When you ask songwriters to describe their songwriting process, the answer you invariably get is, “It depends…” That’s the answer we tend to expect, and of course it really does depend, doesn’t it? If you are like most songwriters, you’ll find that a short fragment of music will plant itself in your brain, and that […]
In a sense, all students of anything are self-taught. The best teachers are mainly facilitators, presenting their own particular angle on a topic. Certainly, a teacher can offer you facts and figures that you may not have previously known, but offering facts and figures isn’t teaching. And teachers can help you parse the data, make sense of the tricky bits, […]
In a way, it’s hard to speak of “errors” in songwriting, because that implies that there are rules that have been broken. Songwriting isn’t guided by rules in the traditional sense of that word. If rules governed the creative process, writing music would hold little if any interest for us. Instead of rules, we are […]
We know that creating contrast is an important principle in the structure of good songwriting. Contrast is naturally sought by listeners, and they’re not usually aware that they’re seeking it. When melodies are low, we assume they’ll move higher. When music is soft, we expect that something louder is going to happen. If you listen […]
Back when I was a composition student at university, there was always pressure to write. I had weekly sessions with my composition prof, and the whole point of that hour-long session was to show what I had been up to for the week previous. This part won’t surprise you: some weeks the writing happened easily, […]
Songwriters are correct to think a lot about how to start the songwriting process. How you start often has a strong influence on where things end up. But songwriters typically worry, not so much that they’re starting the wrong way, but more that they’re possibly missing out on a better way. You need to look […]
