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Stephen Pickering

Category: Audio

  • How Long Will It Take Me From Song Idea to Release?

    Last night the idea came to me as a melody A-F#-D-A-C-B. I didn’t know what the notes were until I played it on the guitar and this is where the Snarkman was another blessing, since it identifies the notes as you are playing them. Then I was able to surmise that it was over a D-C-G chord movement. I tapped the rhythm as 109 and layed down the first demo on the iPad in Garageband with an accompanying “Drummer Track.” I sang mumbo jumbo which is what I usually do just so I can get the jist of the idea before I go to sleep.

    1:49 pm. Today, I’m going to try writing the lyrics. I’m going to listen to what I mumbled last night and see if I can write some real words.
    2:30pm. I got a first verse, chorus, and half of a second verse, but I had to stop. Or maybe I didn’t need to stop, but it feels like I need to stop for a while, do some other things and let my subconscious go to work. I still struggle with just letting out anything that comes to my mind, which I think you have to do on your first draft. When push comes to shove and its going to press tomorrow you can clean it up, but for now let your mind have some space.
    I think the desire is to make everything so pretty, especially when the music is pretty, so when something comes out that is either nonsensical or not necessarily a pretty image, the impulse is to quash it. I say let it out, especially on the first draft. I’m trying to walk a fine line here with a balance between the subconscious and the conscious. I want to let each have its day in court so to speak. On the one hand if I wait for the subconscious to come up with the most perfect line, it’ll never get done, on the other hand if I just go with the first thing, not trying at all to bring some sense into the equation it won’t have any value either. “Sound and Sense” as my college poetry textbook said. An equal mixture of both. That’s poetry.

    5/19/20

    Well, let’s see. So technically I put in 40 minutes on this yesterday, but as I was doing other things the song remained in my head, and new lyrics started coming to me. Luckily with the Notes App whether I work on it at the desk or when I’m out and about with the iPhone, it all syncs up. Today, technically I sat down with it another 45 minutes or so. Well the end result is, I’ve got two or three pages of lyrics, way more than I need, but they don’t necessarily make sense together. Also, when I sing the ones I have, it just feels like there are better lyrics hiding, but I can’t force it or they won’t reveal themselves. Actually after I wrote for 45 minutes I opened up Soundtrap and layed down a couple guitar tracks. I’m a little stressed about the lyrics. It feels like a delicate line to walk between not rushing them and procrastination. I don’t mind having this creative space at the beginning, but I definitely don’t want it to go on too far. There should be some kind of deadline, but I’m not sure what it should be.

  • Pre-Save My New Single “It’s Nowhere” on Spotify

    https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/stephenpickering/its-nowhere

  • How to Delete All Songs from iPhone Quickly

    “Connect your iPhone to iTunes, go to the Music tab and uncheck Sync Music and press Apply to resync.” – from “Randers4 on the Apple Support Forums. (This worked for me and took only a couple minutes, even with 2000 songs, to complete).

    Man, iTunes is just crazy, and drives me crazy.  But anyway, the reason I needed to do this: My old iPhone 4 was filled up to where I couldn’t update anything, and in this age of Spotify, I’m not listening to any of the music on my phone’s library. Now my photos and videos are taking up as much space, but my trust in iPhoto is just as weak, so I’m afraid to delete all photos at once, because I’m just sure there’ll be some in there that I have only one copy of. Ugh!

    At first when I googled it said to “Uncheck” the unwanted songs and then Re-Sync. But you have to do that one by one! I’m not going to sit there and uncheck 2000 songs! Well actually I started to, and then realized the insanity and futility. Then something weird happened. I Googled some more to see if there was a way to Uncheck all the songs at once. One guy said to, within iTunes, click Edit>Select All, as if that was a way to mass uncheck all the songs. But that didn’t work. It scared me because, after I did that, and again started “re-unchecking” songs, the songs would disappear as I unchecked them. I thought, “OMG, am I deleting them from my computer or phone or both!?!?!?!?!”
    Turns out, luckily, I wasn’t. For whatever reason the “Unchecked” songs, as I unchecked them were being moved to the bottom of the page, automatically. Phew! But still crazy. Now, I just went back and clicked Edit>Select All, clicked around the left side of the iTunes window, to the left of the check boxes, and the display seems returned to normal, with the Unchecked and Checked songs together in their normal order.

    OK, so finally I found the simple answer on how to delete all my songs at once. It’s the 8th response down, from “Randers4” on this page in the Apple Support Forums: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3593697?start=0&tstart=0

    He simply states: “Connect your iPhone to iTunes, go to the Music tab and uncheck Sync Music and press Apply to resync.”

    Boom! And that was it. Did the trick. They were all deleted in seconds, and I freed up space to do my iOS update as well as app updates.

    Now, as to how to go in there and selectively add back songs, perhaps things I can’t get on Spotify, or for when I’m out of connectivity range, I don’t know what the best practice is. I saw somewhere that using Playlists was the best way, you add the things you want on the phone to a certain playlist, and when you connect your phone there’s an option to only Sync certain “selected” playlists.

    But I’m not worried about that now. I just wanted to free up space so that I could update. And I really appreciate Randers4 plain English, one sentence response. Why can’t Apple explain things so that a human being can understand? I mean, do you know if you go into “Help” within iTunes that there is utterly no topic on deleting songs from your phone? The craziness stupefies me.

  • Chords and Lyrics for The Happiness Waltz by Josh Rouse

    “The Happiness Waltz” by Josh Rouse
    title track from the album “The Happiness Waltz”

    Eb
    Spring, spring, Winter’s sting

    Abmaj7
    Is gone.
    /                       Eb
    Tomorrow I’ll be new.

    Eb
    Salt wind
    /                          Abmaj7
    Blowin’ through the yard.

    /                                           Eb
    God knows, I’ve missed you.
    Bbm7           Abmaj7             Eb
    Happiness waltzed in the room
    Bbm7           Abmaj7             Eb
    Postcards of where she’s been too
    Bbm7           Abmaj7             Eb
    Smiling and singing a tune
    Bbm7
    A swansong
    Bbm7           Abmaj7             Eb
    Happiness waltzed out the room

    (A Musical Interlude over the Verse Chords)

    Bbm     Fm7          Abmaj7
    Let me into your      world
    Bbm7                 Fm7    Abmaj7     Bbsus2
    Show me your magic hear-            -eart!
    Bbm7           Abmaj7             Eb
    Happiness waltzed in the room
    Bbm7           Abmaj7                  Eb
    Postcards of where she’s been to.
    Bbm7           Abmaj7                 Eb
    Smiling with pearls on her shoes.
    /    Bbm7
    A swan song.
    Bbm7           Abmaj7             Eb
    Happiness waltzed out the room.

  • Song of the Day: A Song to Help You Sleep – Josh Rouse

    Man, chose a doosey today! Musically it’s easy. Just a lot of lyrics to memorize. That’s the irony: The hard ones musically tend to have easy lyrics and vice versa.

    Oh well. What was the spark that made me choose this one? I was sitting around last night watching TV, strumming some chords, and out of the blue, what I thought was an original, cool sounding riff came to my head, and I thought, “Oh, finally, this could be an original song!”

    But the more I strummed it, I realized it was this Josh Rouse song. Hate that when that happens. You think you’ve come up with not only something original, but also something that is actually good, and then you realize it’s someone else’s.

    At least it got me interested in this song, which really I’d only heard a few times before. If it weren’t for Spotify, I don’t think I would have ever heard it. I didn’t realize there was so much material both on “The Best of the Rykodisc Years” and “The Smooth Sounds of Josh Rouse” that wasn’t on any of his previous official “albums” or EPs.

    Anyway, like I said, musically it’s easy. Just four chords: Dmaj7 – Amaj7 – Gmaj – E7. It begins on a Dmaj7, and the dominant riff of the song, both verse and chorus, is a back and forth between the Dmaj7 and Amaj7. The G-E change comes in every so often as a sort of “turn around” as they call it in the business.

    These are the kinds of songs I really encourage for beginning guitarists who need encouragement. They are easy enough to learn, but they’re also good and fun. They keeps you motivated to play. I remember when I was a teenager, I was going to quit guitar altogether.

    And then I found Bob Dylan. Those songs were easy enough to learn, but I knew they were good, and I loved playing them. It was that spark of fun that kept me at it.

    Oh, well, I’m going to get at memorizing these lyrics. I’m sure it’ll take a couple or even few days for them to “sink in.” I’ll have to come back to this post, to official mark that I’ve got them down.

  • Song of the Day: “Imaginary Girl” by The Silver Seas

    Actually I’ve learned a couple others since the last “Song of the Day”, but they both took a couple or three days for the lyrics to really sink into  the “officially” memorized zone, and by that time, like the irony of life itself, I sort of lose interest in them, and end up not blogging about them. But I really do need to put them down in a blog post, or something that tells my subconscious that “This song is official. You can put it in the books. I know it by heart, and I can play it live.”

    Anyway there are a ton of songs that I’ve learned in the past and I know at the present moment, say 75%. But I sort of need a spark to get me to actually learn it 100%.

    Here’s an example of such a spark: I was watching the video of Daniel Tashian’s “I’m the One” song, and I was learning the chords, and writing down the lyrics. I was getting it down, but I was getting a little depressed because I actually couldn’t sing the Chorus. The high notes. That was discouraging. I’d always thought I could imitate Daniel’s voice pretty well. I hate to make excuses, but it could be that he just knows how to do “Falsetto” and I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know. Or maybe its just a bad day for my voice. Anyway that discouraged me from blogging about that song today at least. I will still learn that song and get it down 100% even if I can’t ever play it live, because it’s just such a good song.

    Oh, I forgot about the spark. When I was watching that video, I noticed in the recommended videos a video of the lyrics of the Silver Seas song, “Imaginary Girl” from their 2nd album. That was one of those “75%” songs for me. And I knew I could sing it pretty well. Also, I knew there was one or two little pieces of lyrics for that song, that I wasn’t sure about, and it looked like this video had them right. So that was all the spark I needed. I’ll post that video below. I’ve gone through the song 3 or 4 times now on the live P.A. system, and I feel like I’ve got it down now, that I can put it in the “100% Club.”

    I’ll probably post a video of me playing it live at some point. Until then, if you’re reading this and you would like to know the chords, let me know, and that might be the “Spark” I need to publish those.