What are you doing to improve as a songwriter? You’d probably answer that question by saying, “Well, I’m trying to write more“, or “I’m trying to become more consistent…” That’s one way of saying that you don’t really have a plan. No one improves without change. You want to get better at baseball? You change the […]
Once you’ve written a song, you like to think of it as your baby, something that had a gestation period, and now — here it is! Except… you’re not very happy with it. The song’s done, but it just sounds lame to you. The first step in dealing with a song that doesn’t work very […]
What’s the most effective way to learn songwriting? Is it like other topics that you might learn in a college school? I taught music for years in public school and then at university, but I don’t believe that school is the best way to learning everything. “Chord Progression Formulas” show you how to create dozens […]
In order for an athlete to improve, something needs to change. A golfer who wants to improve needs to develop a different stance, or perhaps hold the club differently, or do some other thing in a different way. Athletes work all the time on that simple idea of change. If they aren’t changing something, their […]
You should not necessarily worry if it takes you weeks or months to write a complete song while all your songwriting colleagues are getting the job done in days, sometimes hours. How long it takes to finish a song rarely has anything to do with how good it is. Having said that, it’s going to […]
These days, boredom is getting a lot of attention. It used to be that boredom was considered to have no redeeming qualities. Being bored simply meant being disinterested in whatever you were up to, and that you haven’t found anything to grab your interest. More recently, psychologists have been conducting research into the benefits of […]
