where do i find an old song?

Answers to where do i find an old song

The following is a simple yet surprisingly effective procedure devised to find an old song when you do not know the band or song name. Your first search will draw from the voluminous Usenet archives, which contain one of the largest repositories of searchable song fragments available on the Internet.

1. Write down the most unique words and phrases of whatever song fragments you remember.
   Tip #1: To jog your memory, brainstorm on the following: Who? What? When? Where? Why? Examples follow:

   Who: The "who" could include the singer, the person(s) to whom the song may be addressed, the subject of the song (e.g., as in a ballad), or any other person, animal, cartoon character, etc. mentioned. Try to remember any first names, surnames, nicknames, titles, and proper nouns.

   What: The "what" could include any objects, ideas, concepts, or events that may be central to the theme or otherwise contribute in some way to the story line. The possibilities here are endless, e.g., relationships, first dates, current events (e.g., "Eve of Destruction"), modes of transportation (e.g., "Fly Me To The Moon"), symbolic objects (e.g., "Fire & Rain"), the supernatural (e.g., "Witchy Woman"), anatomy (e.g., "Baby Scratch My Back"), flora & fauna (e.g., "Ben"), food & beverage (e.g., "Spill The Wine"), drugs & alcohol (e.g., "Naturally Stoned"), medical & dental (e.g., "I Don't Need No Cure"), and a sweater lent to a girl on a date.

   Where: The "where" could include a geographical place (e.g., city, state, or country), a street address, a locale (e.g., the beach, a carnival), or a direction (e.g., North, South).

   When: The "when" could include the time of day (e.g., "Good Morning Starshine"), a season (e.g., Halloween), a day of the week (e.g., "Never on Sunday"), or a particular year (e.g., mention of 1814 in "The Battle Of New Orleans").

   Why: The "why" could include an expression of love, a social commentary, or a lament about a relationship gone sour.

   Tip #2: Look for words and phrases that are unusual or that stand out in any way.

   Examples: Colors (e.g., crimson); descriptive adjectives (e.g., little); acronyms (e.g., WOLD); numbers (e.g., addresses, phone numbers, vital statistics); greetings (hello/goodbye); foreign language words and phrases (e.g., voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir?); sets of rhyming words (e.g., pie, dry, rye, die), catchy or weird phrases (e.g., "Crystal Blue Persuasion"), and repeating words and phrases as may occur, e.g., in a chorus or refrain.

2. Verify correct spellings and also allow for all possible alternate spellings (including misspellings).

   Example #1: The following are alternate representations of some common words and phrases as often found in pop tunes: tonight/tonite; love/luv; undone/undun; going/gonna; want to/wanna; night/nite; out of/outa; you/ya, u; and/'n.

   Example #2: For words ending in "ing" an ending apostrophe (') may be substituted for the ending "g." To cover all bases, try searching on a word both with and without its ending "g."

3. Search on the Google Advanced Groups Search form.

4. Enter the word "music" and up to 9 words from your song in lower case in the "with all of the words" field.

5. Select "100 messages" for number of results to display.

6. If your initial search results are meager, cut and paste your word set in the "with at least one of the words" field, leaving "music" in the "with all of the words" field.

7. If you are getting too many hits and cannot find your song on the first page of search results, narrow your search using one of the methods below as appropriate. (To speed things up, you can use the search box at the top of the first page of search results.)

   a. If you carried out Step 6, remove any ORs between words as necessary. (To be systematic, you might want to try removing one OR at a time between those words you are most certain about until your search results have shrunken down to a reasonable size.)

   b. Pick a group of words that occurs as a phrase in your song (if there is one) and enclose it in quotes.

   c. By default, Google ignores common words such as I, was, in, and a. If any of your important key words are being ignored, repeat your search with a "+" sign in front of any word that was ignored the first time around.

       Example: If the phrase "I love you" is entered as given here even when surrounded by quotes, "I" will be ignored. To force a match on the entire phrase as is, enter it as follows: "+i love you"

8. Repeat Step 7 as necessary. It is generally best to experiment with one permutation at a time. As you try different combinations, you can weed out any words that you may discover to be incorrect.

9. If your first word set does not yield satisfactory results, try a new set or change one or more words in your original set.

10. Repeat Steps 4-9 until you either find your song (hurray!) or cannot find it after many repeated tries.

11. If you have not yet found your song, access the Google Advanced Search form. Repeat Steps 4-9 as described above but do not enter the word "music" in the "with all of the words" field. (Note that you can now enter up to 10 words from your song rather than 9 as instructed above.)

12. If you have no luck using the above procedures but think you might be able to guess what the title might be (e.g., from the chorus or refrain), go to mp3.com or yahoo.com or msn.com and use their searches in the above mentioned ways.

Disclaimer - Answers to the questions are researched using various sources and are meant to increase the knowledge of our visitors. We cannot gurantee the accuracy of answers to questions.

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