Often the best instruction you can get in songwriting is to listen to the songwriters who have made it big. Not only do you get good instruction, but you find yourself getting immensely inspired; you want to grab your instrument and start writing! Last year, Rick Beato, whose YouTube channel I’ve mentioned in my blog […]
If you’ve been planning to write a Christmas tune, you should be working on it now — Christmas is less than a month from now. In a way, there’s not really a lot of difference between a good holiday song and the ones you’d normally write. But if you’re looking to write something that everyone, […]
Similarity is a dangerous quality in the world of the creative arts. And it is a particular problem in pop songwriting, because — weirdly — it’s also an important quality. And it all comes down to how you define similarity and how excessive that similarity might be. If you’re ready to take your songwriting to its […]
If you look at your most recent song’s verse and compare it to the chorus, you’ll usually notice: There is likely a similarity in the kinds of chords you’ve used in both sections. The lyrics are probably different, with verse lyrics setting up a scenario, and chorus lyrics expressing the emotions created by the verse. […]
Most songs have a “climactic moment”, usually in the chorus, but sometimes in other places, like a song’s bridge. In most cases, you can identify a climactic moment by finding the highest note. This has been a noticeable trait in music for centuries. You can go back to Handel’s oratorio “Messiah”, for example, and see […]
I was looking recently at a list of some of the world’s most covered songs, and saw a few surprises on it. Some of them were what we’ve come to expect on such lists: Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday”, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, and Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line.” But I confess I didn’t know that Ray […]
