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Rewritable Song Lyrics
JimCricket writes "A new kind of record company, Tailored Music Group, is selling user-customizable songs. Each song is distributed in its 'default' (generic) form, and the customer can change any (or all) of the lyrics. For a few hundred bucks, the original indie musician will re-work the song with the custom lyrics. Neat idea."
I wouldn't be all that surprised if changes like that were requested, though I'm sure there's an approval process for the custom lyrics. I doubt they're going to perform just any old stuff.
Like your other reply said, another major group that would be interested is advertisers, but I wouldn't be surprised if changes that advertised products would be denied as well to keep the song at least semi-legitimate.
Seems that some outfit in Nashville had a similar idea back in the 80's
http://www.songpoemmusic.com/trubee.htm
"I do know they can smell assembly line romance from a mile away" Too true, but I dare you to do nothing on the conveyor belt that is valentines day. Soon it may well be, roses, chocolate, dinner AND a song.
The problem with that stuff (cool as it is) it that it's easy to get lost in all the technology, and lose sight of what you're after. If you're a real geek, you've probably already got at least one musical instrument you can play - guitar, piano, zither... Whatever. Doing it yourself will be a lot more impressive than paying some dude to do it for you. I taught myself how to play a handful of instruments, and I'm pretty much the klutziest guy I know. Have a look at something like How to Play the Piano Despite Years of Lessons for a good book that demystifies making music.
Here's a quick lesson: if you've got access to a piano, you'll notice that the black keys are grouped in a repeating pattern of 3 and 2. The scale of notes (starting with the leftmost of the 3 black keys) spells out a F# major pentatonic scale (F# G# A# C# D#). It's the same scale that windchimes are tuned to - play those keys, and you won't hit a bad note. (For those curious, it's a "gapped" scale, with the notes B and F (technically E#) removed, which gets of the potential dissonance between the notes A# and B and F and F#. Play the F# with your left hand, and then noodle around on the black keys with your right hand. Change the note your left hand plays for variety (the progression F#, B, C# is particularly nice) and you've got it made. This isn't rocket science.
If music's not your gig, write a poem, or make a drawing, or whatever. Just make it honest. When my wife (girlfriend at the time) and I were broken up, she came over one day and snuck a look into my desk, and found a bunch of poems I had written about how miserable I was feeling without her. (No, I hadn't planned on her ever reading them - I'm pretty damned shy. Why do you think I'm posting as an Anonymous Coward?)
Anyway, she had already heard from me how I felt, but it wasn't until she actually read my private stuff for herself that she believed it.
It's not the slickness of the production, or the heartfelt sound of the singer's voice that's going to win her over. It's putting a chunk of your heart on the line, and doing something that's authentically you. (Unfortunately, that doesn't typically include writing her some elegant code).
A simple way of thinking about how chords are built is that they use the pitch collection, but they skip over every other note. So if you started with a C, you'd skip the D, use the E, skip the F, and use the G. So a C chord from the C Major scale consists of the pitches {C,E,G}. You could continue to add pitches ({C,E,G,B} is a C Major 7th, {C,E,G,B,D} is a C Major 9th), but past three pitches, you start adding dissonant pitches to the chords, and things get a bit complex.
In the key of C Major, you have 7 possible "basic" chords, one for each note in the scale:
- C Major {C,E,G}
- D Minor {D,F,A}
- E Minor {E,G,B}
- F Major {F,A,C}
- G Major {G,B,D}
- A Minor {A,C,E}
- B Diminished {B,D,F}
The names of the chords (Major, Minor, Diminished) refer to the quality of the chords. Play them on your piano, and you'll hear them.Music Theory 1A says that, given a melody pitch X, you can find a possible harmony by selecting a chord that contains that pitch. Each pitch can be harmonized by one of three chords - a chord with the pitch in the first note {X,?,?}, in the second note of the chord {?,X,?) or the third note of the chord {?,?,X}:
Looking at the list, you can see that you've got lots of options for harmonizing the melody. (Constraints like harmonic movement (i.e. what chord changes sound less random than others) come into play, but I'll ignore those for the movement and move on...
All right, we're almost there. There are lots of options, but notice that if we chose to only use the three major chords (C Major, F Major, G Major), we'd be able to harmonize things just fine, with no gaps in coverage:
- C: C Major {C,E,G}, and F Major {F,A,C}
- D: G Major {G,B,D}
- E: C Major {C,E,G}
- F: F Major {F,A,C}
- G: G Major {G,B,D}, and C Major {C,E,G}
- A: F Major {F,A,C}
- B: G Major {G,B,D}
Those minor chords can be replaced with their relative majors - the relative major of A Minor {A,C,E} is C Major {C,E,G}. Note that they share two pitches in common, so your typical listener isn't going to hear much difference.The point of all this is that "three chords" isn't nearly as limiting as people make it out to be. It's sufficient to get the job done (harmonically speaking) for most songs. (Jazz and other styles that depend on sophisticated harmonic dissonances notwithstanding).