A few years ago I saw Arlo Guthrie in concert and he told this delightfull story about how he wrote this song, recorded it, and a year later he realized it was to the tune of Swanee River. Can’t remember the name of the Arlo tune right now.
And then I was at one of my daughters’ schools and they played the new official school song, complete with a lyrics sheet for everyone, and a llittle copywrite symbol on bottom. Only problem: the song was obviously a ripoff of a pop song. It took me about an hour to identify it.
And if Yahoo is advertising that they have 1,000,000 songs for sale, and that’s not even all of them…
So, if you come up with a catchy tune, how can you know for sure that it’s not something you heard in car last Tuesday?
And you know they totally are.
Anyway, the only thing you can do is try to remember what you hear. Attach somehting meaningful to it, so if you hear it again, you can recognize it. Other than that, it’s a crapshoot.
I like to write musicals and songs- just for fun, really- and I always worry that I’m the tune I’ve come up with has been “thought up” before. Thankfully, I actually don’t listen to the radio, so just about all the songs I ever listen to I own, so it’s less likely that I’ll copy something without realizing it, but it’s happened once or twice. Once, I was writing a very nice, pretty piano ballad, only to find out later the first line was pretty much the same tune as part of this poppy, peppy, dance hit “Canned Heat”, which I had never heard before. Unfortunate, because I think it worked much better the way I did it.
I’ve re-written someone elses song too many times to worry about it much anymore. If I write something and find out it is too close to something else, I just drop it. Probably the worst, and funniest, example of this was a tune I wrote one night after my then girlfriend broke up with me. I was all bummed and started playing guitar. I came up with a great depressing little chord progression. I even came up with a lyric melody for it. A couple days later I went to see a friend of mine, Bryan, who I played guitar with all the time. I told him about the break up and then said that it had a cool upside in that I came up with a great little depressing piece. I started playing it and made it through about three verses when Bryan stopped me and said:
wait for it
“Dude, that’s the theme to the Incredible Hulk.”
He was right. It was part of the theme to The Incredible Hulk (the one with Lou Ferigno). I saw the Hulk a little while later, I think it was the last t.v. movie as a rerun, and at the end they played the theme really slow on just piano and it was pretty much what I had written, though I think it was in a different key. It was close enough that I just dropped the piece. Before you start laughing (unless you already are) the piece, when played slow, is pretty damned sad sounding.
These days that doesn’t happen a whole lot because I tend to write with some funky ass chords that aren’t used all that often. I use a ton of thirds, sevenths and ninths and augmented and dimisnished chords which aren’t frequently used in the type of stuff I play. I play a lot of hard rock/metal and not too many people use more than fifths.
I’ve got something now that has an intro that is uncomfortably close to a Fates Warning song. The rest of it goes off in a totally different direction so I am not going to worry about it. I didn’t realize it was close until a couple weeks after I wrote it.
There is nothing worse than putting a lot of work into a piece and then having to drop it because it is too close to something else. These days when I come up with an idea I run it by a couple of my friends who have a pretty large knowledge of music. If they say anything I usually drop the idea. I also don’'t listen to a whole lot of music these days. I when I do listen to stuff it is usually very different than what I write. K.D. Lang, Dream Theater, Fates Waring and Lyle Lovette have been in heavy rotation lately. I write in a somewhat similar style as DT and Fates Warning sometimes but usually my stuff is different enough that I don’t have to worry about rippig them off by accident.
sleestak’s Incredible Hulk story reminds me of an episode of Malcolm in the Middle: Malcolm teaches himself how to play the guitar and writes a depressing song about how lonely he is and how depressing his life is, etc. When he plays it for his family, they’re giddy- it turns out he just wrote new lyrics to the Meow Mix song.
Or if you’re really old school, the episode of The Partridge Family in which Danny is thrilled that he’s written a song for the group, only to discover that it’s Born Free.
I used to play guitar a little and write songs. Delusions of Joni, I call it now, but very rewarding at the time. Then I realised that I truly have no sense of rhythm–like being tone-deaf, I’m a music-lover who’s rhythm-deaf.
Anyway, I put a poem that I liked to music. Can’t remember the author, but it might have
Ah, Google. W H Auden’s ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’.
Played it for my roommate who informed me I’d simultaneously ripped off portions of Neil Young and Ian Tyson for the melody.
I think every new song we create and write is really a compilation of many songs that we have heard. At least thats how it is when I write music. So really, I’m ripping off everyone at the same time, but the key is that is doesn’t sound alot like one song in partivular.
It certainly does help that when you come up with a melody or chord progression, that it doesn’t sound alot like some other song. If it does, change the arrangement. Make sure there are other elements that set it farr farr apart from that popular song.
Sure, happens to everyone. As a matter of fact, Paul McCartney woke up one morning with the melody for “Yesterday” in his head in its entirety. He figured it had to be something that was already written, because the whole thing from beginning to end was there (music only, the lyrics came later). For a month he went around playing it for people asking them if they’d heard it before. Finally he said if no one claims it in a few weeks, I’m taking it. And the rest, as they say…
As soon as I started reading this thread I thought of a Spider Robinson story, Melancholy Elephants. Set in a relatively near future when it is almost impossible to get a new song copyrighted because they are almost all derivative of existing music (similar to the comments that Heckxx made, but imagine that the courts have ruled that derivative music can be a copyright violation).
Spider refers to a number of existing examples; the George Harrison case involving My Sweet Lord and He’s So Fine among them.
Over the past 5 years, I’ve exclusively written songs in sudden spurts. Typically, I can go about 10 to 16 months without any composing and then I’ll take an entire day and write 10 to 15 songs when the mood strikes me. To help avoid plagiarism, I frequently make use of odd chords such as minor 6th, minor 7th, major 7th, 9th, maj7th add 9, diminished, major and minor chords with an odd bass note, etc. I don’t think I could ever write a song with only C, D, and G chords that does not at least remind me of something else I’ve heard. It also helps to use unusual time signatures; though, this can sometimes create a cacophony of sound. Melodies are the most significant challenge in this regard IMO since there are only 12 notes available
Check out the story of John Fogerty, the only man to be sued for plagairising a song from himself. Saul Zaentz, who had bought the rights to all the CCR music sued Fogerty for having written a 1986 song entitled “The Old Man Down the Road,” which, according to Zaentz, was a plagiarism of CCR’s “Run Through the Jungle.”
Iam sure that I read years ago that Fogerty won the case by showing on the stand how he writes songs. Unfortunately I can’t find a cite to confirm this.
