As you know, you can strum a chord for quite a number of bars, and the melody that you sing over that chord will usually feature a lot of different notes. Sometimes, the various notes of a melody might actually come from the chord itself. For example, “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” (Norman Whitfield, Barrett […]
Psychologists will tell you that pattern recognition is a bit of an area of expertise for most humans. Our brains just seem to be wired to seek out any and all occurrences of patterns. We get a kind of pleasure from seeing and experiencing patterns. So many songs in the pop genres succeed or fail […]
When lyrics sound stiff or rhythmically awkward, it’s usually the case that the basic pulse and accents of the words and phrases aren’t being honoured by the pulse and feel of the music. One easy way to deal with this is to read your lyric aloud, getting a sense of the natural pulse of the […]
When lyrics sound like they’re not working, you’ll want to check out the up-and-down of the emotional content. Good lyrics start by being observational and narrative in nature, and then move to being responsive and emotional. And that holds true no matter what genre of music you call your own. Beyond that, the next most […]
There are certain progressions — certain combinations of chords — you’re more likely to see in songs written by a 21st century pop songwriter than you might with a Classical musician. But check out these two progressions and try to figure out which one was used by Romantic era composer almost 150 years ago, and […]
Since the vast majority of songs (probably 98% or more) that make it to the charts in any genre use a time signature of 4/4, we can surmise that producers think that that most common of time signatures is part of a winning formula. Most of the time professional producers get these things right, but […]
