Learn from history! Here are the ten most common characteristics of hit songs, no matter when they were written. ____________ Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-eBook Bundle, and increase your song’s HIT potential. _____________ If you’re a songwriter and you aren’t listening to music from a decade or more ago, you’re missing out on an amazing opportunity to […]
Balancing major and minor within the same song is a great way to make use of the contrast principle. ____________ Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-eBook Bundle, and increase your song’s HIT potential. _____________ When you choose a key for your song, the main factor is usually vocal range. You don’t often have to think about whether a […]
If you’re trying to build an audience base, simplify what you’re doing. It almost always works. ____________ Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-eBook Bundle, and increase your song’s HIT potential. _____________ When you play your next newly-written song for someone, you certainly don’t want the first words out of their mouth to be, “Hey, your new song sounds […]
It’s practically impossible to create progressions that haven’t been used before. But altered chords will help. ____________ Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-eBook Bundle, and increase your song’s HIT potential. _____________ An altered chord is one that doesn’t naturally exist in the key of your song. The chords that naturally exist are the ones that you build on […]
A tritone substitution is a great way to make a typical I-ii7-V sound more interesting. Here’s how it works. ____________ Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” 6-eBook Bundle, and increase your song’s HIT potential. _____________ The jazz world has been using the tritone substitution for decades. And true, the chord is typically found in jazz genres, but like all […]
This simple exercise will help solidify your understanding of verse and chorus melodic construction. __________ A couple of posts ago I wrote about why choruses sound like choruses. In that article, I mentioned important features of choruses such as strong (versus fragile) progressions, the predominance of the tonic note and chord, the higher placement of […]
