Singer - Songwriter

On Being Influenced by Other Songwriters

Originality is everything in songwriting. Every time you sit down to write, you obviously need to be writing something that no one else has written before. It’s that need for originality that causes a kind of fear in some songwriters: the fear of accidentally plagiarizing someone’s song. In particular, some songwriters are afraid to spend […]

Songwriter

Fixing Songs That Sound Too Much Like Other Ones

Practically every songwriter confronts this nagging problem at some point, and sometimes very often: You start writing, and right away you notice that it’s similar to some other song you’ve heard before. There’s nothing like noticing that your new song sounds like an already-existing one to kill your songwriting process in its tracks. So then […]

Feist - How Come You Never Go There

The Tricky Nature of Pop Song Analysis

I’m a believer in song analysis as a way of improving songwriting technique. For any writer of music, basic curiosity should make us want to know why something sounds so good, so that we might be able to incorporate at least some of those ideas into our own music. (Or why something sounds so bad, so […]

Where Have I Heard This Before? 6 Ways to Avoid Accidental Plagiarism

With only 7 notes in common use for any major or minor key, you’d think that the possibility of accidentally plagiarizing someone else’s song would be commonplace. How many ways can you rearrange notes to come up with something truly unique? I’m sure some mathematician can come up with an actual answer for that, but […]

5 Ways to Know If You’ve Accidentally Plagiarized Someone Else’s Song

Here’s a list of 5 easy things to try if you think you may have mistakenly copied someone else’s song. What do you use your iPad for? Why not let it help you improve your songwriting skills? Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 10-eBook Bundle, and increase your song’s HIT potential. For desktop, laptop, iPad, iPhone, or any other mobile PDF-reading device. You’d think that […]