Peter Gabriel - Shock the Monkey

When Lyrics Are Hard, How Do You Attract an Audience?

“The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” eBook bundle comes with a free copy of “Creative Chord Progressions”. Learn how to take your chords beyond simple I-IV-V progressions. With pages of examples ready for you to use in your own songs!  The most important part of getting a song right is getting the audience to care about what you’ve […]

Ray Charles - What'd I Say

When Songs Take More Than 20 Minutes to Write

There’s an opinion amongst some songwriters that songs that don’t form themselves quickly, usually within minutes, are duds; that the more you have to work to get a song to sound right, the less likely it is that you’ve got a song worth keeping. It’s a surprisingly common view. Even Jay-Z, in his introductory paragraph to […]

Audience at a rock concert

Getting Feedback On Your Songs, and Then What To Do With It

Feedback is a tricky thing in the creative arts. Just because someone dislikes a song you’ve written is not an indication that you’ve done something wrong, or that you need to change anything about the way you’re writing. By the same token, if you only surround yourself with people who claim to love everything you […]

Finding Good Chords Starts With Tapping Your Foot

Looking for an easy way to discover the chords that could potentially go with a melody? It’s not a random process; it really depends mainly on what notes are happening on strong beats. There is a bit of instinct involved, particularly with regard to how often you should change chords. You’ll notice that most songs, if you […]

U2

What a Good Melodic Shape Does For a Song

In music, a melody that exhibits a kind of “arch shape” is a natural one that really works. Sometimes that arch shape — where the melody starts low in pitch, rises in the middle, and then descends again, is really clear and obvious, like the melody for Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line”: And sometimes […]

Beach Boys - Vocals

Creating Good Backing Vocals For Your Song Recordings

Backing vocals, when they’re done well, can give your song a professional sheen. When they’re done poorly — out of tune, or not well written — no one wants to hear that. It’s not really possible to solve the problem of writing or performing good backing vocals (BVs) in one blog post, so I’ll do […]