If you’re bored with your chord progressions, you’re likely to opt for throwing them out and creating ones that are more creative. The problem with that approach is that you can wind up with chords that just don’t work well together, all for the sake of finding something more interesting. If you’re serious about songwriting, […]
I read a quote recently by Paul McCartney (I believe it might have been Philip Norman’s book “Paul McCartney: The Life”) in which he said that he didn’t know how to write songs, he only knew how to finish them. That quote shows great insight. I’ve made it a large part of my life to […]
When writing a song, it seems logical to assume that it will be either in a major or minor key, and you simply have to choose which one. But there is another option, which is to allow the song to start minor, switch quickly to major, then back to minor, and so on. You’d be […]
Rules and songwriting don’t go together, in my opinion. I like to think in terms of guidelines and principles, because those don’t insist so strongly on being followed, at least not as much as rules do. And if we wrote everything to accommodate a rule, where would we find the possibility for creativity? People say that “rules are […]
Clutter, at least with regard to songwriting, happens when the following is true: your song has too many musical ideas, and/or those ideas don’t communicate well with each other. But what do we mean by too many musical ideas? What constitutes an idea, and how many ideas should a good song have? Chord Progression Formulas – […]
In good songs, there is a sense of connection — or perhaps communication, in a way — between its various sections. You hear the chorus, and it sounds like the logical follower for what the verse offered. So how do we ensure that each section of a song feels connected to what came before it? […]
