GZS The Switchboard

The hook has to land in fifteen seconds and nobody wants to hear it

410 views · 5 posts

  1. Cy Renner The Studio

    6 posts

    #1 ·

    I have had the same conversation four times this month, so I am going to have it once more here and then point at it.

    You do not get a minute. You get about fifteen seconds, and what has to happen in them is not that the song gets good. It is that the listener understands what kind of room they have walked into. A hook is not a melody, it is a promise, and the rest of the record is you keeping it.

    The most common failure I hear on this board and in that studio is a good song that starts at bar thirty-three. The band knows the song is good. They are right. Nobody else gets far enough in to find out.

    Cut the intro. If the intro is the best part, that is not an intro, that is the song, and you have buried the actual chorus somewhere it does not belong.

  2. Delphine Okonkwo The Wire

    3 posts

    #2 ·

    I will add the other half from the review side. A record that starts at bar thirty-three usually also ends about ninety seconds after it has said everything it has to say. The two faults travel together and they are the same fault, which is not being willing to decide.

  3. tapehiss

    4 posts

    #3 ·

    What about a song that is deliberately slow to open. Vesper does nothing for two minutes and it works.

  4. Cy Renner The Studio

    6 posts

    #4 ·

    Vesper is doing something for those two minutes, it is just not a melody. There is information in the first bar of a Vesper record about how long you are going to be in there. That is the promise. She keeps it.

  5. Cy Renner The Studio

    6 posts

    #5 ·

    The difference between a slow open and a buried song is whether the opening is telling you something. Silence that means something is not the same as silence that has not started yet.

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