Finding Heart in the Hitmaking Machine

Aspiring songwriters have struggled for decades to discover the formula for writing a hit song. But according to Ted Bruner, who has penned hits for a variety of artists, including Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Bowling For Soup and Plain White T's, the secret of success is to avoid a formulaic approach altogether.

“The music industry is on its knees right now because they're trying to build a formula,” says Bruner. “A hit song is not about a formula. Corporate music executives think that hits need to sound the same, which is ridiculous. It's about trying to one-up the last song that became a hit. In the Sixties, which I think was the heyday of pop music, you had a new song every week from artists like the Doors, the Beatles and the Mamas and the Papas. You never knew what you were going to get next. It was refreshing.”

Ted Bruner represents a new breed of songwriter that is shaping the future of the music industry. Unlike the songwriters of previous eras who presented their creations to artists via pen and paper or sparse, skeletal demos, Bruner is a hands-on collaborator who prefers to freely exchange ideas with the artists he works with and also produce the finished recording, remaining involved in the entire creative process from beginning to end.

Bruner started making music when he was 15 after his mother died in a car accident. “She died young,” says Bruner. “The lesson I learned was that you should do whatever you want to do in life because you never know when your time is up. I felt that the people who were having the most fun on this planet were musicians, so I decided to join them.”

Ted learned to play keyboards first, and when his father bought him a guitar and a four-track recorder he dove headlong into writing songs. While still in high school in he formed the band Colony, which relocated to Columbia, Missouri, when Bruner and several members of the band started studying at the University of Missouri.

“The band got a van and we took over the town,” he recalls. “Then MCA Records discovered us and signed the band.”

Colony released their debut album, Siren, in 1998. Less than a year later and before the band had a chance to develop a national following, Colony was dropped when MCA Records merged with Universal. “We were one of the last bands signed to MCA,” says Bruner. “We then got a deal with an indie label, Beyond Music, and released another album (Who I Wanted To Be). When that didn't work out I moved to Los Angeles at my music publisher's suggestion to become a producer in 2002. I started working with other artists and developing myself as a songwriter and producer.”

Bruner's publisher–Ron Moss, Vice President of A&R at Rondor Music International and the son of A&M Records co-founder Jerry Moss–owned a recording studio, which enabled Bruner to work on demos for free. “I got young artists into the studio with me,” says Ted. “I would co-write with them and produce a demo. At that time I was focused mainly on songwriting and the production work was just a bonus. Eventually that led to songs that appeared on albums. One of my first cuts to make it to an album was 'Ohio (Come Back To Texas),' which was on Bowling For Soup's A Hangover You Don't Deserve. That got my feet wet and made me realize that I may be able to do it.”

As Bruner landed more songwriting projects, his production work on his demos started to gain attention as well. For artists like Selena Gomez, Jessie James and Katy Perry his production work became such a crucial and essential element of the creative process that he was brought onboard to complete the final version of the song. His work on Perry's songs “Lost” and “I Think I'm Ready” in particular has led to offers to produce other artists as well, but Bruner generally prefers to work only on songs where he's also involved as a songwriter.

Bruner played all of the instruments on his demos with Katy Perry except the drums, taking advantage of his guitar and keyboard playing skills. “Those demos started out with me noodling around on a keyboard,” he explains. “It usually started with a bizarre sound that took us to another world instead of making us feel like we were just working on a radio pop song. Once we laid down the vocals I tried to make the instruments resonate with that feeling.”

Bruner's enthusiasm for exploring new sounds made him the perfect candidate for a test drive of the Boss GT-10 Guitar Effects Processor. Guitar Center invited Ted to its Hollywood, California, store where he picked up the GT-10, and then he was taken to Roland headquarters for a three-hour tutorial/demo with a Roland product specialist who showed him the GT-10's features and revealed a few helpful tips for getting the most out of the unit in the studio. We caught up with him a week later to see how he was getting along with the GT-10.

With the addition of a Boss GT-10 to his arsenal of studio gear, Bruner finds himself using the guitar more often to find inspiration for new song ideas. The GT-10's wide variety of effects, including a vast selection of overdrive/distortion, EQ, phaser, flanger, tremolo, wah, chorus, delay, reverb, pitch shifter and guitar synth processors, and comprehensive assortment of amp models have given him an almost unlimited source of new sounds to explore.

“I've played Boss pedals since the beginning of my band days,” he says. “The GT-10 has all of those pedals in there combined, plus a lot more like its amp models. I used it on a song I was recording for Tiffany Page to add a lot of parts that are crucial to the song. I've just been dialing through the presets, which are the launching pads for songs that I write, and adjusting them slightly. It's given me so many atmospheres and soundscapes that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise, and it has made my recordings sound so much richer and more professional.”

One of Bruner's favorite and most helpful features of the GT-10 is its Phrase Loop function: “The looper is great for writing songs. I used to record riffs in Pro Tools, loop them, and then think of melodies to go over the top of the loops, but that can take time to set up. With the GT-10 I can just hit a button and capture the riff right there on the spot. Everything is more instantaneous, and I can capture ideas while they're still fresh.”

Bruner is also inspired by the GT-10's EZ Tone Wizard feature, which allows guitarists to quickly create tones in a wide variety of styles: “I like to use sounds out of context, such as having a funk guitar sound in a folky pop song or metal guitars in a dance tune. This gives me the ability to instantly create sounds that I have no idea how to achieve with conventional gear. I can keep flipping through sounds until something knocks me out, and then I can blend that with another entirely different sound. When you create a fusion of different sounds it creates a new sound unto itself. You can break new ground and form a sound with the GT-10 that isn't rooted in a sound that everyone has heard in the past. That's what I think needs to happen in music. Devices like this allow you to explore the boundaries of where music is headed and come up with some crazy new sounds.”

Bruner's studio is somewhat small and intimate, so he doesn't have room to store a bunch of different amps and effects. Thanks to the GT-10 he's no longer restricted to a basic guitar rig and its limited selection of tones. Its 200 user programs and 200 preset locations give him instant access to almost any sound he needs at the stomp of a footswitch or two, allowing him to audition and select sounds quickly. The GT-10's speaker emulation function and USB connection allows him to hook up the unit directly to his computer without the hassles of setting up microphones in front of speaker cabinets. “Right now I'm going straight out of the GT-10 into a Tube Tech preamp and then into my computer,” explains Bruner.

“Surrounding yourself with toys and sounds that take your brain in a different direction is crucial,” he continues. “The GT-10 has opened up whole new worlds for me when I'm writing songs or producing recordings. I'm not even worried about learning exactly how to run it or what its intricacies are as long as I can spin knobs and hit buttons to combine things and goof off until some strange sound comes out. Whenever I do that it launches me into a new headspace. That's really my goal when I'm writing a song. I feel that the GT-10 gives me an edge over the people who don't have this machine.”

For Bruner, the key to making a hit record is much more than coming up with a great melody and capturing an inspiring performance. He feels that a hit must also deliver an element of surprise, and that's something that artists can't capture when they are working with a pre-conceived formula and trying to sound like something else instead of focusing on the inspiration that comes from their hearts.

“A band like Led Zeppelin was in it for the pure love of the music, not to make money,” he explains. “If you generate that type of intensity people will start lining up around you. Or look at Radiohead. They're unstoppable. They can put out anything they want now and it's always good, even as it's getting more and more underground. You can tell that they love what they're doing so much and they're so into it. That's inspiring. I feel like the music industry is getting away from that.“

“It takes a band like Nirvana to break through with raw emotion and integrity, but these days the industry is all about finding the next American Idol. They may be great singers, but they're not true artists. What we really need to be finding is the next Prince. We need some intensity. We need personality. I want to see more artists who scare me to death and who are really out in their own world. The music industry needs to get back to experimentation. I hope that I can play a role in that by digging a little deeper with the artists I work with and by exploring new sounds with things like my Boss GT-10.”