Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-book bundle, and FINE-TUNE your songwriting skills! When discussing song form, there’s a fairly common understanding that you’re talking about verses and choruses, with a bridge and pre-chorus often thrown into the mix. But the song without a chorus is actually a fairly common form, and it can be […]
One of the problems that songwriters often unwittingly face comes from being so intimately connected with the song they’re working on. Because we tend to focus on the parts of a song that are giving us the most grief, we can lose sight of some of the more important elements of basic song construction. For […]
A verse needs to progress in such a way as to make the chorus feel like the next logical step. By this I mean that verse lyrics, melody and chords should be constructed to build certain tensions that are then resolved in the chorus. But sometimes, moving from the verse to the chorus can seem […]
If you were to give a speech, you’d first establish what you should be talking about, limiting yourself to a small number of related ideas. You’d then present those ideas to an audience. Once you’ve presented the ideas in general terms, you’d develop and expand on them in (hopefully) interesting ways. You’d likely then finish […]
If you find yourself ever using the phrase, “my favourite formula,” while describing your songwriting process, you might be actually identifying a problem that keeps you from building a solid audience base. A formula is a method or procedure for how a song typically comes into being. If you’ve used one method a lot more […]
When it comes to songwriting, it’s possible to do everything “right” and yet fail to entice anyone to keep listening. Sadly, that’s quite common. For me, when I’m sent an MP3 by someone to assess, I ask myself a critical question: if I turned this recording off right now, would I care? And when I’m […]
