guitarist | Andy Roberts

At The Bastille In Paris for Guitar Strings

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2012/05/08/bastille-paris-guitar-strings

Seeing pictures of young Socialist Party supporters celebrating their Presidential Election victory in Paris at the Bastille, reminded me of the few occasions I visited the Bastille myself. Paul Beuscher la librairie musicale de Paris When I lived in Paris the only time I ever came out of the Metro at Bastille would have been to go to the big music shop, Paul Beuscher. It’s still there today, not covering quite so many shop fronts, and specialising more in pianos than guitars, but still there. The first time I went on the advice of somebody who had told me it was the best place to buy replacement guitar strings, because you could buy singles instead of having to buy a new set every time one broke. Breaking strings was an occupational hazard, we didn’t have portable amplifiers in those days, played purely acoustically, so there was a tendency in noisy corridors or streets to get maximum volume by hitting the strings hard. You know that if you go just a little bit too far a string will break, but every so often you get carried away and it happens. I was asked very recently why I don’t cut off the ends of the strings like most guitar players do when restringing, and it’s for that very reason. If a string breaks near the bridge, which is the most likely place, you can sometimes put the same string back on again, by retrieving the little nipple end that’s fallen inside the hollow guitar body, threading the end of the string through the ring, tying a knot in it and then tightening the string back up to playing tension again. But you can only do that if there is enough leftover string beyond the machine head to pull back through a couple of inches at least. If it works, then that’s great – you can carry on playing the same pitch without having to go away and find a replacement. Of course you could always carry a set of spares around all the time, but that would have required a certain organised resourceful lifestyle which just wasn’t possible in the 1970s! I had more than most, though, which meant that other guitarists often asked me if I could lend them a spare D string or more likely a top E in passing. I couldn’t afford to do that very often at all of course, otherwise it would have just been me all the time having to make the trek to Paul Beuscher’s music shop at Bastille to replenish everybody else’s supplies. The Mazet Paris One occasion was a more sever emergency than just a string break. I had a guitar stolen from underneath the pinball machine in the cafe Mazet. Having the means of earning a living suddenly disappear is quite a scary position to be in. As luck would have it, the music shop had a big sale on which included a bin full of broken guitars at next to nothing prices. After rummaging around I was able to find an Epiphone six string guitar that was only damaged by a large split on the side of the body. So it was perfectly playable and the sound quality seemed oddly unaffected by the broken wood too. A snip at 150 French francs, equivalent to about £15 then and maybe about £150 in today’s money. Musical instruments and most other thing were generally more expensive in France than in England, particularly so in Paris. Still are. Mid range guitars are probably quite a bit cheaper now than they were then, you could probably buy a playable guitar brand new and undamaged for the same amount, it wouldn’t be as good as my old Japanese built Epiphone though. A few years later Epiphone moved production of their guitars from Japan to Korea and the build quality suffered. Now they make cheap guitars in China, nothing to do with the original Epiphone. I kept and played that old broken Japanese Epiphone for many years afterwards, until the fixed bridge broke and I didn’t get around to having it fixed, what with the broken side as well. Then somebody persuaded me to sell it to them, which I should never have agreed to. Nearly all the guitars I’ve ever sold, I wish I still had. That’s life. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogAt The Bastille In Paris for Guitar Strings

May 8 2012, 7:00am | Comments »

I posted to distributedresearch.net

Write me a hit by teatime: the world of professional songwriters

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/18/write-hit-songwriters

Songwriters work in the shadows, knocking out tunes to order – sometimes in a matter of hours. The songwriters who work for Jay-Z, Adele, Florence and more tell Alexis Petridis how they do it – and why times are getting tough

This article titled “Write me a hit by teatime: the world of professional songwriters” was written by Alexis Petridis, for The Guardian on Tuesday 17th May 2011 20.30 UTC Two years ago, Al “Shux” Shuckburgh found himself catapulted straight into songwriting’s premier league. The Londoner hadn’t expected much from the track he’d produced and co-written at a songwriting session with American tunesmiths Angela Hunte and Jane’t Sewell-Ulepic, about how homesick the pair were for Brooklyn. Later, Hunte sent it to Jay-Z‘s label, Roc Nation, but received a frosty response. Then EMI’s head of publishing overheard it at a barbecue, and decided it would be perfect for Jay-Z. The following night, the rapper wrote his own lyrics, recorded them, and then excitedly told Alicia Keys he had “a song that was going to be the anthem of New York” and asked her to perform on it. Back in London, Shuckburgh wasn’t even allowed to hear the track. “Well,” he says, “I could have heard it if I’d flown out to New York. But they were being so careful about anything leaking. At that point, I didn’t really have a track record, they didn’t really know who I was, so they didn’t know if they could trust me.” In fact, the first time he heard Empire State of Mind was when The Blueprint 3, the Jay-Z album it appeared on, finally leaked online. “It was very weird. I remember listening to it in my studio thinking, ‘Is this for real?’” Shuckburgh sounds more sanguine than might be expected for a man who was actively prevented from hearing a song he co-wrote. Perhaps the subsequent effect of Empire State of Mind on his bank balance and status has eased his pain. The track shifted 4m legal downloads and spent five weeks at No 1 in America, making it Jay-Z’s first US chart-topper. “It’s not like everything’s easy now,” says Shuckburgh. “But everything’s easier.“ Maybe that’s just how professional songwriters tend to be: whatever other attributes the job may require, a giant ego and a sense of preciousness aren’t really among them. This may be why songwriting tends to attract so many former performers, who have either tired of the limelight or watched it fade, and are now making some pragmatic decisions about their futures. Among the more improbable credits on recent hits were the three songs on Beyoncé‘s last album co-written by Ian Dench, formerly the guitarist of 1990s British indie dance band EMF (big hit: Unbelievable); then there’s She-Wolf by Shakira, partly the work of Sam Endicott, moonlighting from his day job as frontman of New York-based the Bravery. The washing machine technique “It’s the kind of job where the best thing you can be is invisible,” says Shuckburgh’s former mentor Eg White. “The very idea of a professional songwriter gets in the way of the singer.” White should know. He began his career as a performer – in boyband Brother Beyond and then in the critically acclaimed Eg and Alice, makers of glossy adult pop. He then went on to become one of Britain’s most successful songwriters for hire. He’s been responsible, or at least partly responsible, for Will Young‘s Leave Right Now, James Morrison‘s You Give Me Something, Adele‘s Chasing Pavements and Florence and the Machine‘s Hurricane Drunk. Tomorrow, as they have been doing for half a century, the Ivor Novello awards will turn a brief spotlight on to the shadowy world of professional songwriters, those people who ply their trade in studios and writing sessions, half-hidden from view, despite being the backbone of the music industry. Up for songwriting awards this year are the composers of such inescapable hits as Tinie Tempah‘s Pass Out, Katy B‘s Katy on a Mission and Plan B‘s She Said. As pop and R&B dominate the charts again (indie bands tend to write their own songs, or if they don’t, they keep quiet about it), the songwriter-for-hire is back in demand. At the top of the UK singles chart sits Bruno Mars, whose songwriting credits include Travie McCoy’s Billionaire and Cee-Lo Green‘s Fuck You. These songwriters do something that seems to go against every romantic notion we have about artistic creativity: they write songs to order (and apparently the current craving among UK labels is for songs that sound like Mumford and Sons, or Florence and the Machine). White, himself the winner of two Ivor Novello awards, is prevailed upon to meet an artist, form a bond, and come up with something chart-topping in the space of a day. “Sometimes less,” he says cheerfully. “Sometimes I get two hours. Someone comes over at three, we have a cup of tea, chew the cud for a bit, go: ‘All right, shall we write a song?’ And by six, they’ve gone home and we’ve fucking done it. Chasing Pavements, that took two or three hours.” Enormously affable, White seems to love every aspect of the process, even being forced to make friends with artists he’s never met before. “You immediately stop observing the niceties of gentle human contact between strangers,” he says, adding that he subscribes to “the washing machine theory” of songwriting. “I tend to play a few records and discuss them: what we need is the beat from that one, the fragility of that one. We try to keep it open, but we talk about the ways it might have precedents in different genres, smash them all together and get something different. If you just put one thing in the washing machine, you’re going to get one thing out; but if you put two or three colours in, who knows what colour’s going to emerge? Pop music is built out of pop music.” This is not an approach adopted by everyone. Jim Duguid, co-author of five songs on the debut album by Paolo Nutini, says: “Some record companies will give you a list of five songs and say, ‘We want something like this.’ But that’s like someone turning up with a BMW, giving you a load of parts and saying, ‘Can you build something like that for me?’ It’ll kind of look like it, but it won’t be right.” Duguid, who was drummer and songwriter with the old band Speedway – of which Nutini was a huge fan, doesn’t care much for knocking out a collaboration in a couple of hours, either. “I try to avoid that like the plague. A lot of industry people think, ‘Yeah, we’ll throw you together and you’ll write a hit in a day.’ But we did that in Speedway and it’s not the way the best music comes out. I like more of a social occasion, maybe three days of chatting and listening to music, then getting a couple of ideas together that reflect that.” The one thing professional songwriters seem to agree on is that times are getting tough. “Having had some success,” says Duguid, “it still shocks me how little money there is in it. I’m lucky in the sense that Paolo is one of the few artists who still sells physical CDs, and there’s money in that. With downloads – at one pence a download between three songwriters – you’ve got to be shifting a heck of a lot of records. The real money’s in getting your song on an advert or on television, but that’s getting harder, because everyone’s trying to do it.” A glorious bloody nose It’s a situation that is changing the nature of recording, says White: “Nobody wants album tracks any more, they just want singles. Before, you weren’t just chasing the money and the radio play – you could do something you really wanted to do, and had thus far been thwarted. Nobody wants the beautiful slow song that ends up as track 11 on an album but that everyone who buys the album will end up loving best of all. It’s down to iPod playing, cherry-picking, downloading. Fifteen years ago, you would hope that albums would outsell singles two to one. Now, I hear stories about Taio Cruz selling 13m downloads and 300,000 albums. And it’s not just him. Katy Perry: massive singles sales, small album sales. For publishing companies, that’s not a disaster – 13m singles is fantastic. But it’s a disaster for record companies and it’s a human disaster. The album is no longer the way people define themselves: there isn’t enough meat in there.” For a moment, White’s ebullience seems to desert him. Then he mentions Adele’s LP 21, which has just spent its 15th week at No 1 in the UK, and suddenly he perks up: he has a song on that. “Oh, that’s a glorious bloody nose to the music industry. Short-termist arses. Start fucking making music with your hearts! The record industry was saying no one was buying records any more, and then someone makes a very stoical, honest, beautiful record and people are buying it in shedloads. Because it’s nutritious.” Anyway, he says, album tracks or not, it’s a great job. “I’ve had Matt Cardle in today. We’ve both been making a fuck of a lot of noise, turning the guitars up really loud.” Matt Cardle off The X-Factor? Loud guitars? Noise? Really? “Yeah,” White chuckles. “Songwriting really is great fun.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWrite me a hit by teatime: the world of professional songwriters

Related posts:Can you learn how to write lyrics? The Songwriters Circle The demise of professional photographers