Building a Climactic Moment: the Tonic Note and Chord

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-ebook bundle, and kick-start your songwriting career! _____________ Adele’s hit, “Someone Like You”, demonstrates an important feature of melody; specifically, how the power of a melody is, in partnership with vocal range, governed by how the tonic note and chord are used. Most songs will exhibit an important principle of […]

Song Analysis: “Pumped Up Kicks” (Foster the People)

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6 E-book Bundle, and become a top-level songwriter! __________________ Foster The People’s current hit song, “Pumped Up Kicks” is a good model for a song that uses one set of chord changes that serves as the progression for the entirety of the song. Our instincts usually tell us that using […]

The 7 Reasons Your Songs Might Be Boring

Get “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-eBook Bundle – Now with a 7th (free) eBook: “From Amateur to Ace: Writing Songs Like a Pro” _____________ Boring songs are hard to fix. That’s because when listeners are bored, they often can’t put their finger on why. There may be nothing obviously wrong, and yet the song […]

Songwriter’s Intuition, and the Validity of Music Analysis

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-ebook bundle, and kick-start your songwriting career! _____________ Students of songwriting enjoy analyzing music, attempting to figure out why songs work. Does it offer too much credit to a songwriter if you discover things that even the songwriter wasn’t consciously aware of when it was composed? If you study a […]

“For the First Time”, and the Inverted Tonic Pedal

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-ebook bundle, and kick-start your songwriting career! _____________ The Script’s hit single, “For the First Time,” has an interesting anomaly that’s worth studying. It involves the tonic note (i.e., the note representing the key of the song), and the fact that it almost never seems to disappear. The song […]

How to Be a Good Student of Songwriting

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-ebook bundle, and kick-start your songwriting career! _____________ The best composers are the ones who listen to a lot of music. Have you noticed that the best songwriters seem to talk more about other people’s music than their own? They’re always listening, always analyzing, always trying to figure out […]