It’s fair to make the assumption that most songwriters are singers, but that’s not exclusively true. So if you’re trying your hand at writing songs and you aren’t a singer, how do you write melodies? The inability to sing usually means the inability to sing well. In other words, you may be able to manage to grunt […]
There’s a good reason why repetition factors into most good songs: it ensures that a song is easy to remember, which means that people are more inclined to sing them. But there are other qualities that make melodies easy to sing. And as a songwriter, you should consider the singability of your melodies to be […]
Last week I wrote about the similarities between classical and pop music, and what today’s songwriters can learn from the classics. Today I want to look specifically at song melodies, and see to what extent the structure of a pop melody resembles that of a classical work. There is a book that is in great […]
You’d be forgiven for thinking that all the good melodies have been taken. Since most songs are tonal (i.e., they exist in a key), that means that the majority of them are comprised of seven different pitches, all arranged in different ways. It makes you wonder, how many melodies can possibly be concocted by using seven pitches? Well, […]
Every once in a while I take a quick glance through a portion of the Rolling Stone Magazine’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” and I’m looking for similarities. I’m willing to accept, of course, that the list is highly subjective, but that doesn’t bother me much. There’s no denying that the songs on the list […]
In the past ten years or so of pop music, it’s become much more of a thing to write hit songs that are mostly based on one single chord progression. It sounds like it would just result in music that is repetitive and boring. Or perhaps the better way to say that is: the job […]
