#songcon

What a great weekend!

This weekend was the first of hopefully many more song writing weekends at The Black Bull, Birstall. The event was organised by Pete Long of the Acoustic Circus. Pete has been putting on great open mic nights and acoustic showcase nights for some time now and they are always a great laugh and carry the tag line create together. (A beautiful philosophy) Anyhow the event got under way on Saturday afternoon and over the course of the weekend a good 20 people came by to either input something, listen or just enjoy the song writing process that was taking place. The first thing I attended to was a quick tag to carry the event on Twitter. #songcon was used and I started by asking the Twitter followers what made a great song? There were some great answers but as I was already more than aware this is one of the un-answerable questions in music. Here are a couple.

@deanince said "Lyrics that mean something, and guitar chords that aren't just basic open chords."

@missrock2 said "good old fashioned emotion..#love.."

As the weekend went on we all talked so much about our process of writing songs and how each of us varied in our routines. I for example became aware that I usually finish one song at a time where as Pete Long had at least 6 on the go. We were all learning and taking ideas from each other. Highlights for me were definitely watching Reedy Zined of the acoustic duo Magpie work. He really has an ear for melody and his lyric writing straight fired towards the collective events of the day, very positive and refreshing. Late on the Saturday afternoon we all went round taking it in turns to play one of our songs and then let the others ask questions and scrutinise them. This was really enjoyable, just being able to talk about a song you have written gives it a new depth. Another highlight was writing a song as a collective with Pete Long, it was very late on the Saturday evening and everyone was having a few drinks and being merry. The resulting song basically put Rihanna's S&M to shame for sexual content. Sure Pete will have this one perfected soon. The big finale to the weekend was everyone sitting together and writing a brand new song. Zak Robinson, Pete Long, Reedy Zined and David Chapman sat down and came up with some initial chords and lyrics whilst myself, Tasha McClymont and Carl Thornton all chipped in with additional guitar, percussion and what ever else we could. Even Trigg a local at the pub who's just starting out playing guitar, never mind song writing was getting fired in to making the lyrics flow better. You can listen to this now on Soundcloud or on this Tumblr post.

All in all the weekend was a complete success and I'm really looking forward to the next one. I came away learning a lot about the way I write songs and also a lot of things I would like to put in to my song writing practice. You cant ask for more than that.