Ever wonder what goes into the making of a chart-topping song? Well, SongChemistry.com, an online song-analyzing tool breaks it down for you. The song analyzing service is now a hit itself with a following of amateur songwriters, professional producers, music scholars and students, DJs, and just plain music lovers. It also offers a lyric search option that allows you to locate songs just by the lyrics. Their database includes Pop, Rock, R&B, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Country, Blues, Dance, Latin, Reggae, International, Classical, and Religious, ranging from 1929 to 2012. We talked to one of the co-founders of this unique online portal, Michael R. Crump, senior vice president, business development for Musical Innovative Products.
Q. When did you start the company?
A. My partner Travis Williams and I started Musical Concepts in 2006 and Song Chemistry is one component of our company’s line of Musical Innovative Products.
Q. Why did you decide to start the company?
A. The idea actually occurred in 2001. In our opinion, music was slowly degrading and had been for a while. In an effort to stay relevant in today’s industry, artists are “dumbing down” their talent and sound. Professionally that is understandable, however; we were concerned about the long-term effect on future artists as well as fans abound. Would they know how to identify good music? They would lack the knowledge of chord progression, clever lyrics, songs playing in key, song structure, the ability to identify traditional instruments, and they would call music tracks “beats”. In the ´80s, underground music still existed but the difference was we had a great balance with mainstream music like Anita Baker, Culture Club, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, etc. With our product Song Chemistry, we are attempting to teach all kinds of music producers and listeners to understand and appreciate the similarities and differences in today’s and yesterday’s music.
Q: How does it work?
A. Each week SongChemistry.com will present the top 10 songs in the nation. By utilizing our system, you will be able to thoroughly inspect these 10 songs and distinguish how these techniques can impact your own productions, songwriting, and mixing sessions. You’ll discover arrangements, song keys, drum sounds, instruments, samples, and background vocalists. You’ll find chart information divided by the most important parts of the songs, interacting multimedia, and graphical information. Afterwards you’ll be able to examine those 10 songs in comparison to one another and analyze their specific areas of use.
Q. What was your major obstacle in starting the business?
A. There were two main obstacles. First, we had to decide whether to make Song Chemistry a stand-alone program or a website, but with careful consideration of the uprising social aspects of the Internet and our passion to share production knowledge, we decided to make it available via the Web to anyone interested in learning music production. Second, was data entry. It took years of planning, trial and error, coding and patience to produce a program that would assist us in entering precise data at a rapid rate. We simply overcame our obstacles by planning our work and then working our plan.
Q. What are your goals for Song Chemistry?
A. We would like to see Song Chemistry being the leader in Song Data Analysis. Song Chemistry will be the go-to source for accurate and reliable song data.
