Music vs Lyrics

[legoline]

I was listening to the radio the other day and because I was at work, I had to keep the radio quiet. Suddenly a song caught my attention, though, there was something about the energy and mood of the song that almost instantly gave me an idea for a rather uplifting cool "Let's go places!" sci-fi vid.

However when I got home and looked up the lyrics I realised that the song wasn't really that uplifting at all, at least judging by the lyrics. It's a bit post-apocalyptic, really. (At least to me) But the mood and energy remain, so I'm a bit torn as whether or not to use it.

How important is it that the lyrics fit the overall tone of the vid? What do you think? Have you ever come across this problem and what did you do?

[obsessive24]

Cool topic.

I never even hear lyrics until like the third or fourth time watching a vid. It's all about the tone of the song for me. But I know there are others for whom lyrics are the first thing that jump out at them. There's been times where I've been a beta, and have had disagreements with the vidder because their clip choice is so tied to the lyrics, whereas for me the clip choice didn't make sense because I wasn't paying attention to/hearing the lyrics they way they were.

I mean, ideally everything - music, lyrics, visuals - should all work together perfectly harmoniously, but if wishes were horses we'd all be eating steak.

My personal approach is to prioritise the tone/mood over the lyrics, unless the lyric/visual mismatch is so bad that it will make my viewer go WTF.

[legoline]

Nov 18, 2011 7:03:57 GMT -5 obsessive24 said:

if wishes were horses we'd all be eating steak.

I've never heard that idiom before ... *is in stitches*

Hmmm, yes, probably. I was thinking that, too, because while the lyrics are on the darker side they are fairly vague, too--or vague in the "Not specifically written about a specific person so any other vid won't make sense" way.

I usually try to find the overall theme in a song and then break it down to the themes of the verses and chorus and I try to match the clips to those, but I try to not to cling too much to the actual words of the lines, if that makes sense?

[obsessive24]

Nov 18, 2011 7:17:16 GMT -5 legoline said:

I've never heard that idiom before ... *is in stitches*

It's a quote from Firefly.

The theme breakdown thing works the same way with me. Sometimes if the theme/narrative doesn't quite progress the way I want it to, I end up chopping and changing verses/choruses around in the song itself. I did it for Bachelorette and This is the Picture, and they sound okay to my ears, but don't know how much of a bad surprise it came across to people who knew the songs well.

[legoline]

Okay, then I've heard it before because I love Firefly. But apparently, I haven't seen it often enough (Yay! An excuse to rewatch it!)

I'm reading a lot about editing songs here and I'm very impressed by how casual and nonchalant you guys seem to be about it. I find editing songs incredibly hard. I only shortened a song once by having it fade out earlier than it originally would have. The rest is very intimidating. I tried to cut down "Three Ravens" but again, it's very hard to do it right, no?

[eunice]

OOPS, I meant to post in the Achilles Heel thread and then expound on my lyric difficulties here and got them backward!

More to say about lyrics in a moment

[obsessive24]

I think that entirely depends on the song. Some are very structured where each verse and each chorus sounds the same musically and the notes sort of don't overlap each other, if you know what I mean, so it's easy to just cut a verse and a chorus out and join up the pieces. But sometimes it's nigh on impossible because the key changes or some notes don't quite mesh, and then you have to see if maybe it'll work with a gentler crossfade across the two pieces, and sometimes it just doesn't work at all.

I used to edit music in Audacity separately, but these days I just do it in the editing program on the waveform. Is actually easier that way, I find.

[eunice]

Okay, so I hate lyrics. I hate them a lot. I actually don't hear them very well in any context, because I have hearing issues which make it difficult to distinguish individual sounds. If you ever try to talk to me in a busy public space or anywhere there are echos? I'm probably only picking out every other word and stringing them together through context.

This occasionally leads to hilarious misunderstandings, and in terms of songs...my ability to mishear lyrics as something else is sort of EPIC. Generally when I settle on a song it's because the mood of the music and/or the singers voice and the way they emphasize words I do pick out fits what I want to do.

This is the point where I usually look up the full lyrics and go "OH! So that's what they said there, what in hell am I gonna do with that?" The problem is, that once I know what the lyrics are I can't ignore them, so even though when I'm watching vids...if it makes emotional and musical sense I don't much care if the lyrics are matchy, if a lyric and my visuals don't connect in some way on the timeline I get twitchy. Since I don't care so much about lyrics this will cause a conflicted freeze up in my process.

Generally I dig my way out of it by allowing myself to go full metal metaphorical with literal signposts (what sisabet dubbed Keanu moments) to ground them. I think generally if you have conviction that x lyric means y, your audience will go along with you as long as you give them something concrete to hang on to along the way.


Doesn't stop me from tearing my hair out at least once a vid over some line in the song that I can't quite figure out how to bend to my will.

[legoline]

Waveform? I must look that one up. I only have Audacity installed because I also use it for recording, and things

[legoline]

@eunice I have a similiar problem as in, English is my second language and while I'm fairly fluent in it, particularly in music the artists seem to mumble a lot, so I tend to mishear lyrics as well (And then there's the moment of revelation when I look them up and go, "Oooooooooooooooooooooooooh." )

With my Festivids assignement I decided to treat the themes of the verses as big metaphors--I hope it worked.

[eunice]

Nov 18, 2011 9:32:09 GMT -5 legoline said:

I'm reading a lot about editing songs here and I'm very impressed by how casual and nonchalant you guys seem to be about it.

The key is pretty straightforward in theory, but fiddly in practice. Basically, most songs you will use in vidding have a standard 4/4 structure (and if they don't...you probably want to find a music major to help you edit, hee). Identify the ones in the 1/2/3/4 beat structure and your job just got about a bazillion times easier.

These are the places where you can usually cut, swap, and eliminate verses/choruses/bridges without jarring. It gets fiddly because musicians aren't metronomes so there's always a bit of futzing to reconnect two sections, but if you're on the one you're three quarters of the way there as soon as you cut.

[valika]

I'm the third with always misunderstanding the lyrics in English, because as for legoline, it is my second language (but I don't speak fluently unfortunately).

That's why I always look for the lyrics on the internet, when I like the song and feel the desire to make a video for it. And that's why I like to vid at instrumental music, too. No lyrics, no problem. ;D

I also made some vids for Hungarian songs, it was such an interesting experience to see, how non-Hungarian people liked these vids. I think when you don't understand the lyrics, you can pay more attention to the music and the visuals.

[obsessive24]

Nov 18, 2011 10:16:26 GMT -5 legoline said:

Waveform? I must look that one up. I only have Audacity installed because I also use it for recording, and things

Oh, waveform isn't software. It's just what you call the music track as it's presented on the editing timeline. like this.

Valika - I agree, some of my favourite vids are for non-English songs. Like you said, it makes it easier to focus on the other aspects. I find instrumentals harder though, because I tend to find them harder to structure or keep viewers' attention.

[voodoochild]

Personally, I'm a lyrics girl. Music is v. pretty, but I've always loved how words can be strung together in various ways (which is why I love writing fic, why I was an English major, why I teach it). When I watch a vid, the moments that make me go "OOOOH" are when a lyric particularly syncs up with a perfect clip. When I vid in my head, I have very little idea what to do with instrumental sections, but can match clips/lyrics easily.

That being said, to answer legoline's original question, I can definitely appreciate a vid that focuses on tone. The example I can best think of are two excellent vids to the same song - Dessa's "Matches to Paper Dolls". I am blanking on the vidders since I'm not on my netbook, but one features Fiona Glenanne of Burn Notice, and the other is Dana Scully of The X-Files. The Fiona one, I feel, is much more literal, tied to the lyrics over the tone. But the Scully one is structured so that even if you couldn't hear the lyrics, you could get a sense of the story the vidder was telling. The lyrics just so happen to match perfectly, though.

[littleheaven]

I used to rely on lyrics heavily because when I first started vidding, I thought the whole point was to make the visuals fit the words, and nothing else. No narrative, no mood, nothing. As long as I had a clip to match each line of the song, I was golden. ;D To this day, I still find that I struggle to use songs where the lyrical match is a bit tenuous, but I'm getting better, I think, at picking songs where the overall feel or message of the music is more relevant than individual lines. It's certainly an uphill battle after years of being far too literal!