by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website: If you want lyrics to sound natural, you need to sing them with the natural pulses that occur in spoken language. For songwriters, you need to match up the natural pulse of the lyric with the natural flow of your music. It may not be […]
by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website: Many songwriters start the writing process by coming up with a chord progression, and then try to create a melody that works with it. The problem with this approach can be that the melody lacks shape, as the importance is placed on the progression first. […]
by Gary Ewer, from”The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website: It’s a peculiar thing about music, but many listeners, even completely “unmusical” ones, can tell that there’s something wrong with your song, even if they can’t pinpoint what the actual problem is. More often than not, it’s how the melody and chords relate to each other. […]
by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website: You can spend a lot of time wondering if the song you’re writing works better in a major or minor key. So why not use both? Having a song that uses chords from a major key, then abuptly switching to minor (or vice versa), can […]
by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website: If you don’t know why your melody isn’t working, don’t worry, it’s fixable. If you don’t know that your melody isn’t working, that’s a problem; you can’t fix a problem you don’t recognize. It’s really hard on a songwriting website like this to address good […]
by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website: For most songs, melodies are what we use to convey our lyrics. And it’s important to realize that in general, the kind of melody we write for use as a chorus will not be the same as what we’d write for a verse. There’s psychology that […]
