Stanmore’s Top 5 Songwriting Tips (Pt1)

This list is a collection of songwriting tips I’ve accumulated over my 10+ years of writing, listening, discussing & reading. Where I can remember I will try to reference where I learnt each tip. Every songwriter wants to write more killer & less filler. Hopefully these tips will help you

Tired Of The Sound Of Your Own Voice? I Have The Solution… (Pt1)

What Meditation SHOULD Be Like

As I sit here drinking a mighty-fine scotch at a mighty-fine price* I think back to a time when there was no scotch. Actually, there was no anything really, except for endless hours of meditation & me alone with my (fucked up) thoughts. What follows is my account of a 10 day Vipassana meditation course at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains on the out-skirts of Sydney NSW in Australia.

If you’re still reading this, I suspect you fall into 1 of 3 schools:

School 1) “I’m interested in doing one of these courses myself.”/”This sounds intriguing.”

School 2) “Why in holy freakin hell would you do more than laugh at the sheer incredulity caused by the mere mention of this concept!?”

School 3) “I love to read about anything that Ryan has done because he is AWESOME.”

So clearly school 3 are the coolest of the bunch but don’t worry, I’ll cater to all 3 of the schools, that means you. So I’d been meaning to do this thing since forever. ie. About a year before the course I attended towards the end of ’09 but I had to keep putting it off, mainly because of my job working at

The XYZ’s Of Me

OK, so my first post ‘The ABC’s Of Me’ didn’t actually include anything about me… So I created this page to tell you a bit about what I’m about!

That is all, see you soon :)

The ABC’s Of Me

Hello Blog-readers,

Like the title? It’s the name of the song I wrote last night & it seemed an appropriate title for my maiden blog. The term ‘the abc’s of me’ I heard Kevin Smith use a few times in his podcast called smodcast which just so happens to be the best god-damn podcast around. Basically, it means “The basic info you need to know about me.” He seemed to like to use it in the context of telling a possible suitress that “These are the abc’s of me & if you don’t like it, fuck off.” Seemed like an interesting premise for a song (which ended up straying from the point just about as much as this blog is). At any rate, do yourself a favour and check Kevins podcast out. For those of you un-familiar with Kevin Smith, he is ‘Silent-Bob’ from ‘Mall-Rats’ & ‘Silent-Bob & Jay Strike Back’ among others. Besides that fact, he has written & directed many great films such as the two I just mentioned,  ‘Clerks’, ‘Dogma’ &