Dealing With Online Haters

The Immediacy of Opinions

They say everyone has an opinion. As a songwriter, though, you deal with an aspect of modern life that people even just 15 years ago didn’t have to deal with: how quickly an online consumer of your music will offer that opinion. It’s not just the immediacy of opinions, though. If you’re involved in the […]

Jimi Hendrix

Chord Ideas for Minor Key Songwriting

If you find that everything you write is in a major key, you’re missing out on an opportunity to create songs that tap into a darker or perhaps edgier side of music, a side that minor key writing offers. It might be that you aren’t sure how to create minor key progressions, and so I’ve […]

Guitar and paper for songwriting

Got Great Lyric Ideas, But No Story?

Let’s say you find yourself in a situation where some catchy lines of lyric, or some great word combinations, have been rolling about your mind, but you don’t have a story or song topic that helps knit those lines or words together. “Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting Process” shows you several ways to […]

Singer-Songwriter recording

Expressing and Generating Emotion In a Song

This is a tricky but very true concept: A good song generates emotion. It may also express emotion, but it’s possible to express emotion without generating it. So you can spend a lot of time in a lyric telling the world how you feel, and you may have wasted a lot of time… if you haven’t done […]

Lennon & McCartney

The Job of the Bridge: To Be Different

Get the eBook bundle that thousands of songwriters are using to improve their songwriting technique. “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting 10-eBook Bundle” comes with a free copy of “Use Your Words! Developing a Lyrics-First Songwriting Process.” A song bridge, which typically happens after the second run-through of a chorus, is optional; not every song uses […]

Guitar in a nature setting

When You’re Stuck in Ballad Mode

If you listen to early Bee Gees tunes, you’ll notice how much they favoured slow tempos. Everything (well, almost everything) seemed to be a ballad. That’s not a criticism of their compositional prowess. But they were definitely, at least mostly, in ballad mode in their pre-disco days. Check out their 1971 album “Trafalgar” and you’ll […]