Episode 37
Co-write Your Way into the Music Business with Daphne Willis (Part 2)
NOTES:
“Songwriting is an art unto itself, not to be confused with performing” -Jo Safford
“Co-writing is the key to getting into the world of Music Sync and placements business” -Daphne Willis
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The 3 Ps to Co-Writing:
Prepared
Present
Proactive
(Do’s and Donuts/reflections)
Do make an extra effort to connect and lean on your PRO
Do Sign up for a PRO (both as an artist and as a publisher)
Don’t get sloppy with the organization of your songs
MLC is a must (not just a do)
Check out Daphne Willis at www.daphnewillis.com
Action:
Enter your email into the FINANCIAL PLANNER NEWSLETTER to your upper right! :)
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With this second half of our interview with Daphne Willis she will discuss what strategies and tools she feels are important for all of us songwriters to utilize and why it’s important to bug your PROs and push to get all you can out of their services.
00.00.15: Welcome to musicians tip jar where we talk about musicians and money, where we sound super smart by saying collaboration writing instead of CO writing, or is it cooperative writing? No, it's definitely collaboration. I'm your host, Chris Webb joined by my collaboration host and BFF, Dave Tamkin.
00.01.02: This episode, we're privileged to have the super talented Daphne Willis on to talk about getting the most out of songwriting, co writing and how to turn those songs into assets with placements and sync licensing. All that right after this.
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Welcome back. Everybody. This week's nonprofit is rootsmusicproject.com They believe in the power of music to make the world a better place. They empower artists audiences and venues to connect and create a thriving and inspiring local music scene. Connecting musicians venues and fans. I believe I already said that, but I'm saying it again. They're musicians venue owners and their fans music Chris, check out roots music project.com located right here in Boulder, Colorado
00.02:23: and make sure you rate subscribe to this podcast. Leave us a comment. Go to our website, check out all the resources and discounts that we have collected for you. And while you're there, sign up for our free weekly newsletter where we will connect you to other related articles and help keep you up on your financial side of the music business.
00.03.05: Well, today's quote comes from Hunter Hayes. "The rule of songwriting is this. Say what you want to say? Say it again and say it a different way. And then say it again.
00.03.22: Can you say that again? In a different way? Today's guest is Daphne Willis. Daphne Willis is described as strong, resilient, and passionate by B-sides and Badlands and a badass my killer and Hustler by pod dust. She's had placements on ESPN Empire, One Tree Hill for weddings in a funeral Samsung Spongebob Squarepants and the puppy bowl was Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart and she is still the hold music for the Royal Caribbean cruise line. She's amassed over 24 million views online and then launched her as a sought after speaker in the worlds of mental health addiction and trauma recovery. So let's set sail and cruise on into this interview.
00.04.13: So, my name is Daphne Willis. Dave, Chris and I all knew each other in Chicago. But I got my start in the music industry as an artist signed to a label called Vanguard records and I was signed there when I was 29. I was 19 or 20 and living in Chicago at the time. And at the time I was in school for something completely non music related and started going down to Nashville. What are the company the a&r guy that signed me up this label was in Nashville so he would have me come down there for like, label meetings and to start working with producers and songwriters down there. And it was there in Nashville that I actually first started co writing and really pursuing music on a career, you know, full time level and started to really see you know how to navigate this whole thing of having a career in music, whether you're trying to be a songwriter, an artist or a producer. So, as I kind of started to navigate, you know, through the CO writing scene in Nashville, it became apparent that it was very, very complicated and very messed up and difficult to difficult to understand.
Until you got to a certain level and you started to accumulate the experience and have the conversations with with certain people within the industry. So fast forward all the way to now I did two albums with Vanguard records, was independent for a while put I've put out a lot of albums independently as an artist. I've crowd funded them and funded them myself. I've had managers I've had agents, I've been signed to all kinds of different weird deals and situations. I was signed at Sony TV for a global publishing deal for four years and left last year. And now I'm in talks with a bunch of other more boutique labels for a publishing deal. I also do a lot of film and TV songwriting and production and that has all that is also something that I've developed over the last 12 years in addition to my artists career and have kind of found some interesting ways and little nuances that have helped me along the way to navigate a career in music and I feel really lucky to to have, you know gotten as far as I have it to be where I am because it is a very tricky industry to navigate both even just surely from a business standpoint, but definitely just being a creative and having to really tap into and like lean into my, you know, business, business skills and things that I've had to really develop over time. But I will say that if you if you do obviously we're all here so we're all very attentive to like where we're putting our intentions and our careers as creatives and like learning about what is going on. In the industry and how to do this. So you're already like 10,000 steps ahead of the game for a lot of people out there doing this. And yeah, so So basically, through all these experiences Fast forward to now I've found that I get I do a lot of CO writing sessions with you know, people who are younger at the entry level and I found that there's a lot of misinformation and there's a lot of information that isn't accessible. And it's not it's you can't really access it because there's no there's it's like this weird
00.08.53: it's this weird thing where within the industry like if you were co writing for years and years and years you would be more familiar with all of these little nuances and situations and industry standards. But until you get to like a certain point, you wouldn't have access to those conversations in those rooms. But if you're not, it's like this whole catch 22 thing. It's really crazy. I'm sure you guys know what I'm talking about giving an example. You Yes, um, for example. Like let's talk about the difference between publishing and masters say we're writing for sync and a co writing session. If I have a rap deal for my masters with a company and you have a publishing deal on your publishing side, if I wanted to put the entire master with my company and make the master a one stop, which is way smarter to do because they prefer to be have a faster clearance. You'd have to have your master free.
And you'd have to know the nuances between master and publishing and also be able to like navigate the actual like email chains and things like that and passing it around and these are things that like a lot of people think that they need a manager for and they really will give up a large percentage of doing that for but it's not really once you do it enough times. It's not that complicated and people that I know like that are my age at my level don't rely on their managers to navigate those conversations and therefore save themselves a lot of money and they don't lawyer up for like a split thing like that. It saves them literally probably 10s of 1000s of dollars every year. So just little things like that can help you like really survive when you have just like little tidbits of information like that. And you can say okay, I know what this means. I know what this is like. I don't have to to give all this money away or I don't have to like get my shackles up and be like no you can't have my like, that's my share. Because you don't want to do that either because it kind of shows other people you're working with that maybe you're not as experienced or maybe you know you're going to be difficult to work with. So I don't know if that helps. Does that help?
00.11.25: Yes, it does.
00.11.28: So like little like stuff like that, that has taken me a long, long time to just really learn and get down and dial and then also to be able to implement it into like my own kind of business plan which works really well for me. And I've also found that everybody that I work with is their own entrepreneur, like they own their own company. They make their own business plans based on what they like to do. What what their you know, skill sets are where their wheel houses. So I was able to just kind of like ink different master rep deals with different labels instead of signing like a publishing deal. Now my publishing is free but I have you know, Little master rep deals that are all very fluid with different different synth companies. And that's been working really well. I also now just got my huge catalogue of stuff back from Sony. And it's a lot of work and paperwork. So now I'm looking for like a publishing deal or an admin deal. So now I'm kind of like re navigating. The monetization of my publishing catalog and my master catalogs they're very different revenue streams, but they're both very, very important revenue streams. So things like that looking at, you know, your career and your your assets. From like a 40,000 foot view, diversification and fluidity and being able to pivot is really, really important in this industry. And that's kind of like why I started a company with a couple of buddies called Academy 145.
And originally, we were going to be doing in person mentor songwriting retreats, which we're still going to do we actually have a place booked for April of 2022 and the retreats are taking place in Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, which is a really cool place. And I'll definitely be sharing more information about the company and what we're doing camps and things like that. At the end, if you want to, you can give me your email addresses and we can put you in the newsletter if you want updates. But the whole the whole program really started there and with the idea of bringing in established, signed unsigned just established producers and songwriters to work with more up and coming, aspiring, anybody who just wants to go like write songs and learn to have that opportunity and the access to information. And then when COVID hit it was like oh shit, we can't do this retreat because COVID So I was like, how could we still do this in a, you know, in an impactful way that was that people still got something out of it, you know?
So we started to develop this online. Virtual curriculum system and really started to dig in on the information side of it, which was really fun for me. Like because I love writing songs, but I also love to like, share the information like because I know how difficult it is to like tap into this stuff. I know frustrating it can be I've been there like I'm always there. Like I feel like I'm still always learning something new in this industry. So started writing a series of curriculums and developing kind of an online course if you will, but more loosely based around the needs of aspiring songwriters, so very much focused on the blend of creative and business and merging the two like the two sides of the brain into one. So what I'm gonna run through here is actually the first course so when you when you do take an academy 145 camp. This is the first camp that you are required to take and it revolves around the art of collaboration, the basic like do's and don'ts, basic things that you should know and then it also focuses on the most basic level of monetization for for songwriters,
00.16.38: Thank you. It's I appreciate that. And it's an ongoing battle with that and the interesting thing with the the catalog organization is that there's a catalog organization is extremely important for not only you helping yourself but for other people helping you and if you don't have your catalog organized and ready to go with the things that people within the industry are going to need to know about your songs to monetize them, and to help you make money and to make money for themselves. It's going to really, really diminish the amount of opportunities that you're going to get to monetize your catalogue. So that's definitely something that we'll go through in the presentation here.
But thank you, Dave, that's really nice. And it was great. I mean, running the camps is amazing for me to Alex's run a camp actually, and a couple of my other buddies have run camps. And we're continuing to just kind of like expand the program and get more and more industry you know, giants on board in terms of like the opportunities that we were able to offer students. And then in addition to the courses what I also found was one of my biggest hurdles was finding compatible collaborators to co write with and to share network with and one of the best things you can do in the industry to like grow your, your career, your brand or expand your catalogs reach is to collaborate and to co write. It's one of the main reasons you know from a business level that you do it from a creative level. It helps you grow it makes you a better writer. It changes you in good ways. It'll expand your scope of genre so on and so forth. I can't say enough how vital and important co writing is to like having a career as a songwriter or producer. It's really hard to find compatible collaborators.
00.18.48: That was that was one of the first things you mentioned here. You just said to you know, it'll really show people how nervous you are, how easy or hard you are to get along with. Yeah, that is 70% of the creative part is just being able to share a room and get along together to be on the same page to write a song, let alone do business together.
00.19.08: Right, exactly. And it is both and that's the that's where it gets tricky because you're collaborating in a way that's very like, vulnerable, right? You're like writing pouring your heart and soul into a song or not or it's just a whatever song it could be a funny song or a parody or some shit but either way, you're you're making something creative. So you feel very like emotionally attached to it. But then you're having these crazy like sometimes very complex business conversations. When there's like a lot of money involved, people can get very different and so like it's kind of I mean, it's a it's a whole thing. It's a very niche, nuanced thing that we do, and important to like be able to separate those things as well and definitely look at it from a business standpoint, because that's at the end of the day.
If you're collaborating with people you're doing it sure because like you're creatively compatible, but also because on another level like you guys are wanting to help each other and you want to help each other grow. You want to help each other make money all of those things are are very, very important and valuable. So you also want to be able to bring more value to the session, the more value you can bring to the session, the more valuable your co writers are going to become and be and you guys can lift each other up and then you'll be able to you kind of have to like climb that that ladder as a collaborator. Basically, the whole program, the curriculum, part of it is really important, but one of the main things I wanted to do was to connect everybody afterwards. So we started I've always had this idea to make an app that was a like a tinder dating app. Ask for for CO writes. So after you take the basic ignite camp, basically, you know base level everybody's registered at a PR O and everybody's taken this first camp about the fundamentals of CO writing and monetization and organization of catalog. Then you can basically make a profile.
We've made the beta network online so there's like a bunch of people in there that have a profile up you can click through and look at their their profiles which are different than like a dating profile because you know, it's similar but it's very different also, so you want to know things like can you record your own vocals? Are you multi instrumentalist? Are you a vocalist only or do you also produce? Where do you live? Do you do zoom sessions, so on and so forth? And then, you know, genre preferences, Lane preferences, which is something we'll also talk about songwriting lanes and what you're writing for basically, is what that means.
00.22.53: So like I was saying about the main lanes of the lanes of CO writing. When we say lane, like we're talking about when you get in a session with somebody usually between two and for people in a songwriting session. I've seen some songwriting sessions or credits be like 15 people. I try and avoid those songwriting sessions when I can because that is just a too many cooks in the kitchen and be a lot of pie slices on the money side. So Lane one is sync, and lane two, which when I say sync, I mean synchronization. So like film and TV, writing ads writing, lane two is artists pitch and cuts. So like when I go into a session and I'm writing for another artist, you know, cuts on major labels, things like that. And then lane three is writing for like my own project. So I co read for my own stuff all the time. I love to collaborate for my stuff. I also write by myself for my own stuff, or I'll get an idea started and then I take it into a session.
Either way, what the best thing you can do, either before the session, or the first thing when you get in this session is ask and decide what lane you're writing for. So that everybody's on the same page, who is this session is for. What this session is for, if you're to write to a brief for, you know, filming TV stuff, then you talk about getting briefs ahead of time or you come in with a brief if you're talking about writing for another artists, there's ways you can come in more prepared for that. And we're gonna get we're going to go through all of those things as well. So writing for sync. There's kind of another breakdown here there's, you know, you can write for TV, film, a TV and film and then writing for ads and they kind of vary a little bit in terms of the genres and the production vibes. Ads are usually going to be way more like percussive uptempo, happy, uplifting and then TV and film, you can get more into like moody darker genres and lyrical territories.
Either way, in sync writing in general, typically, you're going to want to remain pretty vague in your lyrical themes. You're not going to want to include many specifics, like places people's names, because when you're watching a film, or an ad, it's it's not going to line up with what you're seeing on the screen. So the editors like to use things that create more of a mood and like to use broader strokes and the lyrical themes around a feeling or an action or of five really an essence of what it is that they're matching the visual content to. So if you're talking about like a some dude named Chris, who's like, you know, city, and the scene is set in Peru, they're not going to be able to use it automatically out so the more broad the more vague. Often I'm sure you guys have noticed that in film and TV, it's very common. And in ads, it's very common that there's a there's an instrument like there's an instrumental track and then there's like, all those moves and not on us and levelized because that means there's no actual words being used. So a lot of times interweaving things like that into your singing songs can be really beneficial sparse words like you know, sparse lyric, sparse melody lines and things like that broad strokes. Will you be gay if
00.27.26: in the briefs often well, I write two briefs and briefs are basically something that I'll get from a sink company that says oh, so and so is looking for a song that has a lot of clap, claps and it's talking about coming together with your friends and, you know, taking over the world, or something like that. And sometimes the briefs are really, really specific. And they go into very, very specific detail. They'll give you reference tracks. So you can listen down to some reference tracks and see, you know, what the vibe is? And, and then other times they're a little bit more vague, and they don't really know what the hell they want, and you'll send something in that feels like it fits it like perfectly, and they're like, No, this, isn't it. And that's okay, because essentially, things that don't I don't know, I think there's only been like, one or two times where the song I wrote for the brief was actually used for that brief. The cool thing is that when you read one brief, you've kind of read them all. Like there's probably about like six or seven different like three fives, and so like then I have a song that meets that criteria in my catalog. So the next time I get a brief for that, I'm like, Oh, who do I already have this something that fits this or you're seeing people continuously pitch a song that fits a lot of different briefs.
You know, so when you get it into their system and and they tag it up on their end with the magnet metadata, which is another reason why you want to have your catalog organized. And you can really look at your catalog from that standpoint, where you're kind of ticking all these boxes within your own catalog. You can say I have all these ballads. I need some songs like that are more up tempo. I have all these up tempo songs, I need some dark and moody shit. So that that kind of that kind of I think answers that question and then some right yeah,
So every session is an asset. So regardless, regardless if you get picked or not, you're building up your assets and something that can be shared in the future.
Yeah, absolutely. And also exactly and so you want to diversify your, your genres and your vibes. You want to like diversify your vocalists like I like to do do X and I like to do songs or have the other person sing it or do a different character vibe like which is super fun. Like sync stuff has allowed me to be like so many different voting characters on the mic. I have so much fun with it. It's It's really weird, really funny and silly with it too, even if it's like a dark and moody song. And it allows you to take yourself out of it. Too and not be so emotionally like it's you and the song and stuff. And you can just kind of like take a step back and be like, Oh, I It's like, you know, you put on a different hat and be somebody else in the session today. Like doesn't even matter.
It's kind of like acting a little bit. So yeah, super fun, and definitely an asset and then you've got your publishing side of it, which is an asset and then you've got your master side of it, which is an asset. So you want to kind of diversify all of that is something that I've kind of done as I've gone along. is I have these different categories for you know, genres. And within my catalog, I have, you know, kind of diversified my catalog and then externally with my sync partners, with like, you know, these five or six different master map deals I have I can say okay, like, here's the dark moody. Here's 10 dark, moody songs for this company. 10 Mark dark, moody songs for that company. 10 dark, moody songs for that company. 10 Dark moody songs for that company. Here I have like 20 uptempo happy songs. So I'm going to give three to this person through to that person through to that person through to that person. So they all have all these different vibes of my catalogue that they can pitch for their briefs. And that way it kind of increases from a statistical standpoint, the chances that they're going to be successful pitching my music.
Is there ever competition? Are these you know, different sections? Very
competitive. Very, very competitive.
So if the people you're giving your music to, well, no, because I don't give the same companies the same songs. And a lot of people do not exclusives. So that's, that's one of the that's a great question. So there's exclusive contracts in both master rep deals, labels, whatever distribution and then there's non exclusive and it's the same for publishing although publishing is typically exclusive. Publishing is a little bit more like firm solid, and this is because in terms of the publishing and the actual composition of the song that will never change. When you have a master recording however, you can have 10 different masters like think about how many Beatles covers, you've heard, the publishing is the same or is the same, so it's going to be exclusive with one company. But the master could be like I've done that I've done Beatles covers, and I have somebody pitching my masters for those.
So they have so you can have literally like a bunch of different masters and many people pitching them. But sometimes the problem with that becomes that when two people pitch the same song for something, and you get the placement, they don't know who to clear it with and because both of those companies are likely commissioning that placement for you. They're going to fight over it and they're not going to be very happy about it. And more often than not, if that happens, the soup supervisor or the ad agency or the company who wants to license a song will just not use it because it's too big of a hassle. So even though you could technically have a billion people pitching all of your masters all the time, the industry really likes the personal relationships that they've established with people where they know that if they clear something like that's like their buddy like they don't want to like have somebody else claiming like a commission on something or clearance right over something. So it's really important to kind of like pay attention to that. And to really like value those relationships and be very intentional about who you're giving which songs and keep track of it like that have it all spreadsheet it out.
So I have like a spreadsheet Schedule A with each company. And then internally like I use Dropbox and another thing called disco which you shut you should all check out disco is an amazing catalog organizational tool. But that's so I've had everything just organized out so that that doesn't happen. So writing for other artists, super fun. It's kind of similar to writing for sync like you can write more often than not. Now being in the room with the artist is really, really important. Used to be much more pitch heavy. And internally at publishing companies. They're at record labels. They're a&r people, which is artists and repertoire, and that their job is to sign writers on the publishing side. And then when writers submit songs to them, they take those songs and they pitch them to major label artists. And it's changed a lot with the digital streaming and also with tick tock and things like that. And ANR is I don't know it's it's an art form that is becoming more and more like lost or less, less needed, because now we have social media numbers that are dictating so much of what we want to be consumed.
Whereas before a&r People were really responsible for picking and choosing the hits and what was going to be huge and what this next sound was and all of these things that are now really dictated by us. So that changes a lot of things within the industry and has in addition to that the streaming mechanicals and the, you know, little fractions of pennies that you get paid for streams have definitely also changed the way the labels and publishing entities operate, and where they put their money and where they're putting their intention and their focus into.
So like, really, if you're doing more of like writing for other artists, you it's a full time job and you have to like hustle, hustle, hustle, you're going to sessions like all the time writing with people all the time and meeting new people all the time and you may or may not ever, you write a song and they may never use it. It may never end in my opinion, like writing for cuts is like, you know, then you write a song that's so specific to one person and if they don't use it ever, like it's pretty slim chances that you're gonna get a placement on that song because you've made something very specific to somebody else. So, in terms of like, unless you already have existing relationships, or like you're really really tight in with somebody. It can be really hard to tap into that career path. Not impossible, but, but definitely more difficult and I've I've seen people like totally do it and like crushing it, but it is, it's a different game than it is to like if you're trying to just do your own artist thing or write for sync. It's just a different game.
If you write for someone else you still can you take that and try to put it into your catalog, even though the other artists might have had something to do with it. Or as soon as they have like a cut on something that you brought to the table.
Well that's the other thing is you have to be careful with that too because like if it's like a huge major label artists know like if they have it on hold, you can't pitch it. You can't do anything with it. Like, unless it's until it's released. You could and then you could rerecord it. But if it's their voice on it, more likely than not their label owns it. So you can't do anything with it.
Sometimes the challenge is also that they own half of it to write so you really don't have full rein of whatever else happens to that song because of that as well.
Yeah, well often. And this is this is where it gets sticky is like often like the label actually just owns all of it. So like not publishing they don't own the publishing. But the master is way more complicated writing with other artists and like you have to you have to really fight for your cut of the master. Whereas in like a sync session like everybody knows it's just even splits on both sides and that's how it goes, doesn't matter who sings, doesn't sing, produces doesn't produce plays on the track doesn't play on the track. Doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter if there was like a song that the hook was written but they brought and they brought it in, and then you wrote a verse and then they wrote the other verse doesn't matter. You were all they're like equally shared. If you don't want to share your songs evenly with your collaborators. Don't bring it to the session and do finish it on your own is kind of the rule. If like I do all the time I take bring songs and then I'll come in with like, almost a whole song written but I want to do with these collaborators and also, I work in sessions where there's a producer so we leave with like a full track. So it's like, for me I could produce it out by myself it would take forever and also like I'm not as good as like this person. So I want this is the perfect vibe for them to do so. Like we're just helping each other out sharing in the profits of something that we're creating from a business standpoint. And and that's you know, really valuable
you do that with your sink, writing to karate arrived with a producer in the room.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
When you take this class, it was pretty awesome. By the end of, you know, it was four days and by the end of every day, Daphne would send you a pretty like, produced track, you know, definitely scratch tracks and it got better every day. But it was cool to just hear something almost, you know, this is something I could sit on for the rest of the night and bring something new to next table that was almost I wouldn't say finished. But you know what I mean, you had a pretty good idea.
Yeah, yeah. Because if you get the vibe Yeah. So basically, like what we'll do is and we'll get into that a little bit TOS like when in the camps, I've kind of made it so you can kind of go through the process, but it's broken down of like what a typical like sink co writers or typical artists co write either way. And just basically from like the setting the intention, which is kind of what we're talking about here and I'll change this slide just so we setting the intention to mapping it out to all these other things that you do in the course of the session. And like when I'm doing sessions, you know, sometimes like, like last week, I had a session every day, a couple and Saturday and Sunday and two of those sessions we wrote two songs. So nine songs last week, which is great. Like I told, I was like, I feel like I'm insane. Like, it's just nuts, but whatever. Like it's, it was the Moodstruck and the sessions were available and I had some great opportunities. So I was like, alright, screw it. I'm just gonna go in on it, you know? Now like I'm moving or anything like oh, well, it just kind of makes it way easier. When you can go in write the song and you're working with people who are picking up the rest, you know? Like, it's not like I'm sitting there grinding away at the production side of it. I go in with ideas and they need the ideas and I need the production and I have things that I bring to the table and they have things that they bring to the table from a business standpoint and a monetization standpoint. And we have fun and like you know, all of those things.
So it's that's another reason why the network is super important because it's hard to find really compatible collaborators where you're evenly bringing something to the table and that's why this network is so great is because producers can go in there and be like, I need top liners for my tracks. I have all these fucking tracks. People send me tracks all the time and they're like, here's a folder of tracks. Can you sing on these are right to these and I'll be like, Sure, I'll send you a few sketches back and then I'll be like, send me tracks. I need tracks. I have nothing you know. So it's kind of like this cool, little symbiotic relationship that you can you can get into and that's what the essentially what the network aims to remedy.
Well, welcome back, everybody. That was quite the first half. Hopefully everyone was taking notes because I had to go back through twice to make some notes. For myself. We explored so much about CO writing, how she's found a way to make the most of CO writing in so many ways beyond just writing a song. So we're gonna go through some takeaways that we kind of feel are the things we should highlight after that episode, since this is kind of focused on how to get the most out of CO writing. First of all, this section is still called our do's and don'ts. Most of these are do's I've been trying not to go into too many doughnuts lately.
Don't be so negative, like this list.
And also by the way I wanted to make the point that in case anybody was hearing around the outside noises that were there, I was not on my normal setup for that, that interview because I actually conducted that we conducted that interview in a class in one of my classes at the University of Colorado. So there was some class noise and I was using just my laptop microphone, so there probably was a little less quality, just so you know why that was happening. So, do's and don'ts. First of all, do always know and state the purpose of the Colruyt session before it starts.
There was one thing there was a big tech takeaway for me just as far as writing songs for myself as a singer songwriter and at bay tamkin.com. But if you're showing up to maybe try to do something for a placement or a brief sheet, that you have to put those guidelines down beforehand because the tone as an artist is one thing and you're falling in another tone if you're trying to get a placement.
I also liked the fact that it really I'm really big into having a lot of intentionality with any thing that you're working on. Right. That's how you utilize your time best. And I think that what's funny, we often when I mean hopefully a lot of people that are listening have a lot of experience co writing and it it can be common that you don't talk about this right before you start writing. But the reality is that in somewhere in your brain you actually already have an intent. You're just not stating it right. The problem really is when both sides have a different intent. It can disrupt the progress and you know, potentially how good the song turns out because you might have different intents with what comes out of it. And so it really might help improve the quality of the right.
When we get together. You know, we've both stated where we're coming from, to define those lyrics for each other. What those lyrics mean to me, and you would say, Well, I'm looking at it from this point of view, which is also a great example of trying to say what you want to say one way and then saying it a different way, like your quote, you know, these are different ways of looking at the same lyric.
And that Gaza goes to the point that if we were writing it for me, we might want to pull more of my point of view and if we were writing for you as an artist to learn, we'll kind of lean towards the way that you want to say it because it's going to come out better when you perform it right. So that's another example of how it matters.
Normally you just take all the words out that I wrote and then put new words into it after I leave. So you know, but that still works out for me because, you know, I was in the room at the time. And you know, 5050
Do you always come with your best ideas ready to share? I don't know if we stated this one within the interview, but I think it's an important it's an important thing to say for anybody that's going into a career because we really do set ourselves up for a less productive you just don't know what's gonna happen I guess is what I'm trying to say with this and it's really important that if you aren't excited about writing with the person that you're going to write with you shouldn't be doing that right most likely. So you should always become one with your A game right? Come with your a material ready excited to offer what it is that you have to offer depending on what you guys are ready for
when we took her class. You know, we had an a homework assignment. So the next day, at three o'clock we all had to meet there was six songwriters and you wanted to show up with your best material because you're also playing with pro songwriters. You know, you want to be on your game, so it wasn't something you're just like, okay, see it tomorrow, which, again, was just inspiring to have that mindset.
Do always sign a songwriting ownership agreement. If it is your first time writing together with whoever you're co writing with. You can get this form for free on our website. If you do a search for songwriting ownership agreement in search bar. I've already given this out to most of my classes too. And it's it's very basic. It's really just something that you have written and you both sign and it's just gets rid of any question and any atmosphere that might have, you know, tension because of ownership.
Do you know Brandy Carlile, and the twins, they split everything equally, three ways, no matter who contributes to the song.
That's amazing, right. And that's worked out really well. You know, I mean, that's good business is good for everyone. And I think this is another example of that. And lastly, just so we have it, do not, do not miss up the opportunity to go and check out Academy 145 dot com, where you can learn a lot more about what Daphne Willis has started and now the programs that they're offering. We'll talk a little bit more about that in the second half of our interview with us next week. So we're gonna give you one action step, because that's what we do.
CO write a song this week was someone who contrasts your skill sets.
If you have people that are contrasting your skill set in a negative way that would be the good choice of someone the right way right. But you know, you kind of know in all seriousness, you kind of know who you should and shouldn't write with based on can you hang out well, right Can Can you draw ideas out and feel comfortable with that around each other? And that's, that's a good connection. But there's also the side of like, well, they're really good producer, right, which we'll talk more about in the next episode. And I'm a good songwriter. So you know, that's more of my skill set, and that's more their skill set. So that's a good combination, or, you know, they're really good at piano, I'm good at guitar or you know, there's those kinds of skill sets that can be diverse too. We know how valuable your time is, and we appreciate you spending this time with us and being a part of this community. It is our hope that you feel that sense of community here musicians tip jar and help spread the word to make us stronger. One way to do that is to go to our Facebook page and start talking to each other about your finances. What questions you might have different places that you've run into problems, advice you might have for each other. We aren't the only ones that have had experience with all of this and you can really do some good by helping each other out.
And if you don't feel like making that public, we do have a private Facebook group as well, that's connect. So it would be our tight knit community helping each other out.
And as always, thank you for joining us and remember there is already enough for everyone. You just need to know that again. Until next time, on behalf of Dave Tamkin and myself Chris Webb. Please stay safe, stay healthy and take care of each other. Napoleon Hill said it is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others succeed. This musicians Tip Jar
