One little problem can kill a song’s effect. Check out the list in this article: which errors are you committing?
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You’ve finished your latest song, but you can tell — something’s just not working. You look at each element carefully, but as far as you can tell, the lyrics are fine, the melody doesn’t show any obvious problems, and the chords are doing what chords are supposed to do. But still… you’re underwhelmed. Why is it so difficult to critique your music and find the weaknesses? The answer has to do with the way we write songs.
Most of the time, good songs come together quickly, the result of flashes of ideas all surfacing at the same time. To analyze problems requires you to slow everything down, take everything apart, and judge each component on its own terms. It can feel very unnatural.
I’ve been helping students analyze songs for years now, and I tend to see the same batch of problems arising time and time again. So let’s save some time here. Check out the following list of 7 common songwriting mistakes, errors that are among the most regularly-occuring blunders in the music of developing songwriters. It can serve as a kind of checklist for you to diagnose problems in your songs.
- Problem: There’s no real difference between your verse and chorus lyrics. Verse lyrics need to describe situations, people, and circumstances. Chorus lyrics need to describe emotions and reactions. So if you start your song with intense emotional outpourings, you’ve got nowhere to go but to emote further in the chorus. That means you song winds up sounding like a 4-minute complain-a-thon. Balance your lyrics by saving strong emotions for the chorus.
- Problem: Your chord progressions don’t have a sense of harmonic goal. As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, your chord progressions, even the complex ones, need to give a sense of direction, a sense that they’re moving away from a tonic chord, and then back to it. Randomly picking chords out of thin air can make music sound confusing and boring.
- Problem: Your melodies all sit in and around the same 4 or 5 notes, and lack a unique shape. Chorus melodies need to sit higher in pitch than verse melodies. If you construct your verse and chorus melodies from the same set of 4 or 5 notes, it’s too much of the same thing, and your melodies will sound boring.
- Problem: Your song’s instrumentation is uninteresting or dated. Sometimes all a song needs is a guitar played simply. But if song after song uses the same instrument and the same way of playing it, you are missing an opportunity to use instrumentation as a songwriting device. There are many ways to play a guitar or keyboard… explore! And try adding other instruments: fiddle, french horn, trumpet, strings. Use your imagination. Make listening to new music a daily activity to stay up-to-date with today’s sounds.
- Problem: The form of your song is confusing or lacking. An audience uses the structure of a song to help them make sense of your music. It’s why verse-chorus-bridge songs are so common. If your music comes across as having been structured haphazardly to the extent that it’s hard to know where it’s going next, listeners get bored.
- Problem: Your newest song sounds like your previous one. If you start your songs the same way, or create them all using the same instrument, they’re all bound to have an annoying similarity about them. So use different instruments, and definitely don’t keep using the same songwriting formula.
- Problem: Your song is missing a climactic moment. We talk about climactic moments often when we discuss melodic shape, but it can apply to any aspect of your music. And when all is said and done, your song should have a moment that stands out as different from the others, a moment that qualifies as a climactic high. It can happen just before the last chorus, during the last chorus, or any other spot that’s usually in the last 1/3 of the song.
One piece of advice: don’t pick your song apart and “fix” it if it’s working. Sometimes songs just work really well, and it’s hard for us to identify why. So what?! Just let it be, and get on with writing your next one.
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Reblogged this on C-Sharp Productions and commented:
Gary brought up 7 of the mistakes that many songwriters, including me sometimes make when we write.
I agree in the danger of leaving something too long, or re-working it too much unnecessarily. But there’s equal danger in rushing a song out and sending it out naked and cold into the cruel, cruel world.
Ultimately, it’s the writer who usually knows on some level when a song is ‘ready’ or not whether it comes out quickly or takes its time, and the song will often let you know, I find.
Gary,
Great tips! We’ve been in the songwriting business for a combined few decades now and we’ve met a lot of great songwriters that either did not have the equipment, knowledge, or funds to hire someone to record professional quality demos for them.
We started exploring country music loops looking for a way to produce high quality demos for our clients and discovered there was a complete lack of modern country loops available and quality seemed to be a big issue.
So… we set out to create a website dedicated to Free Country Loops
http://www.freecountryloops.com
Everything on our site is 100% royalty free and we encourage people to use the loops in their projects without reservation.
If you’ve got time, could you give us some feedback on the quality of our loops? We’ve also got quite a few guides on the website to help upcoming songwriters.
Thanks!
P.S. We’re going to subscribe to your blog. Keep the great articles coming!
Just to add gary, From personal experience, its also great to have someone you trust to listen to your song even if they don’t have technical knowledge in music, (it would be great if they do! like you!) I have set of friends who are music fans and some just casual listeners but they give me feedback eventhough they can’t explain it in musical terms, I will get what they mean right away…!
comments like… it feels unsettling, too repetitive, sounds like this or that….
It really helps to your objectivity.
While it’s true that some great stuff comes together quickly, I personally find some of my stronger material comes together over a very long period of time, continually chipping away at an idea.
Leonard Cohen for example, works on his songs for months and years if necessary.
Some very useful points though.
I find that if I wait to long then I sometimes lose momentum, but I guess I would rather it take all year if that’s what it takes to get it right!
A good analogy for what you’re talking about comes from the Classical world. Brahms was known for being able to churn out some of his music very quickly, while spending many years on each of his symphonies. Ironically, many believe that his symphonies are not his best music for that very reason… there can be a danger of a loss of spontaneity and a loss of “momentum”, as you say, when you work and re-work your music too much.
-G
True enough. I only meant that there are times when songs come together, and they work really well, but the songwriter worries that some aspect of it doesn’t follow normal songwriting convention for that genre. In those cases, it can be detrimental to try to “fix” that song when it’s already a great one.
-G