How to Craft a Hit Song

Ever dreamt of making a hit song? Think you have what it takes to become an overnight sensation but want to skip the American Idol hoop? If you’re a songster practicing in a garage, for instance, fame and fortune may be closer than you think. You’ve written some songs and maybe performed in local venues, maybe even with a band, and now you’re ready to cut that CD you’ve been rapping about. What you need is a sound engineer.

In today’s pop market, each segment of a hit song becomes a composite pieced together by a sound engineer. A recorded song is contingent on the engineering of each note and the making of a hit song depends not only on talent and the market, but also on the energy and persona of the artist.

Sound Engineer Matt Brown of Sonikwire Studios, premier recording studio in Orange County, Calif., says: “If (a song) doesn’t make your foot tap,” then an engineer can add the missing tempo and create a performance that isn’t. He says if you see pop stars with an entourage on TV late at night, they’re recreating a sound mixed and mastered by a studio.

Though Sonikwire Studios has dealt with stars like Whitney Houston and the Safari’s, who wrote “Wipe Out,” they generally cater to local bands and corporate voiceover needs. When it comes to local bands, Brown says, sometimes he sends them away to practice more.

“I work to deliver quality,” he says, and quality involves a pre-production phase where the artist or band rehearses their compositions with the tempo and arrangements decided in advance of their studio recording.

“”Wipe Out” is a classic because it was well written,” says Deven Berryhill, whose father is the only original guy left in the Safaris. He says the hit song was created because the sound engineer told the band they had extra time for another side on their 45. “Wipe Out,” the Safaris single hit that has survived for 40 years?mostly as commercial jingles?was created in 10 minutes as side two to “Surfer Joe,” which ended up as a minor hit.

“The manager did the “Wipe Out” laugh, and the rest (as they say) is history,” Berryhill says, but not before the manager took the song to a friend who worked on late night radio.

“By the next day, “Wipe Out” was the most requested song in LA,” Berryhill explained, adding that record company DOT, since bought out by MCA Records, after releasing the song without a contract, picked the song up and promoted it. The song has been re-recorded with the new band and digitized at Sonikwire Studios.

Brown believes that a hit song has less to do with the music and more to do with the market, and a certain level of commitment and ambition on the artist’s part.

“Rock and alternative bands that work hard just make hits,” he says, “because of an awareness of their audience âÂ?¦ they’re savvy and ambitious and are able to focus on (their) uniqueness.”

He added that another way a hit is made is that it is manufactured, and he cited Ontario’s famous export Avril Lavigne, who sold more than 5 million copies of her debut album (see www.mtv.com: Avril Lavigne), as a perfect example of a manufactured hit.

“She’s young, has a good voice, is charismatic.”

In an MTV interview, Lavigne says she never recorded any of the songs she wrote. When producers spotted her, they hired three people well known in the industry. Brown says The Matrix, a husband-wife team with a partner, has written hit songs for Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake. They composed Lavigne’s first single “Complicated” and all her radio songs including “Sk8er Boi,” which is being made into a movie.

She embodied something kids can relate to. “Everything about her was well-timed,” Brown explained. “Avril Lavigne is the anti-Britney (Spears) âÂ?¦ more authentic than the Britney experience âÂ?¦ Lavigne has that punk-thing and attitude-she’s cute, her boys are cute,” a live band that fits the role.

Now that she’s working on her second album, she’s dying to write, Lavigne told the MTV crew. Her new songs are more her and she’s looking forward to the next record and tour. According to “Rollingstone Magazine” (July 2002), since signing with Arista, she has resisted their efforts to have her perform other writer’s songs.

Brown is familiar with one guy from Linkin Park who plays the cello and who has been in to Sonikwire to record. Brown says clever marketing and aggressive planning on the band’s part made Linkin Park one of the top 10 bands today. Linkin Park is a crossbreed of diversity, unique in that they have changed their name several times and removed curses from their lyrics as band members came and went.

Bass guitarist Phoenix (aka David Michael Farrell, hence Phoenix from “Mystery Men”) and wife Linsey (she calls him Dave), says the band tends to still be refining their music during the recording process, and that engineering (the sound of a song) is a good thing in that you want the sound to be quality.

As far as hit songs go, Phoenix thought most pop writing people and their producers have in mind three songs as hits and singles of the album, while rock tends to write songs for an album that radio affiliates and record companies, along with the band, decide as the best singles.

“Then you are just lucky if your fans and the public like it,” he says.

Leon Sandoval, a local musician from San Diego whose band Sandova produced one CD, says, in his opinion a hit song is either formula-driven or “from the heart and soul” of a songwriter. “People who write pop music,” he believes, “know a good formula that is basically the same skeleton with difference clothes” per artist.

Sandoval says, “Sometimes a hit is written from the heart and soul âÂ?¦ songs that connect with people on a different level âÂ?¦ songs more about the heart and less about being pleasing to the ear.”

Pleasing to the ear. At least that’s what he witnessed at Sony Studios when in 2000, his friend Hoku Ho, Hawaiian legend Don Ho’s pop star daughter making her own mark nationally (Honolulu Star Bulletin, May 20, 2000), recorded a song she wrote for her CD contracted through David Geffen.

“It was a very tedious process to watch the studio engineer basically go through every note Hoku wrote, playing and conditioning it somehow.”

He says Hoku would play a few bars on her guitar and the studio engineer would, in basic terms, copy and paste each note onto a computer, digitizing the piece, and although Hoku wrote, sung and played the tune, the song on CD is really created by the sound engineer.

Brown recalled Hoku’s as yet unreleased single called “Summer On,” recorded at Sonikwire: “Her previous music was more electronica but her new song needed a contemporary rock sound âÂ?¦ so her drummer came down and a couple of musicians to flesh out her song.”

Sandova cut their CD in 1999 independent of a recording mogul so while he didn’t experience the pressure from a record contract, he did experience some frustrations. The CD was self-marketed and sold in Sam Goody’s stores throughout the southland, but Sandoval remembers the errors.

“We ended up with a CD that was less than perfect,” he says, adding that artists under a record contract know they have to practice more.

“Hoku is well practiced,” he says. “When performing live, (an artist) knows they have to play as well as their CD sounds or fans will just stay home and listen to your CD instead.”
But, just what makes a song a hit?

Hit song “Another Dumb Blonde” was written for Hoku and became the cornerstone for her CD, although she wrote several songs on that album, producing one (www.mtv.com-News-Hoku Talks).

Hoku’s hit was marketed to the movie industry through Nickelodeon for Paramount Pictures’ “Snow Days.” Sony delivered the hit song to play on radio as a promotion piece for both the movie and the CD.

Sandoval says that money from a record company at first is like a student loan and has to be paid back through sales. “That’s why there are so many one-hit wonders,” he says, adding that most artists don’t have the resources to make a second hit.
In the film “That Thing You Do,” produced and directed by Tom Hanks, a small town band is discovered by a talent scout who distributes a cassette to a local radio station. An agent (played to perfection by Tom Hanks) picks up the band and engineers their persona, pays for their gigs, and sees them through their one-hit wonder.

Phoenix explained that there are two types of royalties for a hit song: mechanical and publishing, the later holding the highest value as the artist gets paid for writing the music.

Brown catalogued the music industry all the way back to the 1950s, claiming: “The social stigma (then) was all black music and the theory behind Elvis is that he loved that music and was able to deliver it âÂ?¦ but predicting a hit is hard âÂ?¦ it’s a combination of song and market and how an artist can balance personal artistic ability and the market.”