Get “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” Deluxe eBook Bundle, and take your songwriting to a new level of excellence. Includes “Writing a Song From a Chord Progression.” When we say that you can write a song with nothing more than three chords, we’re usually talking about I-IV-V (like “La Bamba”), or perhaps I-ii-V. In C major, […]
You’d be forgiven for thinking that all the good melodies have been taken. Since most songs are tonal (i.e., they exist in a key), that means that the majority of them are comprised of seven different pitches, all arranged in different ways. It makes you wonder, how many melodies can possibly be concocted by using seven pitches? Well, […]
A song that we love can seem to have a really enticing chord progression, but when you really dig into the song to find out what they’ve done regarding chords, you often find that they’re very ordinary, and that it’s other things — syncopated rhythms, chord inversions, and melodic shapes above the chords — that […]
When you conjure up the first musical bits that will become your next song, those bits are likely going to become part of your song’s chorus. That’s because it’s most likely that you’ll find it easy to think up something like a hook than something like a verse or a bridge. And hooks are going to be the […]
Many songwriters love starting the writing process by generating ideas from a chord progression. That’s a legitimate way to write, and it’s very popular. By starting with chords, you lay down what is in effect a landscape upon which you can place other items. I’ve been working on a new short manual for songwriters who […]
You can define a multi-part verse melody in many ways, but the kind of melody I’m talking about is the kind you might find in a song like Eagles’ “Take It Easy” (Jackson Browne/Glenn Frey), which is a verse-only song where the verse consists of several short phrases joined together to make one complete melody. I’ve been thinking […]
