It’s not unusual for songwriters to think back to a time when songwriting seemed a lot easier. Certainly if you look at how long it used to take you to write a song, you may be discouraged to know that what used to take you hours now takes you days, or even longer. That’s not […]
Most of the time, the decisions you make regarding the instruments you choose for your song come down to decisions made at the production stage. In other words, as you write a song you’ll think about the structure of your song, the melodies, lyrics and chords, without giving particular attention to the instruments. And for […]
I watched a video of a song producer a while ago (I can’t remember who it was) but something he said got me thinking. To paraphrase: “If a song has a great chorus hook, I don’t care what the verse sounds like. Nobody remembers verses anyway.” That’s a surprising observation, and I wondered if it […]
Musical energy is the lifeblood of a song. When you talk about a song’s ability to grab the listener’s attention and then keep them listening for the three or four minutes that it lasts, that all comes down to musical energy. So often people equate musical energy with volume (loudness) or tempo, but that’s not […]
Early next week I will have the pleasure of conducting what is arguably one of classical music’s most powerful works: Mozart’s “Requiem.” It was the last piece Mozart composed, and in fact it was left unfinished, completed by one of his former students, Franz Xaver Süssmayr. By the time the Requiem was composed (1791), the […]
When you sit down with your guitar but can’t come up with anything creative, you’re likely to think that you’re going through a bout of writer’s block. And then it’s a matter of waiting it out until the creative juices start flowing again. But there’s a problem with this quick analysis: creativity in humans is […]
