Once you’ve finished a song and play it for yourself a few times, you might find yourself feeling that one particular section — the verse, let’s say — just doesn’t quite make the grade. You like everything else about the song, but that verse, for whatever reason, isn’t doing a good job of setting up […]
One of the best ways to avoid writer’s block before it ever happens is to create a songwriting schedule. Scheduling your writing takes patience and discipline, but it keeps your mind feeling creative. One of the reasons you probably hate scheduling is that it forces you to write even when you don’t feel like it. […]
When we talk about a melody-first songwriting process, we assume that we’re talking about writing a song where thinking up the melody, or at least a bit of a melody, is the first step. Then once we’ve got a good chunk of that working and sounding good, we then try to figure out what kind […]
Get the eBook bundle that thousands of songwriters are using to polish their songwriting technique. Comes with a free copy of “Creative Chord Progressions” There is a kind of melodic structure called period structure — a two-phrase melody in which the first phrase acts as a kind of “question”, and the second phrase provides an “answer”. A […]
Though everyone has a favourite way of starting songs, I think it’s fair to say that most people will use many different processes, depending on what musical idea pops into their head at the start of a session. Some typical ways of starting: Setting up a percussion loop and improvise over it, using the mood […]
Most of my writing these days is for vocal/choral groups. Sometimes that means writing for piano as an accompanying instrument, and sometimes I’m writing for full orchestra. Some of them are original compositions, and some are arrangements of already-existing songs (public domain folk songs, for example). But in any case, I practically always start by […]
