Whether you’re a full-time student or a full-time employee, a busy life can make songwriting difficult. And that’s a shame, because songwriting gives you the opportunity to be creative in a way that your job or studies often can’t, or at least don’t. But after putting in an 8-hour shift, it can be difficult or […]
Winning an Oscar means much more than simply getting recognition for your efforts from your colleagues in the industry. Much, much more. Sure, the accolades are nice, but everyone knows that if your movie happens to snag a Best Picture award, your movie gets a second run. Many people who might have given your film […]
A song is working well if the listener can put themselves in the shoes of the singer. Whether that means that you identify with the lyric, or simply love the way the guitar solo sounds, the listener needs to make a personal connection to some aspect of the song. It’s why air guitar is a […]
Yesterday I wrote about how to take old melodies and make new ones. The end result should be a song that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original tune, and that’s the intent. That method should allow your own creativity to make something entirely new out of something old. Having said that, unintentional plagiarism is […]
Get “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” Deluxe eBook Bundle, and take your songwriting to a new level of excellence. Includes “Writing a Song From a Chord Progression.” When we say that you can write a song with nothing more than three chords, we’re usually talking about I-IV-V (like “La Bamba”), or perhaps I-ii-V. In C major, […]
You’d be forgiven for thinking that all the good melodies have been taken. Since most songs are tonal (i.e., they exist in a key), that means that the majority of them are comprised of seven different pitches, all arranged in different ways. It makes you wonder, how many melodies can possibly be concocted by using seven pitches? Well, […]
