How to you cope with the problem of accidental plagiarizing?

[Li Shenron]

Me and my bandmates are going through a period of brainstorm songwriting. Each of us is putting down a bunch of ideas every week, and then work a bit on the most promising 1-2 of them before submitting it to the rest of the band's judgement.

 

My problem is that sometimes I fail to recognize when some idea I am coming up with is actually not original, but it's very similar to someone else's music that I have listened to in the past.

 

I'm not talking about famous songs, those should be fairly easy to recognize, and if not by me then by the other bandmates. I'm talking about melodic ideas or grooves coming from obscure songs and bands, stuff that 99% of the people have never heard. But I have... The problem is that at my age and with my bulimia in listening to really a lot of music, I have probably so far in my life listened to literally tens of thousands of songs, who knows how many of these "got stuck" in the back of my memory and come out while composing, without me remembering that they were originally someone else's

 

It already happened twice this week. In one case I was actually using a riff/groove that I didn't recognize I heard it already. It's nothing less than the main groove of a top-single released by one of those cute little chicks of fashion in mainstream pop. Since I avoid such genre, I must have accidentally overheard it somewhere and it sticked to my mind Luckily someone else in the band eats mainstream pop like candies and immediately recognized it, and had her revenge against me who used to make fun of her about her tastes of course

 

The other case was much more frustrating, since I had actually already started months ago working on developing it from the original melodic idea, which seemed pretty damn good, and in fact I had been suspicious since the start... the song I was coming up is very retro (think early Queen) and I had been trying to listen again - after maybe 10 years - to some truly old albums of ragtime and swing because I thought that might have been where I heard it. Then a few days ago I accidentally saw an italian B-movie I watched a couple of times when I was a kid (think >20 years ago) and there it was... the first 10 notes of "my" song are {censored}in' identical to the theme of that movie , except that they are in shuffle rhythm while in the movie they are all eight notes, but I guess this is not enough to avoid plagiarism...

 

I don't know maybe I'm worrying too much... but what if we didn't notice and end up actually recording those songs? It's quite scary on what could be the consequences! How do you guys composing and playing in original bands cope with this problem

[WRGKMC]

This is a common problem when you play in cover bands alot or listen to certain music alot. The echos of those songs resurface and all of a sudden you think that groove in yours.

 

If you widen your listening the influences what may come to you writing is built from a much larger variety of material stored with you in bits and pieces and as you get away from playing cover stuff and write more and more of your own having something come up thats close to someone else occurs less and less.

 

Its tough though because you want to stay contemporary, but you dont want to sound like a clone either.

 

When you pick a genre of music and listen, take disco for example, the same kick beat and clickety click high hats are there in nearly every song. It wouldnt be that genre without it. The rest of the music can be very different giving the song its own unique groove.

 

In reality eveything you know and learn comes from the world around you. the best you can do is arrange the parts that comprise a song make it unique. I really dont worry about sounding like anyone else any more. Even when I play covers I do my own interpetation of the song and may change certain things to sound like me vs adapting my own style to be someone I'm not.

 

Copying other people music just got to be so pointless after awhile. Other than making a few bucks playing local or learning some new riffs, it generally gets you know there once you graduate from playing it, and thats the key word, "graduate".

 

Some try to graduate too soon from playing covers and have no milage on them so when it comes to writing, they are extremely limited for ideas or arrangements. Back when I first started playing with bands I had maybe 4 or 5decent songs writen from jamming and experimenting. We played them great but couldnt play a whole show on them. some of them were kind of substitute type songs for what we may have been playing at the time, but over time even that dissapeared and the songs became truely unique.

 

Looking back now after maybe 25 steady cover bands then switching to writing 100%, I have literally hundreds of great tunes written. I dont even listen to music on the radio anymore. Half of what you hear is such junk anyway, it doesnt draw my attention for very long.

 

If I was to take any one of my current songs written I could make a point that this one kinda sounds like a combination of this or that, but who cares. If you didnt intentionally use other people material, and you have different musicians playing the parts adding their own influences, its impossible to figure where it may have originated from.

 

The best you can do is say, it has an influence and it fits a certain genre. If I was to consider the music I grew up on and cut my teeth playing, I may be able to hear a littel of that come through here and there. But Its just parts of the overall personality.

 

As one great musician said, You take the of what I play and I'll take the best of you and we'll call it even.

 

I'll never run out of new styles and riffs so Its not like I'm going to run dry on developing new things.

[BlueSteam]

I think it'd be impossible to come up with something truly original that hasn't already been done at this point. There are too many people playing music and a finite number of notes to play. If you're not purposefully copying something, then I wouldn't worry about it. Also, you're allowed to be inspired by other people's writing and to model yourself after them... I don't think you're in a risky situation at all.

[Lee Knight]

Don't let it freeze you up but always be on the lookout. It sucks to have unknowingly plagiarized. Take the time after you've had your creative purge to make sure it is your own best you can.

 

But like I said, don't let it freeze you up.

[eeglug]

I try to salvage the idea by making a few changes so I'm not doing a complete rip-off. I'm not so in love with the things I come up with that I can't make some changes to it - just enough to satisfy some arbitrary level of uniqueness so I can sleep at night.

 

Let's face it: anybody making some form of popular music (using the broadest possible definition of that term) is usually dealing with a highly restricted palette. A lot of are working in 4/4, many in diatonic or restricted modal harmony, a limited topics for lyrics...it's a tiny spec of real estate compared to the infinite permutations that could actually be. So, yes, we're mostly not doing anything new.

[Stackabones]

Plagiarism is about intent and that intent involves dishonesty and misrepresentation.

 

Let's say that I write a riff. Someone points out that it is exactly the same as Led Zeppelin's Black Dog, which (for the sake of argument) I have never heard before. I go back and listen and realize that, yes, my riff sounds exactly like it. I cease representing the riff as my own work. This is not an act of plagiarism.

 

Let's say that I write another riff, except this time I don't write it but I find a seemingly obscure riff and claim that I wrote it and present as my own creation. This is plagiarism.

 

You have not committed plagiarism.

[blue2blue]

Me and my bandmates are going through a period of brainstorm songwriting. Each of us is putting down a bunch of ideas every week, and then work a bit on the most promising 1-2 of them before submitting it to the rest of the band's judgement. My problem is that sometimes I fail to recognize when some idea I am coming up with is actually not original, but it's very similar to someone else's music that I have listened to in the past. I'm not talking about famous songs, those should be fairly easy to recognize, and if not by me then by the other bandmates. I'm talking about melodic ideas or grooves coming from obscure songs and bands, stuff that 99% of the people have never heard. But I have... The problem is that at my age and with my bulimia in listening to really a lot of music, I have probably so far in my life listened to literally tens of thousands of songs, who knows how many of these "got stuck" in the back of my memory and come out while composing, without me remembering that they were originally someone else's It already happened twice this week. In one case I was actually using a riff/groove that I didn't recognize I heard it already. It's nothing less than the main groove of a top-single released by one of those cute little chicks of fashion in mainstream pop. Since I avoid such genre, I must have accidentally overheard it somewhere and it sticked to my mind Luckily someone else in the band eats mainstream pop like candies and immediately recognized it, and had her revenge against me who used to make fun of her about her tastes of course The other case was much more frustrating, since I had actually already started months ago working on developing it from the original melodic idea, which seemed pretty damn good, and in fact I had been suspicious since the start... the song I was coming up is very retro (think early Queen) and I had been trying to listen again - after maybe 10 years - to some truly old albums of ragtime and swing because I thought that might have been where I heard it. Then a few days ago I accidentally saw an italian B-movie I watched a couple of times when I was a kid (think >20 years ago) and there it was... the first 10 notes of "my" song are {censored}in' identical to the theme of that movie , except that they are in shuffle rhythm while in the movie they are all eight notes, but I guess this is not enough to avoid plagiarism... I don't know maybe I'm worrying too much... but what if we didn't notice and end up actually recording those songs? It's quite scary on what could be the consequences! How do you guys composing and playing in original bands cope with this problem

I think a lot of us worry about this... but at a certain point, what can you do? You end up being afraid to put any ideas down because they might end up echoing one of the other 900 million songs out there.

 

I'm not, in any way, laughing off the problem. (Shrugging off, maybe, a little.) Within the last year or two I had a very similar situation when I was writing a song and found myself putting in this very heartfelt ad libbed phrase that stuck. But, after I did a prelim recording, I found myself thinking... hey, wait a sec... this sounds... familiar.

 

I rolled in around and around in my head and then realized it was from one of my least favorite major hits of all freakin' time, Peter Frampton's "Show Me the Way." Worse, guess what? It was the title phrase, show me the way... pretty much more or less on melody and everything. It was hugely embarrassing to me when I realized it -- and I was alone. I imagined how I would have felt if one of my old pals, knowing how much I loathe that song had recognized it and nailed me...

[WRGKMC]

Heck I was working on one last night. I started with a heavy rap type disco beat and some blues chords which is extremely unusual for the normal stuff I do. I just never attempted using that type of beat before so I figured I'd give it a whirl. The chords were basically from another song I did that didnt come out as well as I thought they would.

 

By the time I got done adding bass vocals and lead it sounded like a bad rap version of a major bands song and a touch of another older band if you follow the bass part too. See if you can figure it out with a quick listen, I'll post the name and song later and you'll probibly go, oh yea, it does sound like that in parts.

 

By the way the lyrics are a bit X rated so beware of whose hearing it play back.

 

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1682170/Long%20Long%20Gone%20%5Bmaster%5D.mp3

 

This simularity was quite unintentional, I made up the melody where it seemed to fit, used my own lyrics. The chorus is quite different and all, but I never caught on till I was mixing it and discovered it had simularities. I still have to write lyrics fo it. I was making them up out of my head. Since I hear a simularity I'll definately rephrase and repattern my melody and lyrics to remove any trace of the simularity. Maybe the Tele had something to do with it too, but I may wind up leaving it too. Heck, once I get something solid, I do it with the band and it sounds different anyway so who knows what I'll wind up with at that point.

[Lee Knight]

Plagiarism is about intent and that intent involves dishonesty and misrepresentation. Let's say that I write a riff. Someone points out that it is exactly the same as Led Zeppelin's Black Dog , which (for the sake of argument) I have never heard before. I go back and listen and realize that, yes, my riff sounds exactly like it. I cease representing the riff as my own work. This is not an act of plagiarism. Let's say that I write another riff, except this time I don't write it but I find a seemingly obscure riff and claim that I wrote it and present as my own creation. This is plagiarism. You have not committed plagiarism.

 

You're speaking morally... and you're right. But G. Harrison didn't intend to lift He's So Fine but it cost him just the same. I think it's worth paying attention to. Especially when you intend to release your music as you're own. Speaking first hand, if nothing else, it's embarrassing.

[Stackabones]

 

You're speaking morally ... and you're right. But G. Harrison didn't intend to lift He's So Fine but it cost him just the same. I think it's worth paying attention to. Especially when you intend to release your music as you're own.

 

 

Too true. IIRC copyright infringement suits are not settled on the intent of the accused. If the court hears something identical, you lose.

 

Yet the basic fact remains that very few of us will ever step foot in a court for such a trial indicates (to me) that any such claim of plagiarism should be considered a moral issue, not a legal one. From what I gather, Li Shenron isn't morally culpable. YMMV.

[rockinrobby]

"How to you cope with the problem of accidental plagiarizing?"

 

You send me a check and STOP kipeing my material!

 

[kurdy]

There is no foolproof method to avoid it; since most of us have probably heard hundreds of songs in our lifetime, some influence is inevitable.

 

This happens to me a lot--coming up with an idea and having the feeling that I've heard it somewhere before. The way I deal with it is to never trust the first idea that comes into my head. That initial idea may set the tone, but it's really just a starting point for me. I'll listen to what I have so far, and from there I'll change the meter of a line, rearrange a few notes around, maybe alter the chord progression. I pay close attention to the melody in particular, and go over each line very deliberately. It's a gradual process. Eventually that little voice of doubt inside my head fades, and I become confident enough that the song is my own.

 

Although, sometimes I've gone overboard with this approach in the past trying to make it sound original, that I wind up with a melody or chord progression that's a little too awkward. So now I've realized it's equally important to make sure the melody sounds natural. It's a fine line to walk.

 

So in general, I would say the best way to deal with it is to take your time. Just be conscious of what you're doing and how your ideas come about. If you've got a rush of notes that pop into your head all at once, there's a good chance they were influenced by something you've heard, so you have to make the decision--"Do I want to keep it the way it is? Or is there a way I can change a few notes around and still retain the overall feeling?" And be patient. You may get a little overwhelmed at times, but once you've worked on the song enough, and have let your ideas incubate, that initial self-consciousness will fade, and you can comfortably accept the song as one of your own. At least that's been my experience.

[rockinrobby]

My attorneys "Dewey, Screwem and Howe" will be in touch...

[Oswlek]

If it is blatant, I'll typically just drop what I am doing and move on. I typically has out 1-3 new songs a week along with 3-4 ideas, so I never feel that this one song just has to be made.

 

Sometimes, if it is similar, but different enough, I'll even reference the original composition as a likely source of inspiration. Though, I'm not sure that would work as well if I were a bit less of an amateur.

[Cliftonb]

Personally I find that the more different types of music I listen to, the less likely unintentional plagiarism is going to happen. So my suggestion is listen to even more stuff - big band klezmer, Hindustani classical, Musique Concr

[lp_junkie]

That is the frustrating part of it, coming up with something that is your own, when there is so much already out there.

 

If you do realize that you've heard it before when you are writing, change some words, or do something different with the riff.

[Wyzsard]

Good topic. I don't listen to a lot of commercial country music, but I do check it out from time to time. No doubt there are some excellent writers in that biz, and even if you dislike country, you can still learn some things about crafting lyrics.

 

I have noticed a few times, when a "new country" song becomes a hit, a different take or version of it will appear and also climb the charts. I suppose this slides because you can't copyright a title or idea.

 

I just don't worry about it. If I was trying to write commercial pop or country hits, I suppose I'd be more concerned.

[Stackabones]

Eureka! I knew there was a word for this!!!

 

CRYPTOMNESIA

 

Came across reading this article, The Ecstasy of Influence, by Jonathan Lethem, which is serendipitously apropos for this tread.

[ChordGirl]

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." --Albert Einstein

 

 

 

 

and there it was... the first 10 notes of "my" song are {censored}in' identical to the theme of that movie , except that they are in shuffle rhythm while in the movie they are all eight notes , but I guess this is not enough to avoid plagiarism...

 

That means they are not the same melody. :poke: You didn't copy it. Don't worry about it.

[Li Shenron]

That means they are not the same melody. :poke: You didn't copy it. Don't worry about it.

 

 

Uhm... what makes you sure? I seem to remember that there is a law or some precedent at least where it was stated that 7 identical notes in succession constitute plagiarism, while 6 or less do not (I have no idea where have I read this, but didn't make this up! anyone has heard this before?). But I thought this referred to the pitch and not the duration, since it's way too easy to slightly change the duration of one note every 7 while the overall melody would remain practically the same.

[kurdy]

 

Uhm... what makes you sure? I seem to remember that there is a law or some precedent at least where it was stated that 7 identical notes in succession constitute plagiarism, while 6 or less do not (I have no idea where have I read this, but didn't make this up! anyone has heard this before?). But I thought this referred to the pitch and not the duration, since it's way too easy to slightly change the duration of one note every 7 while the overall melody would remain practically the same.

 

 

The hardest situation is the feeling that you've heard something before, but aren't exactly sure where, because then it's hard to know what you to need to alter. But in your case, it sounds like you know the source. So even if you just switch around two or three of those ten notes, it should make the melody different enough not to be a copy.

 

Or maybe ChordGirl is right. Maybe it's already different enough not to get you into any trouble. In the end, it's your call.

 

I also like the suggestion a few posts up of putting it away for a while and working on something else, It's very easy to fall into the trap of paralysis from analysis, where thinking about it for too long makes you lose all perspective. Often, just taking a break from the song will allow you to come back to it later with a fresh ear.

[Stackabones]

I'd take the chance. If you get sued, you'll be famous.

[ChordGirl]

Uhm... what makes you sure? I seem to remember that there is a law or some precedent at least where it was stated that 7 identical notes in succession constitute plagiarism, while 6 or less do not (I have no idea where have I read this, but didn't make this up! anyone has heard this before?). But I thought this referred to the pitch and not the duration, since it's way too easy to slightly change the duration of one note every 7 while the overall melody would remain practically the same.

 

I would think it has to refer to the duration in addition to pitch. That's what a melody is, relative pitches in time. Without the time relation, it's just notes in space. But it's not really fair if I can't do a seven half note walk down because god knows someone has to have already done that.

 

You may have read that 7 note thing somewhere before. I'm sure they had some statistician working out the formula. In my opinion, that was probably set up in the case of a blatant plagarism suit, which was something like you described. However, if I decide to put a 7 half-step walk down in my melody line (which just about has to already be in a copywrited melody somewhere, you'd think), I doubt anyone would be able to sue me over it--especially since the rest of the melody would be quite different I'm sure.

 

 

You don't really hear many lawsuits relatively speaking about these things. Yet, I hear pieces of songs all the time that sound similar to pieces in other songs.

 

I just don't worry about it anymore. I guarantee pieces of my songs sound like pieces of other melodies, simply because of the vast number of songs that are copywrited, plus all the ones that aren't. There are so many songs. How long would it take to listen to them all to make sure you're not plaigarising?

 

I know my writing process, and I know I didn't steal anything. My melody will flow smoothly and make sense before I'm done with it( at least, that's the goal ) , and will in it's entirety resemble no other songs--that I know of, anyway.

 

Like Lee said, don't let it paralyze you. Just write what comes out of you. If you notice someone else had that idea first, tweek your idea. But don't look at it in chunks. Look at your complete melody line and how it flows. Just my opinion. It's too creatively limiting to worry about that stuff too much.