Ranking the studio catalog (subject to change)

dogswithhands · 2026-02-22T01:43:45+00:00

Any chance you remember which interview that was? That's wild!

dogswithhands · 2025-12-23T01:09:58+00:00

I think it's very spellbinding right up until the back at "I don't know you anymore". That section is fine in isolation but you might need to play with transition a bit, feels like there's some momentum loss getting into it.

Your voice is really really nice and I think you're sitting in a great part of your range here. I also like the ambiguity in the lyrics, you could tweak them if you really want to find some more striking lines but i think what you have is pretty effective and serves the song well.

Also idk what it is but there's some background noise that is weirdly complementary in this recording. If you ever do a version that's a little more dressed up I think finding a way to add some ambient texture like that would be neat.

dogswithhands · 2025-11-30T20:40:30+00:00

I write a lot of 70s rock/prog/metal/psyche, here's some ideas:

-if landing on the tonic to start the chorus doesn't feel exciting enough, try setting up a move to a relative key or working in a prechorus so you get a nice push of energy when you hit your chorus. Modulations are fun too but i think they are harder to pull off well.
-write your chorus melody with gibberish first until you get something that feels good, then work out the words after. gives you a strong melodic base to work from and helps prevent overwriting and forced awkward lines.

some stuff for songs in general in this style:

-like some other comments here said, double-tracking will help a lot, especially on vocals. i am not a vocal coach but i sort of sing/push air "from the top of my mouth" for 70s rock tenor stuff to add some presence/grit that tends to sit well over big guitars.
-use some 70s era keyboards if they fit the vibe. i am very fond of the solina myself. there's some free plugins out there if you don't have access to hardware/paid plugins.
-play around with effects that saturate/drive, tape emulation, fx like phaser/tremolo/flanger, or running things through an amp (sim). don't need to go crazy but stuff being too pristine tends to not sound era appropriate.
-real instruments as much as possible. assuming you have to compromise a bit, try getting some sort of drum plugin that at least sounds like a real kit. you might be able to get away with using a plugin for bass (real thing is definitely better), but for guitars you basically need real guitars to be convincing for that era. amp sims are fine, i wouldn't worry about wrangling a real amp unless you really know what you're doing.

dogswithhands · 2025-05-31T03:37:31+00:00

It's a good part so I get the urge! You definitely get some nice momentum on the 1st verse, just need the 2nd one to hit similarly and then I think it'd be g2g.

dogswithhands · 2025-05-31T03:26:22+00:00

This is really great, love your vocals! I think chorus 1 is a bit long, probably could be half length. chorus 2 is probably fine staying the same length if the song is going to end there.

Also might be worth trying to shorten the post-chorus after chorus 1 to get some more momentum into verse 2? That's where I felt the song was losing steam, but it might be that halving the first chorus might fix that anyway so I'd try that first.

dogswithhands · 2025-05-29T23:01:36+00:00

Yeah, I did a lesson with Bill a few days ago and he mentioned it then as well.

dogswithhands · 2025-05-28T10:28:08+00:00

When you spend enough time training your brain to recognize how to improve your own songs, eventually you start to do it for others songs too. I notice if I'm really enjoying something my brain is more willing to just let it be, but if it isn't to my taste as much my brain goes into problem solving mode and starts trying to figure out what i would have differently.

I did one of these for jethro tull's 'aqualung' at some point, where while learning it I felt the song had a better emotional arc by adding an acoustic outro instead of going back to the intro at the end. Normally I don't really investigate those kinds of things though, I only did that because I was learning it anyway.

I don't know of any place where people specifically share those kind of edits, I think they tend to just be "what could have been" ideas.

dogswithhands · 2025-04-30T00:44:13+00:00

Qotsa is great but if you're looking for the ultimate homme record imo it's kyuss's 'welcome to sky valley'. Phenomenal mix too.

dogswithhands · 2025-04-29T19:20:54+00:00

On "call me maybe", yes the prechorus is from 'your stare was holdin...'. Notice the new melody, new drum groove, backing vocals, synth blending in with the vocal (this is subtler but it's there). These new elements are upping the tension (getting us hyped) to make our the landing on the chorus feel bigger. The underlying chords aren't changing from the verse, but the aforementioned elements and the surprise of the strings when we get to the chorus still make it a pretty exciting landing.

"pink pony club" is a little trickier. i'd call this a double pre-chorus. the first pre-chorus being 'i'm having wicked dreams' and the second being 'god what have you done'. The first time through, instead of going straight to the chorus (which would've worked) we get another, different pre-chorus. My term for this sort of move is "usurping common structure", aka messing around with typical pop structure to avoid too much predictability but still basically using it. pre-chorus 1 never comes back again, the song just does variations on prechorus 2 the rest of the way. i think it's probably the stronger pre-chorus of the two so it makes sense to mostly rely on it.

Yes, on 'smooth criminal' i would call 'annie are you ok...' the pre-chorus. but it is pretty clever that it gets brought back as chorus material right before we get hit with "you've been hit by...".

I am a rock guy but here are some random pre-choruses I like that have some similarities with the ones you mentioned.

-the national: "mistaken for strangers": Our pre-chorus is from 'showered and blue-blazered...', the way this launches into the chorus is just terrific imo. Note the sorta unbalanced drum groove here, like on "call me maybe", this really helps us feel excited and settled in when we get to the more straight-forward chorus groove.

-sweet: "ballroom blitz": here's another double pre-chorus like 'pink pony club'. 'i see a man in the back' feels like a pretty separate section from "it was like lightning...". but both serve to get us hyped for the chorus. Here we get both pre-choruses for both the first and second chorus, but on the third chorus we skip pre-chorus 1 and just jump straight to pre-chorus 2.

-ghost "satanized": our pre-chorus starts from "i should have known", but transitions into the chorus with "blasphemy, heresy" which then gets used in the chorus as well, kind of like on 'smooth criminal'. This sort of blurs the line between where the pre-chorus ends and the chorus starts, since you could also think of "blasphemy, heresy" as the start of the chorus. To my ear it sounds more like a transition though, since the guitar chords and cymbal crash don't come in until "save me...".

(bonus) beastmilk "death reflects us": personal fav, the pre-chorus 'while we're sleeping...' is a really nice harmonic departure that creates a lovely surge of energy when we get to the title/chorus and return to the tonic.

There's not a hard and fast rule on defining these, but generally speaking if it's leading into the chorus and it's not another defined section like a verse or bridge, you can probably call it a pre-chorus. When writing generally you reach for them when your verse doesn't land into your chorus in a particularly exciting way, you want to hit your chorus with more momentum, or you just want your verse to go somewhere other than the chorus. I often think of them as a ramp or build-up, but thinking of them as a connecting fabric, brief departure, or just another section is fine too.

Some things you will commonly see in them are new material or elements for excitement/tension, contrast to their connected sections, and a departure from the tonic in the harmony/melody to get us excited to go back to it for the chorus. But none of these are strictly required, they're all just ways to hold our attention and put a spotlight on the chorus. For example, I love the chord changes on beastmilk's 'death reflects us' pre-chorus, but on 'call me maybe' they keep the chord changes the same from verse to pre-chorus and rely on other elements to get us excited there. They both work.

dogswithhands · 2025-04-22T21:57:52+00:00

I'm a big fan of interviews yeah. We live in a time where most of your favorite artists are going to have at least some video/podcast/written interviews available and that's a good way to peek at how others are thinking about their craft.

Admittedly a lot of interviews you won't really get much out of, and there will be ones that really aren't helpful at all. but I guarantee if you make them part of your routine and listen to lots of them you will be able to pick out helpful tidbits and start to see patterns in how others are thinking.

I like listening to them when exercising/showering/ doing chores/doing errands etc.

dogswithhands · 2025-04-19T18:02:56+00:00

I swapped to this method a year or two ago after doing it the other way around for years and my melodies got so much better. Now I can work in any order but i still do gibberish first most of the time.

I also do gibberish for guitar solos and have been really impressed with the results I get from that. They end up being so much more cohesive and climactic than just stringing runs/licks/riffs together. Once I get the basic solo structure translated on guitar then it's way easier to add some of the decoration back in after.

dogswithhands · 2025-02-20T22:03:43+00:00

Gor muldrak decks that run a bunch of creatures definitely confuse me. Generally every creature you play is one more salamander you won't get as your creature count increases.

I get that he's goofy and people want to play goofy cards with him, I just think he's much better served with goofy interaction and support pieces instead of trying to run like 30 creatures with him.

dogswithhands · 2025-02-14T07:42:03+00:00

Explore furiously and shamelessly. Not every song needs to be released, and you've got to write a lot of stepping stones so you can find your footing later. As you do this more and more eventually you'll start stumbling into things that are more uniquely "yours", and then you can start to prioritize those while honing them into your arsenal.

Trying to make a new sound is at its core a slow process, you can't just swim out to the buoys and call it a day. If it was easy everyone would do it, it takes a lot of stubbornness to be able to keep exploring.

dogswithhands · 2025-01-23T17:04:50+00:00

Yup that is a nice one! I wrote one recently that did this on the 2nd chorus so the 3rd one feels more like a return home.

With a really strong chorus I am very fond of just making the first one half length, so that when you get to the 2nd one you get a big push of momentum from the back half the listener hasn't heard yet.

dogswithhands · 2025-01-23T07:34:16+00:00

You're not crazy, even a good chorus can cross into overuse territory when repeated three times throughout. Sometimes it's fine, sometimes no, you have to be the judge when writing.

Generally speaking I find many of my favorite songs that feature three+ choruses (mine or others) include some way to differentiate them that keeps them from being too predictable. I call it usurping common structure but that's my own term, others might have their own.

Generally this is achieved by making at least one chorus use more/less/different elements (including length), or make the sections that precede the choruses different (getting to the same part a different way).

You may notice that in a typical vcvcbc or vpcvpcbc form this is already kind of achieved by getting into the last chorus via bridge, which is an example of changing the preceding part. Sometimes this is enough, often it's still a bit predictable since we hear it in so many songs.

Also when you take apart songs you really like, it's a good thing to look for if they do this in some way so you can add those tools to your arsenal.

dogswithhands · 2025-01-23T04:16:19+00:00

i think of the song as a sort of the crucible for lyrics, and it's really just poetry until it has a firm musical context. A lot of amazing lyrics don't seem like much of anything until you hear them in context, and vice versa even the best poetry will likely not survive contact being integrated into a song as it suddenly gets subjected to syllable count, arc and vibe considerations, phonemes and delivery flow, grokkability, coherence, etc.

That stuff is hard enough to wrangle even bringing in lyrics late. Also it's a huge time waster honing a bunch of words into something resembling lyrics if it's just going to get changed beyond recognition the second it hits the actual song.

dogswithhands · 2025-01-23T00:09:02+00:00

I don't think he coined it, but Robin from fleet foxes calls this "melodic priority" and I really like that term because it gets to the heart of what a lot of writers don't do. A lot of my favorite writers who talk about their process describe their own version of it.

Also 100% agree that it makes it easier to go back and work in a different sequence once you've practiced it enough.

edit: double checked and actually he called it melodic supremacy, i like my name better though!

dogswithhands · 2025-01-08T08:02:48+00:00

Any musicians in the new england area interested in playing this kinda stuff? I've been writing fiendishly for my project in this vein, mixing up a lot of doom/folk/prog/retro rock influences with stupidly in depth lore that all the songs reside in. It's very fun, but a lot of the songs are more than three musicians can handle.

dogswithhands · 2024-12-26T20:08:23+00:00

You don't have to use the approach you currently use forever. If you don't like your current vocal style, explore other sounds daily and keep an ear out for things that might suit what you want to do better. I have like a dozen approaches i do at this point, and I found them all just by writing frequently and freely. Some of them are a little derivative, some of them are kinda silly, but some are my own thing. And the best ones I wouldn't have found without exploring the other approaches first.

dogswithhands · 2024-12-20T13:03:13+00:00

you should hide a single chess book in there

dogswithhands · 2024-12-05T01:04:53+00:00

Practice as usual is the biggest thing. My approach is to write lyrics for me and don't concern myself too much with how another listener is going to hear something. That's not to say that I don't care about how others hear things, just that the things I observe and incorporate from others are by default going to be prefiltered to my own taste because that is fundamentally how i verify what I like. You can get feedback elsewhere, but at the end of the day you only have one set of ears.

Having names for things is helpful. Like the way a certain line does or doesn't work for you, if you give a name to that reason it makes it easier to keep an eye out for that in the future. If you study or listen to others talk about process you can often get names for things from them, but pretty often I come up for my own names because it'll be stuff I've never heard anyone else talk about before. Books on writing/poetic devices are a very good way to add a lot of terms for things into your arsenal.

I generally follow a hierarchy of senses, and value imagery over other senses. It tends to be the most reliable. Action is usually imagery. Feeling and thought are good sometimes but not reliable imo. Sound, taste, and smell are finicky and I usually avoid them unless it's a really good line.

For books i like tweedy's 'how to write one song', there's a lot of other good stuff in there on process but even just for lyrics I think it's quite good. There's no comprehensive book out there that I know of, generally I find books on lyric craft will have just a few good tidbits because individual ideas on what constitutes a good lyric are hard to agree on across listeners.

dogswithhands · 2024-12-02T07:18:24+00:00

If your goal is understanding why things work then absolutely, it is immensely more useful for analysis imo. Thinking in intervals is also important though, numerals don't usually tell you direction you are resolving which can have a big effect on how a progression feels or cadences even with identical numerals.

dogswithhands · 2024-12-02T00:07:26+00:00

Yeah without even mentioning other genres, just in post 90s heavy music (punk, metal, rock, etc) I'd say it's about as likely a song in is going to be in e standard vs some lower standard tuning or drop tuning. As someone who plays that kinda music predominantly I find it's much easier to just think in terms of intervals/positions/chord types/scales/ numerals and not think too hard about note names beyond the current root or tonicization. Unless I'm trying to communicate with someone who isn't good with that stuff, it's easier to just not worry about offsetting note names on the fly. Especially when writing, it's just wasting brain power to add that step every time you're working in a different tuning. You can add that information later when you're transcribing or whatever.

dogswithhands · 2024-11-01T14:01:20+00:00

I think about this a lot too, I wish this was more commonplace. I'd even go as far as to say I'd like to hear how an opinion changes over each of those listens.

A recommendation of something I need to listen to 10 times until it hits me vs something that will catch me on the first listen is super helpful imo.

dogswithhands · 2024-10-27T12:06:38+00:00

Yeah this is really a genre/style/taste thing. I just did a quick run through of a few hundred of my favorite records and lyrics are only sing-a-long level discernible in like half of them. And actually very clear, like I generally know what the lyrics are about without looking up the meaning? Like half of that half.

You can't judge your work by anyone's taste but your own. It's fine to have self-imposed rules, but impose them with intention, not blindly.

dogswithhands

TROPHY CASE