Face Your Ears
'Face Your Ears' is an ongoing podcast for musicians who want to bring their creative ideas to life regardless of age, experience or know-how. Join Rich Bozic and Justin Hochella as they "talk shop" with regards to the ins and outs of music creation. The conversations are approachable, fun and informative! Topics range from the technical to the practical, peppering in the anecdotal, philosophical and beyond. Be part of the conversation by listening to the Podcast, sharing with friends and connecting via Instagram and Twitter. For more information visit their website at www.faceyourears.com
Face Your Ears
Episode 39: Song Scaffolding
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Song Scaffolding: Methods and Tools for Aspiring Musicians
In this episode of the Face Your Ears podcast, hosts Rich Bozic and Justin Hochella delve into the concept of song scaffolding, exploring structured approaches for songwriting. Topics include comparing strophic and through-composed songs, employing the SIMPLE method for song creation, analyzing existing songs for inspiration, and utilizing various tools in DAWs like Logic Pro to facilitate the songwriting process. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced musician, these insights offer valuable techniques for enhancing your creative workflow.
00:00 Introduction and Greetings
00:33 Upcoming Events and Projects
02:11 Podcast Milestones and Popular Episodes
03:32 Deep Dive into Song Scaffolding
07:04 The SIMPLE Method for Songwriting
17:29 Practical Tips for Using DAWs
22:05 Summary and Closing Remarks
Learn more about Kris Bradley's S.I.M.P.L.E Method:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xuCNnFpdBU
For Production assistance and coaching from Justin:
https://www.manmaderandom.com/
'Head Like A Hole' by Justin's 'Same Not Same' Industrial-Electronic music project:
https://music.apple.com/us/album/head-like-a-hole-single/1834582245
For Production Services, Coaching and Lessons, visit:
www.rjbmusicproduction.com
For help prepping your songs/voice for the studio:
www.bozicvoicestudio.com
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Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Face Your Ears podcast. My name's Rich Bozi. I'm joined here with Mixmaster Elite. Justin, Hola. How you doing, sir? I.
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Good. I feel like I need some horns for that. Like, Hey, I'm doing well. How are you, rich?
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245Things are going smoothly here. Prepping for our big concert. Coming up rehearsals are in full swing. Recording prep is happening, writing is happening, teaching and learning is happening. It's great here. How about you?
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245yeah, I am busy. So I've been working on new music myself. I've been in the studio lately. Working on music under Man made Random, which is my solo project that I do. I'm also busy with Same, not Same, which is a project I do with my friend Jay, and will be making an appearance at the Cleve Tober Fest coming up. So by the time this episode publishes Cleve Tober Fest will be like. Less than a week away, so it's coming up quickly. So I'm excited about that.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245recently also release a cover?
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245we did, yeah, it was quite, quite an interesting journey. We did a cover of Head, like a hole, a classic nine inch nail song. So both of us are huge fans of Nine Inch Nails. We both. Saw them live recently. I saw them just last month. And Jay did as well. And yeah, it was phenomenal. So yeah, we wanted to put a cover song together mainly for the live situation that we're gonna be in. So we thought, hey, it'd be fun to play a song that we love that people will recognize. So it's out there now on all streaming platforms?
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245will link it. We will
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245We will, we will. Outside of that, I was looking at the stats on our podcast here and
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245We've surpassed 3000
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Oh my God.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245and we're well on our way to 5,000.
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Wow.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245do you think about that,
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245I think that's incredible. I guess it's
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245I.
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245surreal to think that, thousands of people have listened to us. That's really cool. So I'm really excited about that.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245Or maybe one person a lot.
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245One person has a compulsive downloading problem. I don't know,
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245We'd like to thank our wives for
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Yeah.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245uh, uh, buying a
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Yeah. A bot farm.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245Listening
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Just downloading our podcast, no kidding aside, it's great to see that the podcast has that many, and we're excited to hit that 5,000 milestone mark speaking of stats and so forth, I was looking through downloads of our episodes and it was interesting in that one of the most popular episodes by far was our episode, seed to Song. I think it, it made sense for us to. Look at that and say could we continue to pull on that thread? And so here we are, dear listener, pulling on that thread today with you. And in today's episode we're gonna talk about taking that further, so this idea of song scaffolding and how we can continue to build out. A song. If you have a seed of an idea we're going to take that even further with song scaffolding today.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245the first thing I want to talk about is this idea of structure. this idea that Justin mentioned earlier of songs scaffolding kept coming up, there's a multi-layered approach, to this that we're gonna talk about today. songs can come into being in many different ways. We're just gonna give. One way that you could possibly go about this process. So first thing I wanna talk about is the idea of Dystrophic through composed song. So what atrophic song is as when you have basically the same music that repeats over and over again with different lyrics. Oftentimes verse, chorus, verse, chorus kind of situation. But even the verses sometimes could have a very similar melody each time you come back to them, not just the chorus. And then you have this other idea called through composed, which is the song constantly evolving and changing. Sometimes the sections never come back. You would. Experience a lot of this maybe in the Prog Rock genre. I know there's some dream theater songs like that that start in one place and end up in a completely different place by the end. These are two, kinds of structures that you can deal with when you're starting to build a song. so today we're gonna talk a little more about the idea of, I guess, atrophic kind of song and
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Yeah.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245this. So
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245you say, so dystrophic is more kind of what people are used to in terms of like pop music or rock music or that sort of thing?
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245A lot of times when you're listening to stuff on the top 10 list, oftentimes when you hear songs, uh, well, you'll you'll notice that there'll be a repetition of the same melody coming back in the different sections.
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Gotcha. Okay. Yes. So diving right in. So one approach that comes to mind for me is to. Find a song fi atrophic song, if you will. So maybe some sort of pop or rock song that you like whatever it might be. And then place that in your DAW of choice, be it Logic, pro, Ableton Live, cubase, whatever it might be. And really start to analyze it. So break it down to understand where is the intro, where's, the verse, where's the chorus or the bridge, et cetera, et cetera. And this can just give you like a linear kind of structure. Not that you're necessarily going to copy that same structure. Exactly, but it, again, we're talking about scaffolding, so it's helpful to just get a sense of okay, this, chapel Rone song that I really like, or whatever it is. Put that in, analyze it, get a sense of the structure that
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245And remember, we're we're approaching this from the point of view of someone who is new to this and who's
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245right.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245into it all. Like, you got your studio set up, you want to get into songwriting.
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Yes. So this is for somebody Yeah. Who's just figuring this out and learning. This is a great sort of method to approach this. There's a producer I really admire. Her name is Chris Bradley, and she has put together a really great approach called the simple method, S-I-M-P-L-E Method, which takes a lot of what I'm talking about in terms of the structured format. And, puts it in place so that, you can use it to analyze something, understand it, but then turn it into your own song structure. And I'm gonna butcher what she, has to say about it, but I'll sum it up and then I'll leave the link to the video so you can check it out and dive deeper into it. It's a fairly long video. It's 40 minutes, but it's definitely well worth watching. Just a quick summary of it. So the acronym simple stands for structure. So you want to look at the structure. In terms of the arrangement in the form, so like we were talking about before, that sort of strophic sort of structure, verse, chorus, et cetera, understand that I is for instrumentation. So listening like this is a really key thing to listen for the instruments being used. Drums, bass, guitars, piano, synths, samples, loops, whatever.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245So Breaking
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Right? And then m is for mood. So major or minor is is this gonna be like a happy, sad song? What genre is it gonna be in? What key is it gonna be in? And then pre-production is laying out the plan, assembling. A template that you might have. We don't have enough time in this podcast to go into what all that means, but basically setting the stage before you just dive in blindly. And then l is for leave that stuff behind so you can toss the template out the window, if you will. So once you start, to me what that means is once you start. Breaking stuff down in an analytical way, creativity starts to emerge and you can start to leave certain things behind and go your own way and try different things. And finally, E is for execute. Which is, moving forward and starting to put everything in place. So this was a really butchered explanation of that, but it's a great start for somebody who's just staring at a blank page. So like I said, check out the link. It's really cool. It's a really great method to, to kinda get started and inspired.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245So we mentioned that beginners could get some stuff from this, but I think also people who are more advanced can get some stuff out of this by perhaps a way you might have tried before or revisiting or, or, or starting off. A new way of
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245I, I really like it for trying to work on a song in a genre that you don't normally work on. So having a structure like this, like it, if you're someone who's very seasoned and you never write country music or you never write rock music or whatever, this method is really helpful for you to have a systematic approach to be like, oh, okay, this is how I can do it. This is how I can put something together like this. So really cool. I just really enjoy that approach.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245So there might be some people who would look at this and be like, well, you're just taking that song and you're, copying it. no, No, we're not saying. Rewrite the same song. What we're saying is, if you're new at this especially, you have to start to develop a language and a way of looking at songs so that eventually you can branch off and start
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Absolutely. Mm-hmm.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245your the, the analogy like. To use oftentimes with my students is the analogy of like what fine artists do, like painters and sculptors, and especially painters where they will oftentimes train for years recreating, Techniques that Masters before them have already established, with regard to how to look at, the subject that you're painting. you know, Even just painting inanimate objects and drawing and painting inanimate objects in front of you try to develop your skills. So copying the masters can be very. Useful. So like if we have successful producers that are doing things nowadays and you wanna be able to do things the pop world, might find those people that you admire and do this method that Justin is talking about. Bring it into the D, break it down, look and see what they're doing and be able to, start to have an idea of how this stuff is happening and then eventually. After you've done that enough times, hopefully you can start to learn deviate from that and create your
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Absolutely. Yeah, I I actually did this sort of thing with a Lady Gaga song. Called Abracadabra and it was fascinating. It was challenging. It was harder than I thought. So the idea was like, can I more or less recreate this song Abracadabra by Lady Gaga? And I basically used this approach where I put it in the DAW, I analyzed the sections and the next part. Was to sort of break down okay, what are the instruments? And that's a lot easier said than done um, to like go section by section, really listen critically and be like, okay what am I hearing here? What instruments am I hearing here? And that's the next phase of this, I think, which is to really develop a keen ear and listen to the instruments that are going on. And for me, what was cool was I was able to do that, but at the same time there was full like creative license for me to be like I don't want that kind of instrument here. I want this kind of instrument. You know? And I could, start to change things up to my own. Preference, if you will. And it ended up being like a more or less like a remix, of her song. But that approach really brought to light, like how how interesting that exercise can be and how it just, it's such fertile ground for creativity.'cause I could have very easily like. Just gone off on my own path and completely abandoned the song Abracadabra, and then come up with my own
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245Mm-hmm.
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245of pop song. Using that structure and some of the instrumentation and like you were saying before, like you have to copy the Masters first before you can develop your own sort of skillset and so on. It's like it made me think about. This idea that how many pop songs have the exact same chord progression? I, it's crazy, right? The 1, 4, 5, kind of thing or whatever there's so many songs that use the same cords, but, there people come up with all kinds of different melodies and instrumentation and all that fun stuff. So yeah, I think It's great for somebody who's learning this craft to have the ability to listen, to, analyze and develop their own sort of taste and style skillset based off of that.'cause I think that will naturally emerge through this kind of process.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245expanding on and deviating, from the original is a very important thing, uh, what I'm hearing You say, Justin. So it's, once again, we can't stress enough. It's not about just mimicking completely what you hear. It's about getting inspired. It's about digging into it a little bit, seeing is in the recipe, so that you could get ideas and sometimes, that could inspire a whole nother thing, right? And follow the impulse. Go for it. This is what we want, right? We want this inspiration to happen, and we want, uh, the creative ideas and the impulses, to guide you in that
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Yes, I mentioned this a bit earlier, but what is the mood of the song that you're going for? I think that. Can help direct the outcome. So is that happy, sad, thoughtful, energetic that kind of thing? Key signature, like changing the key signature surprisingly, will totally change the trajectory of the song. For example, if you're a singer and you're in a key signature that isn't comfortable for you that can, maybe push you into a place. That forces you to think differently or it could make you say like, this is the wrong key signature. I'm gonna change it to a different one that, that I'm more comfortable in. that's something that can totally change the feel of a song. Also I find personally. If I just set out and say like, I want to do this song in a really fast, like 160 beat per minute tempo, like it totally changes everything for me. Time signature along with tempo can really spark creative ideas. I glossed over time signature, but I think we're so used to like four four in our music, so that's standard like 1, 2, 3, 4 kind of beat. But playing with different time signatures can open up different. Avenues in your mind, in your creative outlet. So trying six, eight or three four or two four or whatever, like it can or something more like you mentioned pro rock before rich do some like prog rock like seven, eight or something like that. Uh, To just challenge yourself and go into different realms of music that you wouldn't normally. So I think these are just some of the things that. For me are sparks of creativity. So they seem so simple and arbitrary, but they're anything but
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245Yeah. This is all in that idea of scaffolding the kind of decisions you make early on in the process. That could lead to interesting ideas.
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245yeah.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245great. Justin? I mean, there's really no set order to this stuff. no, you know, right or wrong way to start. I just get in there and experiment a little bit. we're just trying to expand on that creative process. I have a question for you.'cause. You are the logic man here. Logic, the da. Right. And I guess regular logic too.
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Yes, I'm quite the Sherlock Holmes.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245I guess so. what are what are features, uh, that can help us in this process and logic? Is there anything you could throw
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Yeah, there definitely is. And I think a lot of daws share these types of features. But one, one set of features I really like are markers and arrangements. I guess they're s sections. In logic you can create markers which are literally just flags in the timeline to demarcate like. Anything you want. I generally use them to write something like intro or verse one, just to designate a section of the song. And so it's more or less like a note on the timeline to tell you something about that part of the song arrangement. Sections and logic are a little bit different and that. You can have an arrangement marker that's for say the chorus. And what's cool is like you can manipulate that entire thing or duplicate that entire, like chorus in this case. Move it to a different part of the song. So like if you have 10 tracks in your chorus and you can just drag the chorus to different parts, just to like quickly preview or hear, hey, what would it sound like if the chorus. Follow the first verse immediately instead of, there being some sort of, I don't know, segue or whatever it might be in the song.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245Oh, that's
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Yeah.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245you a lot of time
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Yep. Absolutely. So a lot of chopping, copying, and pasting and you can actually, in logic, convert the markers to arrangement sections. So that's helpful too.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245man, that would've been helpful, uh, to me a few weeks ago.
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Yes. So those are really handy, especially in this sort of realm. Tempo and key signature are, front and center at the top of your logic pro window or in your DAW, whatever it might be. So you can manipulate tempo and key signature pretty easily there. Something that I think some folks. Overlook or maybe aren't thinking about, especially if you're newer to this kind of stuff, is automation. Especially for things like tempo automation is generally thought of as oh, like fading something out, like volume or like bringing an effect in, that kind of thing. But you can also use it for tempos. So if you wanna slow the the track down you can even automate things like your. Time signature that, you know, that kind of thing. It's pretty cool. Another great thing that a lot of DAWs have, including logic is the notes field. There's like a space to put notes in. So this could be like lyrics or ideas that you have, things you might wanna try out. There's a metronome. Sounds really basic and simple, that can really help the recording process kind of speed things along, making sure that your, recordings are adhering to the tempo, which can save time later on for sure that you don't have to edit like crazy. And then I love all the stock sounds and loops. So Logic has a ton of these thousands.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245like sing the
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Yeah. Thousands insane.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245library.
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245So those to me are such a great. Avenue of inspiration just to sift through those. I love too that in logic the audio loops and so forth have different categories like genre or even, like what is it feeling or descriptors. That's it. So you can sort it by instrument or genre or descriptors and descriptors are things like. Relaxed, intense, dark, dissonant, melodic, so you know, it, it can help you dial in what it is you're looking for. So there's like really cool tools to help you with that. And one thing I also love is the chord track in Logic Pro. So
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245Hmm.
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245this is something, I don't know if a lot of DAWs have this yet, but logic. Allows you to program in the chord progression of a song, and you can easily generate parts from those chords. So like you can put in like a virtual bass player or keyboard player, for example. And not that you would just, click and be done. But like we're talking about, it's about creating scaffolding. So if you're like, okay, I wanna see what a baseline would sound like here, and you can dial in the right sort of bass part based on that chord progression. So yeah, those are some just quick hits. I think within like a DAW, like logic, there's a lot of really great tools in there to help. Build that scaffolding and inspire you and flush out the creative ideas that you're coming up with.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245Nice. So just to kind of sum things up here today, we talked a little bit about song scaffolding and we touched upon the idea of a strophic versus the through composed song. And then Justin introduced the idea of the SIMPLE method. And we'll link to that video that fleshes that out more, uh,
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Okay.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245Cool. It's always Cool. to have another way of approaching this stuff. then we talked a little bit about, breaking down, the structure and analyzing what's happening in the track and the details of the track, and using that to inspire, creativity and to deviate, to start thinking of your own ideas. Justin also mentioned the idea of mood and how you can use. The structural things like tempo, and key to help. Craft the mood of the song. And then, to close it out here, Justin just mentioned a bunch of tools you could use in Logic to help with these things. And I'm sure there are other things in other that you could discover as well that can help you. This episode was just designed to talk about the general idea of song scaffolding. we're gonna get into more detail. I guess precise detail about specifics with regard to songwriting in episodes to come. We've talked about this. We have some ideas on the horizon. Thank you, Justin.
Justinjustin_1_09-08-2025_111245Yeah. Thank you Rich. Yeah, there's always so much to talk about. So I'm excited and I look forward to unpacking more of this with you in detail in a future episode to come. So with that, we'll wrap it up. And once again, everyone, thank you for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode. Bye for now.
Richrich_1_09-08-2025_111245Take care.
