

There’s really no question that music is an elusive and powerful art form, whether it’s Gregorian Chant, blues, jazz, Shoegaze, Hip Hop, Punk, Folk, Death Metal, Nu Metal, Stadium Rock, Dark Folk, Indie Pop, ElectroFunk and SynthPop, or your annoying cousin playing air guitar with his tennis racket.

You can see all the fear and loathing people have for music in this YouTube clip of the very Reverend Jimmy Snow, in the US of the 1950s, explaining how he recognized rock music as something that creates ‘evil feelings when you sing it’ because, ‘of the beat’. 

You might also want to check out these Youtube videos of infants reacting to Led Zeppelin to see how right he actually was. 

Of course, when something is this powerful, it feeds on money. Take the new behemoths of music distribution Apple, Google and Spotify, the last of which is owned in part by the fourbiggest record labels on the planet: Sony, Universal and the other two. 

Spotify loads up around 20, 000 songs a day for 71 Million subscribers that contribute to an annual revenue of $4 Billion. A small part of a global pie worth $15 Billion. Artists make a variety of returns out of exposure through these systems and an estimated $.00437 on Spotify per stream, on YouTube, $0.0007, Apple Music, $0.008 and Tidal, $0.013.

Eating fried lentils and rice five nights a week, and taking crap from a psychopathic boss in a dead-end job, musicians often get disheartened when they look at how overwhelmingly impossible success financially seems. Everybody knows there has always been a tension between creative activities and money, and its’ a long standing and wonderfully complicated idea that does nothing to pay the rent.

If making a living from music is important for you, and chasing that living doesn’t extinguish your love for what the philosopher,Soren Kierkegaard, described as being ‘like time,’ ‘measured,but immeasurable,’ ‘composed, but indivisible,’ right now is avery exciting time because the production and distribution of music has never been a straight-out system of one–to–one between artist and audience. 

Back in the 1970s, musicians couldn’t afford access to studios and promotion so they sold the rights to their work in exchange for help from record companies. The artist formerly known as Prince was a talented and naïve 19-year-old when he signed with Warner Bros.

Record company management explain, in this video from The Economist magazine that they use the money from the copyright they hold on those artists work to foster new musical talent, which they presumably keep a look out for, driving through Monaco on holidays in an affordable Audi TT. 

It’s not for nothing that, back in the nineties, the artist formally known as Prince went around with the word ‘slave’ written on his face to champion the rights of artists to own their own work.

The revolution that has reorganized the music system has lowered the cost of production and distribution of music and the cost of music. To understand this, take the average price of a house, in Sydney, in 1975, at $28,000, and the average price of an album of music at just under $10. 

Right now, house prices in Sydney are 36 times what they were in 1975, at an average of $1 million, while an album of songs has only doubled to around $17.00 on iTunes.

Bands make their money on live performances and merch, nowadays, but record labels are out to take that too, if they can get you to sign.

But the news is not all bad. 

In fact, it’s pretty good. Former Executive Editor at Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly, put out the idea that a musician or a band can live well on one thousand true fans, and it’s finally starting to catch on, as musicians realize that they can promote, record and run their own careers with technology like Digital Audio Workstations and websites and social media. 

It’s a revolution those who signed their lives away before us would never have imagined. 

The fact is that there are another two billion or so people who will be online world wide in the next two years, and some of them – a lot of them – are going to like music. Maybe your music, once you have recorded it and sent it out there. 

The idea is to make the music you like and find out who your audience is. You can mess around with the out of phase aspects of Stratocaster or the effect compression has on a Nashville Tuned Martin, you can fine tune the attack of an 808 in your retro Trip Hop piece and then EQ your vocals with a Neve 1073plugin and send it all out through your own marketing and management team. 

Best of all, write some poetry into your lyrics in language that, to quote Flaubert, is like ‘a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.’

And it’s yours, and it feels good if you make some kind of an impact musically and culturally, and get a thousand true fans. Some of them might be the infants who love Led Zeppelin. 

James Gallaway

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/please-dont-stop-the-music-or-do-stop-the-music-i-dont-really-mind/519099/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/13/afghanistan.books

https://ncac.org/news/blog/turn-that-down-40-banned-and-censored-songs

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5R152hTbVPQdYjn29q5jt4/16-songs-banned-by-the-bbc

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-25490161

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gQV15DPvyE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lboxh5nXSU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdPwFx3j8JY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRWVkuvW1QA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz3DaisBz8

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/prince-fought-big-labels-ownership-artistic-control-n560161

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/56nG2R2ps7YJCDyG76Wjbvf/more-than-merch-why-band-t-shirts-are-so-important

https://www.edge.org/conversation/kevin_kelly-the-technium

https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

http://www.worldometers.info/

The post Music, Success and Money appeared first on Everyone Can Sing.

In songwriting, the first steps to take are purely practical and they work more like guidelines than rules.

You need music and you need to put a melody over that music, whether it’s the rhythmic melody of Hip Hop, the more traditionally lyrical melody of Rock or the throat-shuddering guttural of Death Metal, whatever it is, it will have melody.

There are songs that are composed entirely of vocal melody, of course, but, if you want to include music and all the emphasis it provides to a song, you should write the music on guitar or piano first by picking a key and a group of chords or notes and run them in a sequence.

Historically, we have developed names for the parts that form a sequence in songs, including chorus, pre-chorus, verse, middle eight (bridge), refrain, coda and outro just to name a few. But it might be a good idea to leave those names out of the process early on.

In the interests of finding out what a song is going to be (rather than imagining you know everything about it before you begin) its probably a good idea to name each of the parts in your sequence of chords or music as A, B and C, or 1, 2 and 3 and so on.

If you frame them early on as a chorus or verse, you might tend to write and arrange your song based on those frameworks and labels and you might miss something interesting or new if you work to create early on without labels.

When you have a couple of chord sequences that are mostly in the same key signature (and, if they aren’t, if it’s a change in key that you enjoy the sound of) sit down and listen carefully to the music and find within yourself a vocal melody that the music inspires. A kind of emotional reaction in sound that you feel and want to sing.

Also, if you want to at least be a little bit original, to try and avoid the first, fourth, fifth and relative minor configuration of chords that have been overused in music over the past forty years. Those chords are a great place to start and you will sound okay, but, if you want to create something that is your own, it’s probably better to grab hold of some information about music theory and other chords and see how wonderfully complex and beautiful music is beyond that arrangement.

When it comes to creating a vocal melody that encapsulates the emotional reaction the music engenders in you, a good way of starting this is simply by singing the root note of the key signature. You can easily just hum this note, and, in a way, right there and then, you have already written a song. It might be a one-word song with a simple melody of one note, but it’s still technically a song. And it’s a great way to start.

From here the possibilities are endless. You can vary the notes in the melody by moving along the diatonic scale in that key. Melodies everywhere have come from movements in notes throughout that and other octaves. If you’re feeling very adventurous, you might want to try flattening the seventh note of the scale to move it into the mxylidian mode. Or sharpening and flattening other notes as they occur in other modes.

Modes might seem daunting but they are very useful in melody making and they change the nature of a key signature to make the music more engaging. You can watch a helpful Youtube video here, explaining how the Beatles did this with a lot of their songs.

Even though it might seem exciting to have finally made a melody appear over some music, it’s important to keep pushing yourself into the further trials of song writing, which involve arranging the musical parts of the song into sections that you might want now to call chorus and verse and so on. Or you can simply arrange it as parts and stamp those with your own labels.

Arrangements are killer moves to making a song work. And it’s a good idea to remember that thinking carefully about the impact your voice and choice of lyrics has on your listener at every point during the song is an intuitive exercise that plays out inside your own head and has a lot to do with your own internal thought processes.

Way back around the start of the last century, Sigmund Freud wrote ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ about human internal thought processes, as part of his career at attempting to explain aspects of human consciousness.

It’s a long book about the battle individuals have with the normative forces in their society and it includes the notion that parts of a person’s mental life includes ‘perceptions, thoughts, feelings’ which seem alien and divorced from their own sense of self.

It’s an idea that has a great impact on artistic creation. When you are creating a vocal melody or a line of poetry or an installation representing some immense idea, all you are doing is creating something from ideas of your own. Ideas that come from within you and have all the validity your subjective self-worth commands.

It’s true that art can be evaluated by a consensus of subjective opinions, which, generally, divide into popular and critical appraisals and it’s true that some of those evaluations have some merit.

But, if you are going to create, you need to ignore the evaluations that might arise in your own mind and suggest to you that its not worth bothering because you have no talent, or it’s not worth bothering because you have immense talent and no one needs to know about it but you. If you really want to create, it’s important that you bother.

In the end, as guitarist Robert Fripp says, you have to ‘learn to trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.’ And create.

By James Gallaway

The post Songwriting appeared first on Everyone Can Sing.

So, if you are just starting out, the questions you need to ask are a lot less complicated than you might imagine. And most have to do only with the physical size of the instrument and the way your fingers work on its fretboard.

When you buy clothes, you make sure that they fit and a guitar is no different. If you’re playing something that has the same effect on you as walking around in a tight shirt and pants that split when you sit down, you’re not going to be making great music. So, when you meet with a guitar you’re interested in, sit down on a chair, put it in your lap and play it. If the bass end of the sound box is too big and your strumming arm is being pushed up into your shoulder socket when you try and hit the strings, you know you’re going to need something smaller.

The same thoughts work for the length of a guitar’s neck.

If you feel as though you are reaching beyond a comfortable distance to get your hand around the chords and make precise push points when you’re fretting strings, maybe a shorter neck is for you. Guitars come in a number of neck lengths, nowadays. This is also true for the width of the fretboard.

The part of the guitar where all the action happens, fingerwise, come in a variety of widths, from just over five centimeters on some classical nylon string guitars to around four centimeters on steel string electric and acoustic guitars. The width of the fretboard and the size of your fingers will need to match so that you can get your fingers around the back of the neck as well as properly placing it on strings to fret notes.

A good way to test this is to play a C chord. The three fretted notes of the chord spread out across the strings, and, if you find that your fingers are not muting any of the strings on either side of the notes you are fretting, that’s probably the right sized guitar for your fingers.

The next thing to look at when you’re buying a new guitar is the action. This is the distance the strings are from the fretboard. Obviously, this will differ all the way along the fretboard, but it’s important that its not too high, which would make fretting notes a chore because you have to push them so far down to reach the fret. Or too low where they might hit against the frets when you are playing making a rattling sound that is often referred to as ‘fret buzz’.

In most cases the action on a guitar puts the strings at around two to three millimeters (sometimes four) at the twelfth fret, depending on the gauge of the strings. It is important to realize that, on some guitars, the action can be lowered by turning a socket that controls a metal bar that reaches up to the end of the neck from the inside. You can tell if your guitar has this facility or not by looking in the sound hole where the neck connects to the guitar.

Another important thing to do when you get a new guitar is to hold its base at your feet and stare down along the fret board from the tuning end so that the fret wires line up like sleepers on a railway track. This is the best way to make sure that your guitar’s neck is not twisted. If all the fret wires line up properly, the guitar is okay. But, if you can see that they drift to one side or the other, it’s likely that guitar was left in a car on a hot day and has twisted and will never tune correctly.

If all of these issues are sorted, you are almost there. Be sure to check the body for any gaps in the wood or holes or cracks. Sometimes these issues are not terminal, and, if it’s a guitar you’re particularly fond of, you can take it to a luthier to have the body repaired.

Take a look also at the machine head and the arrangement of tuners at the guitars end. Check to see if they are rusty or not moving smoothly when they are tuning strings. It’s probably also a good idea to check the nut just near the machine heads to be sure that it’s not loose. On older guitars the glue holding it in place can wear away and the nut can often be only held in place by the strings.

The same can be said for the bridge, where you should also check that the sound board down from the bridge is not bubbled or raised slightly from its usually smooth plane. If it is, this is a good indication that a strut on the frame inside the sound box has broken and the strings and bridge are pulling on the guitar body incorrectly.

If you’ve got all these things in order, the only thing left to do is to check out the guitars tone. All guitars have a different sound, just like human beings, and it’s often a good idea to play and listen to the guitar to make sure it’s the right sound for you.

The final consideration, of course, is how much do you want to spend. There are a lot of guitar brands out there and they all claim different value based on their reputation. Guitars purchased new are not always more expensive than a used guitar, depending on its age and reputation. Some guitars from the 1950s sell for thousands of dollars more than the same design manufactured last year and never played.

For the everyday musician looking to start playing guitar there are a number of brands that sell new around the five-hundred-dollar range that sound fine and play well. You can often get used versions of these for even less, but you should be careful to check all the points listed above.

It’s also worth looking around for used examples of more expensive brands at around the one-thousand-dollar mark, if you have more money to spend and you’ve been playing guitar for a while and know that it’s something you will always want to do. Brands like Gibson and Fender are the most well-known, but there are great – and often, better – guitars made by companies like Epiphone, Gretsch, Martin, Maton, Guild, Ovation, Taylor and Washburn to name only a few.

And there are new companies appearing all the time, making perfectly wonderful guitars. The thing to do is to read a lot about the guitar you finally decide will be right for you so that you have a reasonably healthy idea about what you should pay, and then, sit down and make sure everything is in order before you hand over the money.

By James Gallaway

The post How To Buy A Guitar appeared first on Everyone Can Sing.

What a great night this was- First of many! Ethan (Click here to visit his website) was so kind to come and capture the night for us.

On a side note, Ethan also does music videos and has helped Prototype and Ankur with their music projects.

As for your performances and support towards other performers, I was extremely proud of all of you.

I love us!

The post Open Mic Night Marrickville appeared first on Everyone Can Sing.

Whether you paint, write, play music or make films, other people whose livelihood depends on the commerce that surrounds art, are likely to be involved.

Everyone from the grunts who carry equipment into venues to management that books events, all of them expect to be paid, and, wherever money is involved, there is sure to be an underlying tension between the people who make the art and the people who profit from it.

Most artists prefer to concentrate on producing work and leave all the other crap to someone who knows what they are doing. Creativity is something most people like to be involved with, in some form or other, and, if they can’t be creative themselves, people who work in creative industries at least get some joy out of being involved.

Back when Courtney Love wrote this piece for Salon on the way money is divided between the music industry and the people who actually make music, radio was still a big factor in the way music made its way to audiences. Nowadays, it’s iTunes and Spotify that rule distribution (although a lot of artists are able to deal directly with their audiences) but the situation is probably not all that different.

So, if you’re creative, you might define success as the intellectual and emotional reaction you have to the work you do, and you might also accept that you need to involve yourself with others who provide skills that help you do other things like manage your work, produce it and market it.

But how do you know when you meet them, if they are the sort of people who have you and your creative work’s best interests at the top of their list of things to do?

Negativity works

A good thing to watch for is a technique people in business use to sell their services that is as old as money.

If you find yourself sitting talking to someone who is telling you that you are lacking in some way, that you’re a bit short of some special ingredient that only they can supply, if they are telling you over and over that you have faults that only they can fix, you probably want to leave them alone.

Being creative is probably the most humanly vulnerable thing anyone can do for a living, and, at its heart is the burden of carrying a doubt that anything you do is any good. In a lot of ways, it’s a central concern all artists have to work over throughout their entire lives. But it’s a question to be addressed personally and psychologically and best not solved through external validation.

People who sell deodorant will tell you that you smell, people who want to whiten your teeth will tell you that anything less than shining white enamel is unattractive, people who want you to buy their book on how to use a software program will title it ‘Software program for dummies’.

Billy Corgan talks about being manipulated in this way in an interview with Joe Rogan that’s interesting generally, but the specific details are at 11 minutes and 30 seconds. The idea is also known as ‘negging’ and it’s something men who call themselves ‘pickup artists’ think works when they are looking for a relationship.

It’s also probably worth thinking about how you react when someone tells you something good about yourself and the work you do. A lot of people find praise difficult to accept or deal with. In many people, it can create feelings of distrust, people often undervalue it because they suspect the person offering it wants something from them.

The whole issue is a vexed one. Ultimately, whoever you trust to market, managed or otherwise involve themselves with you and your creative life, you should be careful to be sure that you do actually trust them.

And then you can just get on with what is the only really truly sustaining aspect of making music, making music.

Post by James Gallaway

The post The Business Of Being Creative appeared first on Everyone Can Sing.

The most important thing to remember when it comes to the legalities of copyright and intellectual product is that it’s something you really shouldn’t worry about until the work you do becomes significant, financially.

When you’re starting out as an artist, the most important and valuable way to spend your time is creating work. A lot of people get distracted by the idea that they must copyright and protect their work when they really should be spending more time making that work great and successful.

Because that’s what matters, right?

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t keep a weather eye on your creative product and be sure no one is stealing your ideas. And there are a number of sensible precautions that a creative person can put in place to cover themselves against the theft of their intellectual property until that great day arrives somewhere in the future when your work is enjoying (or suffering) the commodification commerce brings to art.

And, at that point, if you do find yourself in a situation where someone else has taken your creative work and sold it or represented it as their own, you’ll probably need to speak with a lawyer.

And that’s expensive.

Lawyers and money

There are a lot of things you can do before you need to contact a lawyer. You should weigh up the cost of getting a lawyer to contact the person you think has ripped you off with the amount of return you can expect to get from them – minus the cost of the lawyer.

The calculation will involve working out how much the person or entity that stole your creative work is making from that theft. That’s not a particularly easy calculation to make and might not cover the cost of getting a lawyer (good lawyers cost around $600 an hour) to write and ask that they stop using your work and pay you for what it’s earned them.

The way the online world works now and the ease with which images and sound files can be easily copied and reproduced elsewhere, it’s easy to understand that the theft of creative work is an all too common offence. The simple fact is that, if people think they can get away with something, they’ll try to get away with it.

With this in mind, the most important thing you can have as the creator of a work is factual evidence that the work is your own. If a creative work has been published and marketed under your name the evidence is there in the sale and distribution of the product, whether it’s a song or art work. And you will likely have signed a publishing deal with that distribution. More on that later.

If you are an unpublished artist, evidence that the work is your own might be a little more difficult to come by, but it’s not impossible to secure. What matters is that as soon as you create a work the copyright belongs to you, it’s automatic and enshrined in law. You can add copyright symbols if you chart it and print out hard copies, if you want. You can even get an International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) for the work as a sound recording.

The Australian Performing Rights Association (APRA) is an organisation that looks after the interests of its members and provides resources to artists who want assistance with the legalities of negotiating royalties for the use of their work. If you find that you are moving into a more financially successful environment, as an artist, you should probably make contact with them in any case.

You can register your ISRC with APRA AMCOS and sign on with them as a songwriter. If you want to register your work with them, you will need to contact the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) because it issues ISRC in Australia and then APRA AMCOS will record that information as part of your membership.

Emerging artists who sign publishing deals with major labels often find that their creative works are, to some extent, copyrighted by those labels. And, for many, it’s a shock to find later that they have signed away their rights. If you are interested in what this means, the Economist magazine has produced this excellent examination of how major labels make money from artists.

What to do if someone has stolen your work

As long as you have evidence that the work is yours and you created it at a point in time before the other person started using it, you should have enough to warn them off continuing to use it without attribution or payment.

If you find that someone is using your material without your consent, in the first instance, you probably don’t even need to involve a lawyer. You can just write to them politely – it’s important to realise that they may have been misinformed about the providence of the material so there’s no point being angry when you’re communicating with them – and inform them that the material is your intellectual product and ask them to stop using it and refund any financial reward they might have gained from its use.

If you get a lot of negative responses to a reasonable approach like that, it’s probably time to start thinking about the benefits, or otherwise, of using a lawyer.

It’s important to remember that, because lawyers cost so much, it’s not a good idea to fight someone in court for anything less than forty thousand dollars. If the amount you believe you are owed because someone has broken an agreement with you or they have ripped you off is less than that, you can pursue them in a local court as an unrepresented litigant and have a judgement made by a magistrate.

But you should think carefully about the toll it will take on you to represent yourself and whether, in the end, it’s worth the hassle. It will be, if, as an artist you are making a lot of money from the hard work you’ve put into creating your artistic work. At which point you should be able to make a considered judgement about hiring an effective lawyer.

Until then, keep records of the work you produce and be ready to act on your own behalf if you think someone has ripped you off. But most important of all, don’t spend more time worrying about intellectual property rights than you need to. Creating work is all that matters.

James Gallaway
Guitar and Songwriting Teacher for Everyone Can Sing

For more information on songwriting click here

The post Copyright For Emerging Artists appeared first on Everyone Can Sing.

When we listen to songs we know whether we like them or not because of the way they make us feel. Music is art that requires a special kind of emotional connection that goes deeper and resonates more significantly than any other.

It’s a fact that there is no other art form that gets people up and dancing, tapping their feet and moving about. And it’s also true that the emotional connection songs and music provides makes it possible to listen to the same song over and over in a way that you can’t with a book or television series or film.

It’s not just that songs are more compact and more readily available, it’s because there is something in our human nature that makes it possible to repeatedly listen to the same song over and over to repeat the experience of the emotional impact it has us feeling. Poetry, also, in the lyrics of songs has a similar force, which is why the two are so often strung together.

Our emotional connection to songs is so strong that they can take us back to the way we were feeling about our life when we first heard the same piece of music. The French writer Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time) wrote about the way sounds and fragrances can take us back many years to another time and place and remind us vividly of who we were at that time in a way that deeply connects us to our sense of self through time.

The emotional truth at the heart of music is so hard to describe that it can only really be found by listening. So often the words we use to describe why we like something often leave us describing music in terms that are ambiguous and inadequate.

For example, people often use the word ‘creative’ to describe what people do when they make music. By calling something or someone ‘creative’ we are describing a process of manufacturing and weaving aspects of instrumentation and harmony together into a fabrication.

It might sound obvious, but songs really are the result of a long process of building arrangements that can sometimes be stripped down into bare simple piece of music or, at others, jam packed with a fully orchestrated framework of arrangements and carefully selected instrumentation. It’s a simple fact that songs are built.

But, in many ways, the words we used to describe the creativity of writing songs also describes them as an illusion that is formed and this goes against the idea that songs are also there to reveal a hidden emotional and spiritual truth.

Revealing emotional truth, it would seem, should happen by digging into our shared human experience. This is why songs feel as though they were written only for us in an honest way that describes directly what it is to feel human and brings us closer to the song writer.

So, on the one hand, songs and music are creative illusions that are fabricated, and, on the other, they are artworks that strip away the illusions and fabrications of life and take us to an essential emotional truth.

Perhaps the same musical motif that appears in the song Good Times by Chic is part of this emotional truth and this is what Niles Rogers (he wrote the guitar parts in Good Times) means when describes that song as being a starting point for the rhythm in Hip Hop.

The punchy guitar you can hear in the song also occurs in Another One Bites the Dust by Queen, I Need You Tonight by INXS and Radio Clash by the Clash.

The same emotional truth is also hidden somewhere the words of two poems written by two different English poets in the early 1800s. Both of these describe something of the nature of the eternity and reality.

One is the first stanza of Auguries of Innocence written by William Blake around 1803:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

And the other is in a stanza of ‘Adonais’, which was written by Percy Shelley in 1821:

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments

Whatever it is that lies at the heart of music, it reaches all of us emotionally and significantly and all we have to do is listen.

Post by James Gallaway

The post The Emotional Truth at the Heart of Music appeared first on Everyone Can Sing.