Melodies and lyrics are the two components of any song that must be unique. Song titles, chord progressions, rhythms… they can all have been heard before, and probably have. But melodies, if they share more than a few notes in a row with some other song, are said to have been plagiarized. Because every melody needs to […]
Writing great songs doesn’t need to be a random occurrence. There are things you can and should be doing to improve your songwriting consistency. Get “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 10-eBook Bundle, and FREE copy of “Creative Chord Progressions” For some songwriters, starting the song is the easy part; continuing the process after that is […]
Most of the time when you switch a major chord to a minor chord, you’re using what’s called a modal mixture, or “borrowed chord.” The most common switch is the change from a major IV-chord to a minor iv, like this: I vi IV iv I (C Am F Fm C) It adds a nice moody […]
Most songwriters are well acquainted with the frustration of having a great song idea, but having it fizzle out. You had such high hopes, but now your idea seems to have gone nowhere. To properly address this frustration, we need to look at two aspects of it: Why the idea went nowhere; and What to […]
Years ago, I became interested in simple computer programming, mostly in BASIC. I didn’t have great aspirations; most of whatever code I wrote was for relatively uncomplicated things. I wrote a program that helped me keep a sensible budget (yeah, that helped), and then one a little more advanced that attempted to interpret Morse code. […]
I’ve always liked R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” but there’s something odd about it. Because most of its melodies and melodic fragments dwell on the 3 notes A-B-C, in the key of A minor, it sounds very much like a drone. Normally, that just doesn’t work all that well for a song; you normally want to hear […]
