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TLDR: finish your songs

November 30, 2022 · Beat Kitchen · Songwriting

Transcription of the video above

If you want to get better at finishing your songs, here’s the TL;DR. You’ve got to practice. You’ve got to practice finishing your songs.

For better or for worse, get them out the door. You’ll get better at it. it.

Video thumbnail: If you want to get better at finishing your songs, here’s the TL;DR.

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Recent Resident Gyms
- THEORY-GYM: We took Marvin Gaye's "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)" as a case study in how profound musical joy can emerge from radical simplicity — just three chords, the I, IV, and V in C major. The session dug into the harmonic texture underneath that simplicity: plagal cadences nested inside perfect ones, chord inversions described through figured-bass shorthand (6-4 and 6-3), and a piano technique called triad pairs where two chords alternate up and down the scale in shifting inversions. We also touched on how equal temperament creates a kind of constant low-level motion in tuning — and how that connects, philosophically, to the way harmony itself is never truly "still."
- OFFICE HOURS: Pro Tools import, Varun had questions about getting some files to line up in Pro Tools, we made a new session, got the correct files imported, and then began editing and talked about keyboard short cuts in Pro Tools.
- PRODUCTION-GYM: Lateralus by tool
- EAR-TRAINING-GYM: Bass - the importance of the right notes, different rhythms, and the different timbres that you can get from the instrument - and how they all can influence how it works with the song.
- OFFICE HOURS: Dewi had an issue with creating AI stems in Logic and we were able to troubleshoot the issue with the file format. Talked with Alee about video editing in DaVinci
- PRODUCTION-GYM: David Bowie - Space oddity: Production, songwriting, and recording. We compared three different versions. The original and Demo from the late 60's, and the remade version from 1979.
- OFFICE HOURS: Worked through a one-on-one FL Studio session focused on chord voicings, register, and arrangement fundamentals. We diagnosed why the student's chords were sitting too low and muddy in the mix, corrected it through manual note transposition and chord inversion principles, and then built out a basic bass layer to fill the harmonic space we opened up. Along the way we covered the four core arrangement zones — rhythm, harmony, bass, and lead — and talked through how they function together in a beat.
- OFFICE HOURS: Went through a mix of Alee's and talked about arrangement, distribution of frequencies and lumping in mixes
- THEORY-GYM: We dug into Al Jarreau's "We're in This Love Together" as a live analysis vehicle, unpacking its deceptively simple harmonic language — predominantly plagal motion, super sus chords, and bass-line-driven pseudo-chord changes. From there we traced a sophisticated turnaround section that flirts with a Giant Steps-style modulation before resolving differently, and closed with a brief but rich look at vocal formant production and how great singers physically shape tone without needing the engineer to fix it.
- PRODUCTION-GYM: Breakdown of "Time Moves Slow" by BADBADNOTGOOD, production style, tempo push/pull, song structure, drum texture and keyboard sound
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