Our Songwriting Experience at the Beehouse brings together a wide variety of customers. Here are some typical customer approaches (although nothing is typical!)
A. This 35 year old lady songwriter could sing, but played no musical instruments. For the past fifteen years she had been singing tunes into a cassette player and keeping the lyrics. Although a shy performer, when we listened to her cassette recording we realised straight away that she was a very unusual talent - all the recording were in tune, although they had been sung without accompaniment, and it was possible to play an accompaniment directly to the recordings. This made our job wonderfully straightforward - with a few edits we were able to develop her initial idea into a fully fledged song with her own beautifully accurate vocals and overlaid vocals, and a simple piano, bass drums type backing.
B. Another songwriter, a man in his thirties, had only a few sketchy lyrics, a good singing voice, and a clear idea of what he wanted his songs to express. Working again from piano, we elicited some tunes from him and harmonised them, later adding an instrumental middle eight section, and again bringing the song to life, with soft piano sounds and cello backing.
C. A third young woman arrived with a very calm personality, saying she would like to sing a grunge track and make it angry.... Our studio engineer sat with her and played electric guitar riffs for half an hour until she picked up on a tune, lyrics...and a very angry song was born...!
D. This songwriter was a gentleman in his late sixties who wanted to record a disco track. he had had the lyrics in his head for many years, and wrote them down for us. As he did not have a strong singing voice, we brought in a session singer to put down the final version, and he left with a fully produced song cut to CD.
Customers sometimes ask us about the rights on the songs we help them to produce during a songwriter experience. It's very simple. When the songs are produced in the studio, they are effectively copyrighted at the time of production. Whichever parts are written by the artist belong to them and whichever are added by the studio would belong to us. If you should subsequently go on and release your track, the studio would usually have a 50% claim to royalties if it had been involved in developing harmonies, tunes, or lyrics.
As you can see from our range of customers, this is one of our favourite types of recording studio experience at the Beehouse, as it takes us through the whole range of diverse genres and keeps us developing new techniques for song production with our creative clientele. We hope to be shortly setting up a site where new songs can be showcased, and will be adding this in as a feature of our experiences during the coming year. Keep 'em coming!
A. This 35 year old lady songwriter could sing, but played no musical instruments. For the past fifteen years she had been singing tunes into a cassette player and keeping the lyrics. Although a shy performer, when we listened to her cassette recording we realised straight away that she was a very unusual talent - all the recording were in tune, although they had been sung without accompaniment, and it was possible to play an accompaniment directly to the recordings. This made our job wonderfully straightforward - with a few edits we were able to develop her initial idea into a fully fledged song with her own beautifully accurate vocals and overlaid vocals, and a simple piano, bass drums type backing.
B. Another songwriter, a man in his thirties, had only a few sketchy lyrics, a good singing voice, and a clear idea of what he wanted his songs to express. Working again from piano, we elicited some tunes from him and harmonised them, later adding an instrumental middle eight section, and again bringing the song to life, with soft piano sounds and cello backing.
C. A third young woman arrived with a very calm personality, saying she would like to sing a grunge track and make it angry.... Our studio engineer sat with her and played electric guitar riffs for half an hour until she picked up on a tune, lyrics...and a very angry song was born...!
D. This songwriter was a gentleman in his late sixties who wanted to record a disco track. he had had the lyrics in his head for many years, and wrote them down for us. As he did not have a strong singing voice, we brought in a session singer to put down the final version, and he left with a fully produced song cut to CD.
Customers sometimes ask us about the rights on the songs we help them to produce during a songwriter experience. It's very simple. When the songs are produced in the studio, they are effectively copyrighted at the time of production. Whichever parts are written by the artist belong to them and whichever are added by the studio would belong to us. If you should subsequently go on and release your track, the studio would usually have a 50% claim to royalties if it had been involved in developing harmonies, tunes, or lyrics.
As you can see from our range of customers, this is one of our favourite types of recording studio experience at the Beehouse, as it takes us through the whole range of diverse genres and keeps us developing new techniques for song production with our creative clientele. We hope to be shortly setting up a site where new songs can be showcased, and will be adding this in as a feature of our experiences during the coming year. Keep 'em coming!