I thought I’d kick off this series of blogs about what I do with possibly my favourite ‘job’ within Rob and Kal – providing vocal harmonies.  Within our music, my harmonies range from something subtle on tracks like The Island Without a Name and Can’t Help Me Now to something very clear cut and almost separate on Vedere.

What is a vocal harmony?

Well as the name suggests, a vocal harmony occues when two or more voices, that compliment one another, sing simultaneously  – pedants, see wikipedia…

It’s something that’s not really talked about within mainstream music, but if you listen to nearly every track in the charts for example, it will have vocal harmonies – be they simply the same vocal sung by the same artists, or another member of the band chipping in on a different set of notes.

The obscure nature of vocal harmonies means it’s fun to cite influences.  It allows me to mention major artists and bring you another talent that these guys have, that you may not have associated with them, or their image.

I remember the first time I really noticed or cared about a vocal harmony.  I was at Rob’s house with a few friends and it was the night before our last ever day of school.  We were waiting for the early hours of the morning to come so we could go to the school and set up some pranks for the next day.  To pass the time we found ourselves watching an Oasis tour DVD.  Listening to a rendition of Stand By Me, at first I wondered why Liam Gallagher’s voice suddenly had this extra power and sounded so much better at certain times during the chorus and second verse.  Then as I listened more closely I realised that Noel was singing a harmony, to great effect.  I have tracked down an acoustic version of the song on Youtube to illustrate that more clearly.  Give it a listen:

As well as add power to a vocal, a harmony will also emphasise a line for a songwriter, Noel has also used vocal harmonies here in the second voice to create a bit of variation.  The verses, one with just Liam singing and one softened by a Noel harmony are now different, giving the song a dynamic, as it is building from start to final chorus, even with just a guitar, two vocals…and a man sitting by a swimming pool on tambourine!

The way I see it, the other use of vocal harmonies or should I say the main use of them, is when they are the focal point.  Perhaps Rob and Kal doesn”t have a song like this yet, although I’d say the closest we have is in the chorus if All I Ever Wanted. A tight harmony is one of the most beautiful things on the ear, and that’s why we all enjoy a barbershop quartet.  Don’t think you do? Well each generation has had it’s edition of a vocal quartet or group. Motown fans need look no further than the Supremes, while those raised on 90s teen pop may enjoy listening to The Backstreet Boys – every genre has them, or I assume they do – I have yet to scope out death metal!!

My personal iteration of the vocal group is Boyz II men.  Listen to this completely acapella version of their biggest hit End of the Road.  I say totally because if I didn’t know it myself, I’d swear they were singing with a full band – they’re not:

Who are the biggest band in the world?  I’ll leave you all to argue that, but one of the front running contenders (at least), who are gracing the Glastonbury stage this summer when I go are U2.  And leaving religious beliefs aside, if God does exist, the gospel choir and the beautiful harmonies it creates would be his music.  Listen here to Bono belt out U2‘s classic I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For with The New Voices of Freedom gospel choir from their Rattle and Hum tour:

To wrap up, I urge you to listen closely to any of the music in your ‘record collection’; to any of the artists you particularly like; to even those who you don’t care for so much.  They’re all at it – vocal harmonies give music an added dimension, they give it a polish and more emotion at the same time.

Leaving all of these possibly pretentious adjectives aside, to me, vocal harmonies make music sound good.

In this blog I’ll be discussing what happens when you already have the lyrics before you’ve written the music. It may seem like something usual, trivial even, but as I mentioned in All I Ever Wanted – The Story So Far, lyrics are something I consider once I have a large chunk of the music sorted.  To do it the other way around produces something different.

To explain how things work the ‘other way round’ (with the lyrics coming first), I wanted an example – a song where this had been the case – and here it is:  The Island Without a Name.

Rob wrote lyrics to a song of the same name, a long time ago – BRK (Before Rob and Kal) and I suppose it reinforces the idea that we usually write lyrics to music and not the other way around.  The song formerly known as Island was a completely different song might I add and the lyrics that we’ve ‘air lifted’ now form the verses of the song you see here, a song for which we didn’t come up with the basic musical idea until around a year ago.  Four simple chords.

When you write a song, on an acoustic guitar, piano or even with just bass notes, as in this case, you don’t know the direction the song will take.  What I mean by that is,  no matter what melodies or chords you start with you can go in any direction emotionally.  Do you want the song to sound cheerful? Eerie? Depressing (some people like that!)? It’s up to the the song writer, and in the case of our Mubla 2.0 project, it’s up to you.  :)

In my experience, when we’ve written songs, Rob and I have started with the music, developed it to a certain level and then added lyrics.  The words and the theme have been heavily influenced by the music we had to start with and while this might not be the case for other ‘artists’ out there, it’s how we do it!

So in the case of The Island Without a Name, Rob already had a set of lyrics, that he had used for a different song.  (Perhaps if we ask him nicely enough, he’ll post the midi version of the song formerly known as Island!)  With this set of lyrics came a set of emotions and a theme that we had to mirror when we developed the song.

The words refer to a break up.  An angry one at that.  ’You thought I’d be upset, but I’m not!’  And with that said, something that sums up my whole point is the ending of the song.  You know the bit I’m talking about, right?  Listen to version 4, and it’s where the electric guitar comes in.  Rob added that part to the structure of the song not long before we recorded version 1, to give it a resurgent feeling which really suits what the song is about.

We had some lyrics and a mood.  We then brought in a musical idea, and fleshed it out with the feeling of the lyrics.  You provide your comments that we work on, and Dave and Matt (soon!) come in and add their expertise. As I say it’s not the way we usually do it, but maybe with how well Island is turning out, it’s something we should do more often. ‘Writing lyrics to poetry’ has a nice ring to it. Let us know.

All I Ever Wanted is the epitome of a Rob and Kal song.  It may not be totally there yet as a sound – hey, it’s not my favourite of the 6 in the songs section – but the way it has developed is a great example of how Rob and I write music.

1) Chord Progression

The first step is for one of us to come up with a chord progression.  For All I Ever Wanted, it was me.  I remember randomly playing around with the guitar in my room at university and hearing the chords.  Rob and I were in different cities at the time, so I recorded the chords using a cheap computer microphone and sent the audio over to him.

2) “Making a song of it”

The next step is making a song of it.  When we collaborate, this is Rob’s domain.  He’ll take the chord progression and play around with it, adding the structure to it that makes it feel like a song rather than a group of chords.  With All I Ever Wanted, I thought nothing would come of the chord progression, having just sent the chords over because that was something we did, but when we got back home after uni, Rob had created a song.

Each step of the process moves the song on, so when I heard the song, I was able to hear additions I hadn’t heard before when I was just playing a cycle of three chords. Rob had used the chord progression to make a verse and chorus, and had made up a bridge from scratch – when I heard the arrangement, I added a pre-chorus and without using any more technical language(!) that pretty much got the basics of the song to where it is today.

3) Lyrics

In the process of creating a song structure, Rob will usually add lyrics.  I assume that at first it helps him feel where the song should go and what new parts would work, and then it forms part of the song, but that would be something you’d have to ask him – he won’t tell me his secrets!

4) Switching Instruments

During a creative process, it’s hard to come up with a scientific way of working.  This whole blog is just an example of an approach that has worked a few times, but many developments occur “by accident”.  This next step is an example of these accidents that we have now started to use.

Rob and I play both guitar and piano, and as is only natural, we each have different strengths on each instrument.  We use this to our advantage by learning potential song ideas on both instruments.  Then as we get used to playing it on both instruments we naturally come up with some additions that occur to us on the guitar and some that are easier on the piano.  This step keeps on cycling around until we know all of the additions and extras on both instruments and so it continues.

This was a significant step for All I Ever Wanted.  As you can tell, this song idea stayed a song idea for a long time because we were unable to get it to sound right.  It involved a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between guitar and piano – you can even see that happening really recently as version 1 was piano based and version 2 is guitar based, which we think sounds better.

5)  Record

Next step, you guessed it, we record the song idea in the studio.  It’s hard to accept, but at this stage, what we record may not please us, but it will allow us to draw on our most powerful resource…

6) YOU!

As soon as we’ve recorded the tracks, we put them up in our Songs Section where you give your thoughts.  This really is the bit that helps us, be it to suggest radical changes, or just to polish off a song at the end of the creative process – it’s great to get other perspectives on the music.

With All I Ever Wanted, we definitely responded to comments that the songs sounded too samey, by basing it around the acoustic guitar, and we’re glad you like the harmonies in the song, but we want more of your views.  Tell us what you think and rate everything about the song with out new 5 star rating system – that way, we can get a feel for what works and what doesn’t and maybe you’ll come up with that idea that we didn’t think of that fits the song perfectly.

I was speaking to a friend who I had not seen for a while.  She’d been on the site, as most of my friends have been coerced to, but as I hadn’t seen her, I hadn’t introduced it to her like I would most people I know.  For me, this is a nightmare, because it leaves me unable to ‘help them shape their view’ shall I say!  What happened though was really useful, because it got me thinking.

Anita said, “OK, so you’ve got these song ideas and you develop those, but how did you get to that stage?”  And she’s right of course, because we haven’t covered that have we? So from now on I’m going to endeavour to describe it to you. What happens first?

Lyrics

Anita actually mentioned lyrics when she asked me about how I came up with songs.  What did I think up first – lyrics or the music?  Good question.  The answer is, I don’t know.  Both come to me at different times, and when I come up with one it doesn’t come neatly packaged with the other.

Let’s take lyrics, hey, I’ve titled this lyrics already so I’m kinda duty bound.  Lyrics can come at any time.  Generally something really really good or really really bad happens and when I have some time to myself (generally when I’m travelling), I get my phone out and write a text about it. Save, drafts, come back to it later. I don’t try and make it rhyme – if that happens, it comes later.  I just write whatever comes to me to get it out and ‘bottle it up’ in words.  A lot of the time it’s more for healing than for anything I’ll actually use, but I find that trying to force words onto a page, sitting a piano, and making them rhyme always sounds emotionless.

Maybe I haven’t been to Brit school and don’t understand, but for me, lyrics are about what you feel at a particular time, not what you can brainstorm!  With that said, my lyrics aren’t particularly abundant on the songs we have so far.  In fact, they only appear in one chorus – I Wanna Know.

I wanna know if she knows,
I wanna know if she cares,
I wanna know if she’s playing,
I wanna know if she’s there.

I first came up with these lyrics over a year ago.  I wrote them because I’d recently met someone and I couldn’t figure them out.  They seemed to have a certain way about them, that I didn’t particularly like.  The question was, did they know that they were doing it? And if they did, did they care?  Obviously it annoyed me at the time.  I can still feel that, everytime Rob or I sing those lines. It’s almost like having a picture, documenting a particular feeling I had.

Testimant to this, I feel, is the fact that in recording 1 and even in recording 2 of I Wanna Know, when Rob sings these lyrics in the chorus, it changes the feel of the song completely.  From a verse that is a little eerie and fairly contained, emerges a much more aggressive feeling.  Someone shouting for answers, which is exactly what I felt at the time.

On what I think is definitely a related note, and to definitely muddy the waters of what comes first, the music or the lyrics, I had already worked out the tune for the chorus along with the chords before Rob and I started to work together on it.  If I’d written those lyrics down, showed them to Rob and he’d thought, I know I’ll put them in a song, here, they might have lost their original meaning in the swapping of ideas.  But with me writing the music and already singing the chorus, the original feeling stayed intact.

I tell you what!  I’ve got a few ideas for lyrics on the go at the moment.  Let me get back to you with them very soon and we can see where they go and it will really demonstrate the whole process I’ve tried to describe above. Stay tuned, Lyrics II coming soon!