It’s quite possible to use a single chord progression in every section of your song, such as you might hear in “Controlla” (Drake et al). But if you do choose to use the same progression throughout a song without changing it, it’s the kind of progression that needs to sound tonally strong. A strong progression simply […]
Musical energy is a term that a lot of musicians use but find hard to define. You might use the word energy in a very nebulous sort of way, where it’s synonymous with intensity. With that usage of the word, most listeners of music would know what you mean if you said, “I really like the energy of this song.” They would […]
It’s fair to make the assumption that most songwriters are singers, but that’s not exclusively true. So if you’re trying your hand at writing songs and you aren’t a singer, how do you write melodies? The inability to sing usually means the inability to sing well. In other words, you may be able to manage to grunt […]
It’s an instinct that most songwriters have: to take a song beyond what you’d normally hear in the genre, creating something innovative and unique. You don’t want to give your listeners something so unique that it sounds strange and uninviting, and you don’t want something so much like everything else that it simply bores people. It’s all […]
If you have a chord progression that works but doesn’t do much to inspire you, you can of course toss it and look for another. But with the simplest of changes, you can take a progression from being mundane to something much closer to awe-inspiring. So let’s say you’ve got the following simple progression: C […]
I was remembering this morning a discussion I had with a drummer many years ago. This guy told me that he loved the band he was with because they were so rhythmically tight that he didn’t have to work very hard to “keep things together.” That meant, as far as he was concerned, that he could think of his […]
