Most of the time, the decisions you make regarding the instruments you choose for your song come down to decisions made at the production stage. In other words, as you write a song you’ll think about the structure of your song, the melodies, lyrics and chords, without giving particular attention to the instruments. And for […]
As you know, you can strum a chord for quite a number of bars, and the melody that you sing over that chord will usually feature a lot of different notes. Sometimes, the various notes of a melody might actually come from the chord itself. For example, “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” (Norman Whitfield, Barrett […]
I watched a video of a song producer a while ago (I can’t remember who it was) but something he said got me thinking. To paraphrase: “If a song has a great chorus hook, I don’t care what the verse sounds like. Nobody remembers verses anyway.” That’s a surprising observation, and I wondered if it […]
Musical energy is the lifeblood of a song. When you talk about a song’s ability to grab the listener’s attention and then keep them listening for the three or four minutes that it lasts, that all comes down to musical energy. So often people equate musical energy with volume (loudness) or tempo, but that’s not […]
The title of this blog post sounds like a trick question, because you’d probably think that I’m going to say, “Neither is best – it’s whatever suits the musical ideas rolling around in your mind at any given time.” That, of course, is logically the best answer. But for me, I’ve always found melody-first songwriting […]
Early next week I will have the pleasure of conducting what is arguably one of classical music’s most powerful works: Mozart’s “Requiem.” It was the last piece Mozart composed, and in fact it was left unfinished, completed by one of his former students, Franz Xaver Süssmayr. By the time the Requiem was composed (1791), the […]
